Earthbound Zero Is My Favorite Mother Game

RPGs have been pretty important to me most of my life if I was held at gunpoint and asked what my favorite game genre was I'd probably say RPGs or oh God please don't shoot me in the head so when I first discovered that my favorite character in Smash 64 was from an RPG called Earthbound I was extremely interested somehow finding a way to play it but unfortunately I didn't have any consoles other than the N64 and the game costed three million dollars on eBay so this wasn't really gonna happen for me thankfully when I was like 11 I figured out how to download emulators and ROMs on my on my Dad's laptop and I found a ROM called Earthbound and an NES emulator online I think I remember feeling a bit puzzled as the title screen of the game popped up Earthbound zero huh what's the zero for I mistakenly named my characters with somebody on an image board told me their names were and I started to play I Was immediately entranced by how different this game was compared to basically every other game I had played up until that point but I was filtered by its difficulty this [ __ ] isn't like Paper Mario at all what the hell why is this game being so mean to me now when I was that young YouTube wasn't really a thing yet once it started getting popular through Word of Mouth though I became interested in watching videos on YouTube because I discovered people could upload videos about games on there it was a lot of fun to discover new video games that I'd never seen before by watching people play them oh yeah that game that Ness is in let's look that up real quick hey hey what the [ __ ] this isn't the game that I played at all oh it's a Super Nintendo game not an NES game misinformation about stuff like this was a lot more common before YouTube okay like I'm an idiot but this type of thing could have happened to anybody back then please stop laughing at me so I ended up playing the real Earthbound and I loved it of course I could happily call it a masterpiece like every other [ __ ] person on the planet that's played it the original game that I tried would still linger in my thoughts though and eventually I would return to it and give it an honest try it's in 80s RPGs so it's got a lot of issues that keep it from being critically and culturally adored like its sequels I tried my hardest to play it to the end but as a kid I just couldn't get very far in it I finished it a couple of times as an adult however and despite its problems I think it's an extremely interesting game that doesn't get the love or attention that it deserves and I want to talk about it today I'm not going to be reviewing it or critiquing it or whatever I'm not really interested in that I'm more interested in talking about the game as a whole and maybe expressing why I think it's nice before we start that though I guess I'll provide a little context in case anybody watching this lives under a rock and doesn't know what the [ __ ] I'm even talking about here you've probably heard of Earthbound in passing at least it's a big deal arguably the most influential RPG ever made this thing's presence is immense they're countless games that have come after it that wear its influence on their sleeve and many of those games have ended up being influential in their own right Degrees of Separation but instead of Kevin Bacon its Ness Earthbound if you ask 10 game developers in the current year about their influences I guarantee nine of them would list Earthbound as an inspiration the series is really [ __ ] important to a lot of people [Music] I'm an RPG the second game in a set of three what maybe you'll be tomorrow row when the blue bird flies away a lot of people series is known as mother in Japan and is spearheaded by shigesado a toy this guy's pretty unique and interesting as an old God at Nintendo because he's not like a lot of these other dorks he didn't have any background in programming or coding or anything he didn't even know how to use a computer during the development of mother or Earthbound he already had the status of a celebrity in Japan in the 80s as a copywriter his main bag was writing slogans for companies and commercials and [ __ ] foreign [Music] [ __ ] co-wrote a series of short stories with Haruki murakami the guy that wrote The Wind of bird Chronicle he made the best iPhone app ever made dokonoko you ever hear about this [ __ ] it's an app to look at cats and dogs my cat's on here the toy [ __ ] gets around he's an interesting man and he's always struck me as the type of person that really cares about art and creative scenes and keeps up with that [ __ ] he's always had a pension for Western culture and when he started getting into video games in the 80s on his famicom with games like Dragon Warrior he wanted to make a game like that but taking place in modern America this was a completely original idea at the time seriously there were no other games like this RPGs at the time were always focused on taking place in a fantasy setting there weren't really any games set in a modern contemporary environment eventually he began a relationship with the idiots at Nintendo and they let him have his shot making a game as long as he agreed to write the entire script for it I can't imagine what it was like creating games back then the technology was so primitive by our standards now but it's fascinating to look back on like developers drawing out the Sprites for the characters on graph paper before putting them into the computers they were using to program everything the NES is really notable to me most of its Library doesn't really do anything for me now but it really is the starting point for modern video games before this console it was just arcade cabinets and like [ __ ] Atari games [Music] [ __ ] foreign ly worth picking up an NES at a garage sale now or anything but I think it's important to acknowledge the nes's role as essentially being modern Gaming's patient zero mother was a huge success by the way it ended up being the sixth highest selling game of 1989 hitting almost half a million units sold serious numbers for the time the game was successful enough for Nintendo to hire Phil sandhob for a few months while he localized the game for release in the west sandhop did a really good job with the localization the dialogue in mother is a lot better than most other games released on the NES and he left in a run button that originally existed as a debug feature for the development team just because he was a nice guy thank him for your ability to run RPGs just weren't big in English-speaking countries yet however and they decided it wouldn't be worth the financial hit of actually manufacturing the cartridges and shipping them overseas or whatever the Super Nintendo was also right around the corner and they just didn't see an English release of an NES game as being worth it many years later in 2015 it would see its first official release in the West on the Wii U's virtual console under the new name EarthBound Innings I was excited when this happened but I wish they stuck with the name Earthbound zero Earthbound Beginnings is a bit of a mouthful I'm not too fond of it I've never casually referred to the game as Earthbound beginnings and conversation with friends or anything for this video I'm just gonna call it mother for simplicity's sake but I've always known the game as Earthbound zero because that's what the original ROM was called by the fans that leaked the original localized translation online however many years ago this is the version that I played back then before I had ever seen footage of Earthbound to played it and it's the version that I played for this video now also I played this [ __ ] on a retro art core that doesn't support Save State so I want you guys to know that I really played this [ __ ] the way it was meant to be played without the Comforts of modern emulation and I still genuinely [ __ ] with this game I had a blast with it hopefully this is a fun video to watch too thanks for hanging out with me today also this game has one of the sickest trailers I've ever seen for a video game ever if I was a little kid living in Japan in the 80s and I saw this on my TV it would have like changed my brain chemistry forever look at this [ __ ] [Music] come on voices [Music] I really like the title screen it's simple but effective I love the way the spinning earth looks and I like the black a lot I think games that use a lot of pitch black backgrounds have a very distinct atmosphere to them I'm not undertale's biggest fan or anything but it's something that I really dig about it just to name a more contemporary example of this [ __ ] like I said before I was confused years ago and I assumed this game was actually Earthbound so I wrongly named all the characters here after the characters in EarthBound but they're actually named ninten Lloyd Anna and Teddy I like these names because they all sound like normal names the kids would have nobody in the world is named ninten is it [ __ ] short for Nintendo Entertainment System they kind of did this [ __ ] with Earthbound too Ness is just SNES but scrambled but at least Ness is like an actual human being's name Mother 3 I'm sure Lucas translates the [ __ ] Game Boy Advance and Lithuanian or some [ __ ] when you start up the game it asks you to name all of these characters and I often do name characters silly things when I'm given the option but for the mother games I usually prefer to let the characters keep their default names the game starts off with some Exposition that I guess I'll just read actually in the early 1900s a dark shadow covered a small country town in Rural America at that time a young married couple vanished mysteriously from their home the man's name was George and the woman's name is Maria two years later as suddenly as he left George returned he never told anyone where he had been or what he had done but he began an odd study all by himself as for Maria his wife she never returned 80 years have passed since then this is such an ominous start and it sets the tone of the game pretty nicely I mean that was definitely an alien abduction right what the [ __ ] did George's neighbors think when he returned years later without his wife like they definitely thought that he killed her right Jesus Christ so after that we're immediately given control of ninten ninten is our guy but you can easily see why I would have mistaken him for earthbound's nests right they're effectively the same character their designs are incredibly similar and they both serve the same function as silent inserts for the player but there's quite a few differences between the two of them that I'll bring up when relevant we try to leave our bedroom and our lamp starts floating around and attacks us I hate when this [ __ ] happens like imagine you get off work and come home and sit down and then your coffee table starts doing the electric slide this whole beginning section with the house shaking and getting attacked by furniture and your little sister's baby doll is all the practice you need to figure out the battle system mother's battles are extremely simple and easy to understand you know very typical RPG [ __ ] you got your basic attack a few other options like using item or running away or using Psy techniques when you level up enough to learn some of those again it's a small thing and really indicative of the hardware limitations of the time but I dig the black screens that the battles take place and a lot it's effective like look at the screen right now completely black right now look at this what is that and the distance there is it a friendly figure is it something that you should be afraid of so getting closer or getting further away you don't really ever know for sure and I think this kind of uneasy feeling permeates the entirety of Mother's battles after we defeat the possessed doll we check it out and this melody starts to play out of it [Music] I quite like this visual effect it's very psychedelic for the NES this is easily the trippiest game to come out on the system obviously Earthbound would up the weird visuals when it would come out years later but for the time this was really sick we head downstairs and our mom is flipping out we ostensibly explained a nintend's Dad what's going on and he just kind of goes ha must be ghosts like he's been anticipating this type of thing happening or some [ __ ] he tells us that our great grandfather studied Psy which is essentially psychic techniques and that his diary is in the basement somewhere that it might help us out if we check the menu we find that ninten is actually capable of telepathy in the context of the gameplay this is purely an Overworld ability that we can use to read certain NPC's minds but in the context of the story I find it to be pretty interesting that he starts the game out with the psychic ability already because it gives an intense some motivation for getting out there and figuring out why objects are starting to get possessed and attack people if I became a telepath and suddenly a bunch of weird [ __ ] started happening in my town I'd want to figure out what was going on too if we go outside and talk to ninten's dog he explains that you can check things that are weird or out of place I've heard people complain about the check mechanic before even when talking about Earthbound and I kind of understand it being a little Annoying if you accidentally talk when you mean to check and vice versa but it's never been something that bothers me at all between the conversation with the dog and ninten's little sister earlier with the possessed doll mother has already shown you all you need to know about the difference between these two mechanics I know this game can be kind of obtuse and sometimes not give you a lot of guidance so I'm just pointing out when it actually does a good job conveying info to the player because I genuinely don't think it's the hardest game to get into if you're willing to give it an honest chance so we check ninten's dog out and we find that he's wearing the key on his collar and we go grab the diary from the basement this first route from ninten's house to the first town Podunk is probably where you'll decide if this type of game you'll want to commit to or not ninten has very low stats when you start the game out and the first few non-scripted battles will test you harshly mother takes a lot of grinding to make any progress at all the amount of grinding and the high random encounter raid are the main things that turn people off from this game I think I'm gonna risk sounding really pretentious and jerk offy here but I honestly don't mind this game being on the difficult side because you're playing as a kid you feel more at risk at all times playing as Nintendo 10 and mother than you ever do playing as Nas and Earthbound and I find that to be very compelling if I'm being honest I'm not gonna outright say that it's fun that this game has Random Encounters every two steps and a lot of random things at play that can unfairly halt your progress but I'm gonna say that I think it makes sense if you take the way the game is designed into consideration you have to grind a lot in mother and the game gives you ample opportunity to fight enemies to level up and lots of abilities and items to make it a relatively painless experience people complain about this game a lot and I think it's pretty unfairly judged the final area of the game is especially hated by a lot of people but I didn't have that bad a time at all there nintend develops a sigh ability that lets you escape battles immediately and by the time I got there I was strong enough to handle it because of all the grinding I did but I'm getting a little ahead of myself here I'll address more things that people tend to [ __ ] about when it comes to this game when we get to them and I'll tell you why they're wrong and little babies Podunk is the first town in the game and it's fun to talk to different NPCs and kind of get a feel for what's going on like this person mentioning that a poltergeist tore through their house as well helps sell the idea that what's happening is a big deal affecting people everywhere whatever's going on is pretty serious there's animals attacking people in the streets dead people in cemeteries that are being reanimated and attacking the living hippies and hillbillies are succumbing to whatever negative psychic influence is causing all of this and attacking people on site this lady on the outskirts of Podunk is in hysterics because her daughter is missing and begs us to go tell the mayor the mayor is insanely funny because of how big a piece of [ __ ] he is he just wants us to save the kid because it would make him look good for the upcoming re-election I like when a toy sprinkles little social commentary in here like this the keep your politics out of my games people must [ __ ] hate this series look at all this sjw stuff guys in EarthBound you can [ __ ] fight police officers holy [ __ ] foreign it's pretty insane that we're this early in the game and we're fighting reanimated corpses and [ __ ] they sure don't make kids games like this anymore pippy the little girl is in an underground area hiding in a coffin for some reason sweetie what the [ __ ] is wrong with you would you really rather be here than at home it's your mom an alcoholic or something what's the deal she actually joins our party briefly and can help us attack enemies and stuff we only have her with us for a little bit and she's incredibly weak but it serves as a nice little glimpse into what having party members later on will be like we take pippy back to the mayor safe and sound wow a hundred dollars that's it I just fought like 35 zombies with a baseball bat I'm [ __ ] 12 years old I'm gonna grow up with severe psychological damage he immediately has a new task for us he wants us to go see what's going on at the zoo because the animals are going insane and it's dangerous for people to go out there fine I'll go fix this too but first let's see what Podunk has that might help us in mother most cities and towns offer nintends some Provisions like department stores to buy healing items new equipment and weapons hotel that you can pay money to sleep in that will heal you and restore all of your sigh points and a hospital that you can visit if ninten or any of his party members get sick or die in battle or something this early on in the game I rarely seek the aid of the hotels because you can go back home to heal up and restore all of your side points for free but the department stores are cool it's always nice to upgrade your weapons and do more damage in battle and uh this guy's selling a canary [ __ ] it dude sure I'll buy it its eyes show sadness oh cheer up little guy I'm not gonna eat you or anything there's actually an NPC in Podunk that tells us about a canary Village and if we explore around a little bit we find a path leading out to it there's a bunch of Big Bird people just hanging out over here they're not very talkative but if we return the baby canary to its mother she gets so excited that she sings A Melody for us similar to the doll at the beginning of the game so immediately we don't really know what the deal with these Melodies are but if we check on ninten's status we can see that we've collected two out of eight Melodies so far it seems like these are going to be important later on so I guess it's a good idea to be on the lookout for them from here on out you know a lot of [ __ ] people complain about how difficult it is to find The Melodies without a guide but I don't think it's that bad in an RPG like mother you tend to want to play the game by talking to everybody and exploring every house and every path and seeing everything that you can and the game isn't that hard to figure out if you're inquisitive and take the time to Snoop around everywhere this is what a game like this is all about this isn't Pokemon dude everybody on this website that's given this game a negative review needs to write a twit longer right now so the mayor wants us to go check out the zoo it's to the north of the cemetery and if we take the key that the mayor's assistant gave us but once we get up there Diddy Kong here takes it and runs away I recently have decided that if a game has a monkey in it it's good there are no bad games that have monkeys in them [ __ ] this one Donkey Kong Country Mega Man Legends Monkey Ball ape Escape I can't think of a single bad game that has a monkey in it can't think of a single bad game that has a monkey in it not a single if the zoo is so intense poor ninten is having to fight off elephants and tigers with his little baseball bat Jesus Christ I'm a child oh cute look at the bunnies some flamingos okay this area is tight actually we find an abandoned building and I really dig The Vines and overgrowth on the outside of it it's a subtle thing but it immediately indicates that this building has been used by people in a very long time inside of the building this Eerie high-pitched ringing is audible as we climb to the top floor we find this Dr Mario medicine capsule doing the Michael J fox and we crack it open and fight a Starman Jr these guys are awesome and pretty much the iconic mother enemy there's one on the box for Earthbound they're cool and I've always dug the way they look a lot very alien but also cartoony I'm a sucker for character designs without faces I think it's a nice Trope both in making friendly characters that are extra charming and enemy characters that are extra unsettling the animals stop being violent once the source of the high-pitched humming is destroyed and we head back outside to see that there's a singing monkey in this enclosure three out of eight melodies already we're on a [ __ ] roll now if you hadn't gathered already music is a pretty important element in the series from Gathering melodies or soundstones in the games to the actual soundtrack itself being really [ __ ] good mother and Earthbound share a lot of songs although obviously the Renditions in EarthBound are a bit better because the Super Nintendo featured more robust options for musicians the level of sound complexity allowed for NES games is really limited with only three nodes being able to play simultaneously at any given time but I think the Melodies and compositions of these Tunes are absolutely fantastic there are no bad songs in this game or even the series really keichi Suzuki and hirokazu Tanaka were in charge of the soundtrack from other they both have interesting musical histories kind of distinct from one another Suzuki was the lead vocalist and guitarist in this experimental rock band called Moon Riders and he also scored numerous films including the Fantastic Tokyo Godfathers mother and Earthbound were the only video games he ever worked on the soundtracks for but hirukazu Tanaka who released his records now into the name chip Tanaka is a different story this guy was already very well respected by the time mother was in development because he did the soundtracks for the original Metroid and Kid Icarus as well as lots of other games with very memorable and iconic soundtracks at the time this guy still releases albums that are really [ __ ] cool I'll leave a link to his bandcamp in the description because I think his [ __ ] [ __ ] slays I have a lot of respect for this guy his album Django which he released in late 2017 is in my regular rotation I listen to this [ __ ] while doing the dishes or making pipe bombs to mail my local Congress God damn it it's really [ __ ] funny to me that most of the enemies have generic names like hippie or snake or bag lady or [ __ ] fugitive but this guy's just Wally like ninten is already familiar with this guy and uses the fact that he's attacking us to finally get retribution for that time we hit a baseball into his yard and he never gave it back to us yeah [ __ ] you you Old redneck [ __ ] [Music] that's so funny Mr Mayor thank you thank you so much I'm getting pissed off at all these stupid adults I'm gonna start running around oh [ __ ] cops okay stay calm officers I may look like a child with a weapon but I'm actually a white woman they actually move out of the way for us since we took care of the zoo and one cop mentions that he heard that we're a telepath and the other mentions that there's a weird rock in the cave up ahead putting these two things together we head into the cave and attempt to use our telepathy on the rock [Music] foreign [Music] oh [ __ ] it's pink everywhere now weakling child it's funny cats swimming around and little guys wearing witch hats all right man I'm into this this weird place we've been transported to is known as magic hand and it's one of my favorite areas in the game for sure it's such a shock after running around all this normal ass green scenery to be in this weird pink place if we talk to some of the people hanging out here we learn that the ruler of magic hand is someone named Queen Mary they're shops to buy items and weapons here and the NPCs act surprisingly ordinary considering we have no idea what this place is or why we're here I'm strange what did this guy look at my internet history yeah big deal I have dreams like this all the time this is why I stopped taking melatonin the people living here are pretty friendly and nice this guy lets us sleep in his house after we fix his spoon this guy guesses my sexual orientation you can heal here for free there are a lot of weird enemies exclusive to this area and I really enjoy when mother introduces more abstract [ __ ] for you to fight and stuff up until now it's been kind of off but not too out of the ordinary besides the star man we fought in the zoo administration building but now we're fighting like peppermint snails and floating eyeballs and the ugliest [ __ ] tree stump I've ever seen in my life God damn there are also these bird guys called The Flying men these guys have always fascinated me because of how eager they are to sacrifice themselves it's so weird if we talk to one of them they join our party while we're in Magic hand and will help us fight against the enemies here I try to avoid recruiting them though because if they run out of HP during a battle then they [ __ ] die permanently and I feel really guilty about it I don't like being responsible for such an earnest and compassionate characters death good Lord if one of the flying men die his gravestone gets erected outside of his house to remind you of the blood on your hands and his brothers go he died honorably anyway my turn now just makes me sad to the north of the peaceful town area there are some guards protecting this Castle I'm guessing this is where Queen Mary lives now this is probably a pretty silly thing to bring up but ninten is like what 12 so he's probably learned about King Henry in the house of tutors and [ __ ] and school do you think he was like mentally scrambling to try and figure out how to pretend to be Catholic here like oh [ __ ] my parents don't really do church at all hope Queen Mary doesn't burn me at the stage for being too Protestant I don't know ninten probably wasn't worried about this at all he's probably failing history he's probably [ __ ] failing every subject in school never mind Queen Mary's Castle is crawling with these Texas Chainsaw Massacre looking guys they're not malicious or anything just kind of creepy to me Queen Mary addresses Us by name and says that we're welcome to hang out magic hand for as long as we want we apparently ask her to sing for us but she says that she can't remember her song she really wants to sing but needs us to collect all the Melodies so she can remember how the tune goes alright now we've got a real reason to seek out all the Melodies how the [ __ ] do we get out of magic hand uh if we explore around a bit we find these Wells one of them actually leads towards this Cavern that we can follow to reach the outside world the way this area looks specifically really reminds me of how influential this game was on kikiyama when they were creating a maniki there are a lot of design similarities between the two games and how Labyrinthian they both can be and from a visual standpoint and stuff goddamn yuminiki rules I think if kikiyama was the type of person that had any kind of public Presence at all they would probably say that this game is their favorite in the series as well just a hunch there's a sleeping Dragon down here but we can't wake him up yet we're not powerful enough there's this item down here as well that's easily the most useful item in the game called the Onyx hook if we pick it up and keep it with us we can use it to teleport to Magic hand any time but it's being guarded by this fish for some [ __ ] reason this is the only fish in the game and for some reason it's guarding the Onyx hook I have no idea why there's a fish here sometimes this game just kind of throws [ __ ] at you to see how you react to it I mean the entire series does this of course but it's especially impressive to me here I guess this game daring to be quirky and strange back when video games barely had any standard tropes or design guidelines accepted by the public before they were like a mainstream thing I don't know it's just cool to me after we beat the fish we reached the end of the cavern and uh I don't even have any commentary here I'll just show you how bizarre this conversation is [Music] foreign [Music] like you see what I'm saying about this game just kind of throwing stuff at you what the [ __ ] was that guy on about we never see him again for the rest of the game just this weird sad guy hanging out in this whatever magicath is anyway back in the regular World things are starting to escalate just a bit there's new enemies to fight like flying saucers and these freaky looking robots that remind me of stick bugs there's also more variations of violent animals and people and we fight a shitload of them on our way to the next town Marysville foreign yeah me too buddy Marysville is pretty similar to Podunk but a bit bigger the towns all kind of look similar to each other but their layouts are all different so if you're playing through the game yourself I don't think it's disorienting or mundane or anything just seeing my footage out of context might make this game seem a bit samey to you but whatever it's not a big deal it's definitely not a negative for me [ __ ] every area in the original Legend of Zelda looks the exact same people still love to suck that game off until the cows come home I'm allowed to give mother a pass I'm allowed you can go online and literally do or say whatever you want [ __ ] you Marysville has a department store and a hotel and hospital and stuff just like Podunk but good Lord look what happens if you talk to the doctor at the hospital in this town Jesus Christ am I playing a video game or am I in every Healthcare facility in the [ __ ] United States there's a school in Marysville and it's kind of surreal to be able to just walk in and wander around unsupervised I mean some of the teachers ask us questions if we talk to them but they don't really give a [ __ ] that some random person just entered their school and is wandering around the 80s sure was a different time huh the door to the top floor of the school is locked so if we walk around a bit we find the school's custodian he complains about his wife and nintends like actually she seems cool because he's a woman respecting gigachad and the janitor goes yeah you're right my wife kicks ass and he awkwardly walks us back up to the top of the school to unlock the door for us oh wow I actually really like this view a lot it's like really nice looking that mountain in the distance looks pretty familiar oh [ __ ] this trash can is Parkinson's too what okay buddy I won't tell anybody Lloyd gets bullied and shoved into trash cans I guess poor kid he trusts us enough to come out of hiding but he's really fixated on explosives and bottle rockets that's probably his special interest respect when I was his age it was Sonic OCS not to get too personal here or anything but I was shoved into trash cans and lockers and [ __ ] when I was in Middle School so I kind of feel a kinship with Lloyd so let's go get him some bottle rockets from that factory he mentioned as a peace offering sweets Factory isn't really anything to write home about it's the first factory in the game and it's really small with weak enemies to fight it's a tiny blip in our adventure here we get some bottle rockets and bring them back to Lloyd and he immediately gets really excited and leads us down to the school laboratory while he's leading us down there he tells us about another Factory where they're constructing a rocket that he's apparently excited about and he tells us about how the kids at school call him names and stuff I don't ever mean to wax poetic or anything don't misunderstand me but I really appreciate the Simplicity of this game sometimes kids just kind of say things and do things for no reason like Bully a Kid for being weird and quiet when we arrive at the [ __ ] school for the first time some of the kids are either talking about how weird Lloyd is or how they're looking forward to beating him up later and then on the flip side how simple it is for ninten and Lloyd to become friends we just show interest in what he's all about listen to him talk about his problems and then we blow up a bottle rocket in the science lab together and we're friends for life now Lloyd doesn't even say anything after we blow up the science lab he's just our buddy now he's our ride or die I really like that I don't know it's quaint again I'm not interested in trying to make myself seem like I'm smarter than I am or anything or that I have some kind of unique or profound viewpoints because I played this [ __ ] video game that came out in 1989 and liked it I just find that its Simplicity sometimes makes it more compelling and gratifying to me personally pee pee poo poo Lloyd starts out at level one so he's significantly weaker than ninten is when he joins up with us but training him up to our level isn't so bad the enemies we fight give a lot more experience points per fight than the enemies at the beginning of the game and having ninten handle most of the combat makes things go relatively smoothly I don't mind grinding a bit to give Lloyd some time to catch up to us Lloyd is a cool party member he doesn't have any psychic abilities like ninten but he can use a lot of weapons and items in battle that ninten doesn't know how to use like bombs and Rockets and [ __ ] guns again he's a bit weak at first but he's a Powerhouse later on in his own way and he's a welcome addition to the party I like the way mother handles Fallen party members if one of our guys runs out of HP in battle we have to go to a hospital to go get them and their ghost or Spirit or whatever follows us around until we go save them I think it's cute how they look like a little angel with the Halo and stuff floating around behind us it's really unique and Charming kind of dark but really Charming nonetheless we can also use the Onyx hook to warp back to Magic hand and we can revive Fallen party members there for free man what do you think Lloyd thought when we teleported to Magic camp with him for the first time see look at him he's at a loss for words he's stunned oh yeah that weird swimming cat was talking about a gift for a weakling child I guess that's Lloyd he gives him a magic candy that UPS his stats a bit which is nice did Aphex Twin name that song after Lloyd in this game probably not I doubt he plays video games I think he's probably too stuck up to do anything other than make music and jerk off the Onyx Hook is super helpful for getting us out of a pinch but it's a little cumbersome to walk all the way through the cavern to get back to the real world every time I mean it's fine it takes like two minutes earlier Lloyd mentioned another factory with a big rocket let's go check that out so I'll be honest Duncan's Factory is the roughest part of the game for me it's absolutely massive it's got lots of dead ends and the enemies you fight here are just difficult enough to give you a bit of a hard time ninten has at least developed quite a few Psy abilities to make the game a bit easier by this point though like healing and removing negative status effects and stuff so at the very least I was able to keep the boys alive while I was lost in this gigantic gray hellscape the good news is that this is it this is the worst and it's really not that bad while you're wandering around like a dumbass and crying and pissing Your Pants the game graciously drops a bunch of items that permanently up your stats in here so hitting a dead end isn't the worst thing in the world at least you're rewarded in some way and at least the game isn't [ __ ] messing with your control scheme or some other stupid [ __ ] like that it's extremely tolerable sincerely this is a good place to grind a bit as well the enemies give you decent experience points for your time scientists in here all kind of look like Steve Buscemi lots of robots to fight Lloyd you said there was a cool rocket here where the hell is the cool rocket Lloyd if we can find the cool [ __ ] rock and I'm gonna three point shot you back into the garbage myself [Music] oh oh [ __ ] Lloyd we're gonna get in [ __ ] trouble for this the rocket hits this huge Boulder that was blocking the train tracks outside of the factory and thankfully doesn't go anywhere near Hawaii now for about two seconds after the launch I was like oh [ __ ] I guess I better find my way out of here now but then I remembered we could either use the Onyx hook to quickly get out of here or use some bread bread in this game bread can either be used as a healing item if you eat it or you can use it to make a breadcrumb trail and instantly warp back to wherever you want it's tight actually game gives you surprising amount of options a lot of the time this is the most gracious RPG on the famicom probably by far honestly I tried playing that first Fire Emblem game a while back and it gave me lupus so after Duncan's Factory we can follow the train tracks to see what's past that Boulder we destroyed ah [ __ ] Lloyd get behind me it's Jesse Lacy from brand new there's a train station behind where that Boulder was and the sky inside of it is being a little traumatic just chill out dude I'll make you some chamomile tea you can take a train ride to one of three cities oh boy if we go to reindeer and talk to this old lady at the station she asks if we're going to Snowman and she gives us a hat that belongs to somebody named Anna reindeer is a fun area but there isn't much to do here that's super important for our adventure there's some places to explore and funny people to talk to but the game is kind of nudging us to go to snowman so [ __ ] it let's go to Snowman Let's go meet Anna [Music] oh hell yeah dude Snowtown I [ __ ] adore a snowy icy areas and games I'm pretty sure I've said this in like every other video that I've made but I don't care it's still true I am in a short sleeve because of snow yeah this town is the best one as far as I'm concerned except for the fact that you can talk to people here and they can sneeze on you and get you sick God [ __ ] just go to the doctor and get treated for that real quick okay back in snowman and we're gonna avoid getting [ __ ] tuberculosis from some contagious [ __ ] this time oh [ __ ] guys he's real and now he's [ __ ] dead Anna is in this church with her dad and she's like tripping out when she sees nintend because she had a dream about him before we give her her hat and she tells us that she's been waiting for us to show up and that we're supposed to help her find her mom oh man okay maybe this is just me being a sensitive [ __ ] but I've always kind of been easily moved by stories about kids that lose their parents and are looking to find them fuga Melodies of steel made me cry like a little [ __ ] earlier in the train station there was another girl with her father that was also looking for their lost mother wonder if these disappearing moms are connected somehow those guys said that they were heading out to Youngtown probably a good idea to keep that town in mind we can take the train to Spokane and when we head over there it's immediately a little Eerie the town doesn't have any people in it it seems totally deserted there's a hotel though this guy looks kind of weird oh wow 18 bucks that is by far the cheapest hotel in the game so far hell yeah I'll stay here [Music] you swindled me past the town out in the fields you can see all of the residents of Spokane hanging out over there because their homes in the city itself has just become too dangerous slash haunted sucks to be you guys I guess okay there's this kind of weird recurring bit in this game where women are just really Charmed by ninten they think he's so handsome and shower him with compliments completely out of the blue it's really funny to me because he just looks like [ __ ] this can't relate whenever pretty ladies see me in public they spray me with insecticides she gives us a key to this house out here that's apparently super haunted and tells us to go nuts I'm getting Duncan's Factory PTSD from looking at how big this Mansion is from the outside but it's not that bad it's dark in here and there's lots of ghosts and stuff to fight but it's built in a pretty linear fashion not too hard to reach the end this extremely ordinary talking Mouse at the beginning of the mansion mentions a room with a piano in it so I guess we should keep an eye out for a piano you know in horror [ __ ] it's always like a piano what do I need to do to get a haunted 808 drum machine in the next horror movie oh [ __ ] it's a from soft character we get to the end of the mansion and the piano plays the fourth Melody for us [Music] been a minute since we got one of those huh I'd almost forgotten about them Queen Mary is still sitting on her throne in Magic hand just patiently waiting for us to find all the melodies for her but ninten and Lloyd and Anna have just been running around like idiots getting the [ __ ] beaten out of them by wild animals I just got hit by a [ __ ] car foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] your son was named bug error can you legally change a kid's name when they're like old enough to have sentience and autonomy what the [ __ ] Child Protective Services how can I help you today I'm calling on behalf of bug error Rosemary I'm sorry sorry his name is ninten Rosemary um there's not much more to do in Spokane or snowman now so we can head back to Union Station in Marysville there's an area nearby that we haven't explored at all yet this desert to the east of the station has super weird creatures running around some big bugs lots of cactuses cacti I don't give a [ __ ] this guy is offering paid plane rides and says that if we collect enough plane ticket stubs he'll give us his [ __ ] tank what the [ __ ] kind of drugs are you on out here my guy we're children it's kind of funny he says that there's a landmine out here in the desert too good God that's stressful I'm gonna try to not think about that while I'm wandering around out here I actually read online that you can find the landmine and step on it and it explodes and if you do shigesado a toy himself shows up and goes oh you did it and he comes out of your TV and like brofists you and kisses your mom on the lips I don't know the pilot takes us on a flight and circles around this specific Cactus twice it looks way different from every other Cactus out here so after the flight we check it out and find that we can communicate with it telepathically [Music] fifth melody look I know it's a little obtuse I know it's a little cryptic but the playing guy circles it two times and it sticks out like a sore thumb among the others here got a [ __ ] penis coming out of its face I still can't believe this guy's giving a tank to three little kids this is gonna be so sick we reach these ruins in the middle of the desert and get attacked by this big robot foreign Adventure huh there's another weird humaniki ass Labyrinth down here with these monkeys that are all pathological Liars but this one's a breeze to get through because there's no Random Encounters in here I'm grateful for the break honestly at the end of the tunnel we find another funny pink telepathy rock that teleports us back to Magic hand and when we check out that dragon in the cavern he actually responds to us this time but he's a [ __ ] and he won't give us his Melody until we beat the crap out of him we have all three kids here pretty powered up with side techniques and weapons and [ __ ] and I even brought along one of the flying men to help us out here but hilariously enough I wanted to test out of one of Lloyd's super bombs would be effective on him because they destroy most enemies in a single hit and uh it worked this was the easiest [ __ ] fight in the game I genuinely didn't expect it to work on a boss character like this but uh thanks Lloyd okay we're up to six Melodies now hell yeah since we entered magic hand through a new telepathy Rock when we exit the cavern it spits us back out in the real world in a brand new area we've never been to before it looks like there's some train tracks we can follow sure I'm down to do some more Stand By Me [ __ ] with my new buds I kind of skimmed over Anna earlier so I'll just say now that she is by far the strongest party member we have like offensively at least ninten only really learns Psy techniques that heal or support in some way but Anna's scary powerful she can use Psy to [ __ ] freeze burn or electrocute enemies Jesus we follow the train tracks to a station that's out of commission and meet the most relatable video game NPC of all time the other train station attendant guy needed a cup of chamomile tea but I think this guy needs a valium or something calm down it seems like we've stumbled into young town if you remember earlier that girl and her dad were coming here to look for her lost Mom they're not here though Youngtown seems to have an ironically super-fitting name now everyone here is a child and all of the adults are totally gone there's kids crying begging us to hold them asking to bring back their parents [ __ ] me dude I can't stomach this [ __ ] who's gonna take care of all these goddamn babies this little girl says that a big ship took her parents away other kids say that they saw the ship fly past the next town and up into the mountains now A Link Between the intro of the game and the game itself is beginning to take shape but will hold off on diving into that for now until we have more pieces to put together this game's story has kind of been loose and haphazard so far with very few concrete things to guide us forward like finding the Melodies meeting Lloyd and Anna has just kind of been what we've ended up doing without a clear sense of direction this isn't a bad thing mind you and I actually really enjoy the fact that this game never really lets you 100 feel like you're heading in the correct direction but it's interesting that things are starting to come together a little bit if we explore around a bit more in Youngtown we discover that there's a psychic baby living in this house talking to it obviously yields no notable results but attempting a telepathic connection brings us to these incredible lines of dialogue have I complimented this game's sense of humor yet I think it's seriously perfect it's not a huge Focus or anything the jokes and silly moments are pretty infrequent so I think they pack a bit of an extra punch when compared to later games in the series all three games have a fantastic sense of humor of course but I'll say that I think I appreciate it most in this game Earthbound has more jokes and a lot of them are objectively funnier in [ __ ] but the subtleties of mother just hit different for me the teleportation ability we get from the goo goo gaga baby is [ __ ] sick too if you've played Earthbound you're familiar with it already but it's a very useful side technique that obviously lets you warp to any Town you've been to before and I actually enjoy that you've got to make sure you have enough cleared out space to run in before you make that jump it's a lot more fun than just immediately teleporting to wherever you want to go it's like in Sonic CD trying to get a running start before time traveling I love when you accidentally hit something and it makes all three of our little guys here look funny when it explodes in their faces it's cute those kids were talking about La the next town let's try and make our way out there I don't think I've actually brought this up yet but ninten has a map of the game's world it's not super detailed or anything but it was enough to help me get to wherever I wanted to go when I was playing I didn't have to consult a guide that often even though it's been years since I played this [ __ ] not that having to consult a guide regularly would have bothered me all that much but for people that dislike having to utilize extraneous material there you go Gotta make our way through this big stinky swamp with these weird alien guys and crocodiles until we reach a house out here your Dad's here foreign [Music] can't even catch a break from your [ __ ] dad why the [ __ ] is pippy out here did she buy this Swamp House oh my God I knew it her mom is an alcoholic she came out here to escape she graciously lets us heal up at her home and we're off no [ __ ] idea why Lloyd's dad is out here but all right man he actually asks for your name like the player's name so the game can address you personally later in a bit of a primitive meta sort of way it's not Metal Gear Solid 2 or one shot or anything but it's definitely somewhat novel for the time I don't even remember where the game addresses you directly so it obviously isn't a huge deal here in mother 2 and 3 they definitely did quite a bit more with this idea having the in-game characters actually refer to you as a real person and stuff once we get past the swamp we find ourselves in La the final City in the game there's the typical setup here with the usual amenities and weirdo NPCs to talk to as well as gang members that fight you in the streets these guys are affiliated with the blah blah gang which is either the best name for a gang I've ever heard or the worst name for a gang I've ever heard I'm not entirely sure the citizens of LA are aware of the gang in their leader who's apparently somebody named Teddy now from the intro of the game we'd probably assume oh cool fourth party member is out here but it isn't exactly like that you'll see we find this live music Club definitely not a strip joint being guarded by our wacky friend from the desert that gave us his tank he's pissed off at us for breaking it but like didn't you give it to us dude either way he wants two hundred dollars for reparations which is [ __ ] nothing to us now we have enough money to buy 10 copies of Earthbound on eBay 200 is Pocket Change we get into the club and this woman starts hitting on ninten and buys him a drink then a cop comes in and for a split second I was like oh man this [ __ ] is in trouble now but no we're the ones in trouble come on Pig I'm the victim here I'm being preyed upon and served alcohol shut down the club arrest the woman not me are you [ __ ] kidding me I'm a miner Pig takes us back to the station and confiscates our weapons and refuses to let us leave until we admit that we did a bad thing but I didn't [ __ ] do anything dude [Music] oh my God they really want me to feel bad about this I get it it's a valve lesson to teach kids that alcohol is bad I'm just not sure that this is the exact correct way to teach this lesson also after the copious amount of grinding and wandering around we've done in this game I think a drink would probably be a decent [ __ ] idea speaking of lessons Todd this part also does a great job teaching kids that cops [ __ ] suck Mr Jack in the corner over here will try to sell you your weapons back at a marked up price but [ __ ] that I just went and bought new ones from the store in Magic hand now that we're back in the club I'm gonna avoid Julia vickerman over here and see what else is going on oh man uh sure foreign [Music] oh [ __ ] it's Teddy he attacks us immediately for beating up some of his gang buddies and he and ninten trade attacks back and forth for a few turns now in the English localized release it looks like we're having a fist fight here but in the original Japanese version dude is holding a knife Jesus Christ This is actually a decent place to talk about some of the censorship for the American release that took place in the localization process I definitely understand a lot of these decisions removing cigarettes from the birds and blood stains from the zombies and [ __ ] would obviously make the game a lot more family friendly and although I wish the game was uncensored it's not something I'm gonna ship my pants over no vagina bones here for people to weep into their fists about I think there are patched ROMs online that reintegrate these cut elements into an English version of the game but I couldn't be bothered to find that for this video and I wanted to have a more authentic and relevant experience anyway I guess all of this is only kind of interesting and a matter of preference if you're planning on picking up the game yourself but yeah we beat the [ __ ] out of Teddy and he tells us that he admires our strength and that he wants engines for his dead parents they apparently died in the same mountains that we're trying to get to you know after a while you start to question what a toy's relationship with his parents was like I know that his folks divorced when he was really young and that he didn't really have a relationship with his dad which kind of explains why the dads in this series are either faceless voices that just talk to you over the phone and deposit money in your bank account or portrayed as kind of shitty and flawed it's interesting and just a small reminder that the games we play are made by people and shaped by their perspectives and experiences it's cool video games are [ __ ] cool Teddy is a very interesting character he's obviously quite different from our main three protagonists as he's in his early 20s and a gang leader he's also got a very narrow-minded goal here I don't actually know what he plans on doing when he gets to mount a toy or who he intends to get revenge on from what I can tell his parents were killed by wild animals up here this apparently drove him to drinking and getting into fights and bars and [ __ ] and his gang started committing more crimes and general acts of malfeasance as a result much heavier than anything ninten Lloyd or on seem to have going on clicking through the wiki a little bit it says that Teddy smokes a brand of cigarettes called horseshit which I absolutely [ __ ] love teddy can tell that Lloyd is our weakest link here which I personally resent a little bit but he shockingly polite about this and just asks him to wait in the club while we go up to the mountain together when this happened I was immediately super bummed out because I really like Lloyd and with Teddy replacing him in the party we aren't going to be able to use any of his bombs or weapons but I ended up rolling with it because Teddy is interesting and he's actually a really good party member he's super strong and makes a lot of fights against random enemies a lot easier so begrudgingly we leave Lloyd behind yeah keep that [ __ ] lady away from him alright Mount to toy is the final notable area of the game the enemies here are really strong and the music has an uneasy kind of atmosphere it definitely feels a lot less safe here than the rest of the game which is saying something once we make our way through the caves and up the side of the mountain a bit we find a house with an old doctor living in it he heals us up and Teddy says that he wants to make a few phone calls ninten and Anna hang out in this room to Wade and the scene that follows obviously shows its age but if you use your imagination a bit I think it's actually an incredibly sweet scene just two kids dancing together the dancing matches up with the music that plays perfectly and it's a little embarrassing to admit but I found myself moved by these pixels moving around on my screen my favorite quote on Dancing Is by one of my favorite documentarians Adam Curtis he was being interviewed by Chapo trap house when he said this and I'll just play the clip because I don't want to butcher what he says by paraphrasing or whatever people behave as though they are being watched even if they're not dancing is this really strange moment because on the one hand it's that moment when many people give up that sense of self-consciousness and really let themselves be what they are it's the moment when you are looking at people truly being themselves and it's wonderful and it's glorious [Music] after this little number Anna asks ninten if he loves her and they admit their feelings to each other this [ __ ] is sincerely just really sweet to me I don't have the heart to make any hilarious quips or jokes about this I'm sorry teddy comes in and just [ __ ] completely destroys the mood here thanks [ __ ] and then suddenly we hear a bunch of loud crashing sounds oh [ __ ] it's another one of these guys and this time we don't have a tank it's way too powerful no matter what we do we can't win it just wipes the floor with us foreign [Music] I have never been happier in my life to see you Lloyd after Lloyd saves us and takes us to a safe place ninten and Anna are revealed to be fine but Teddy is a lot more seriously injured I don't remember where I read this but I remember reading someone interpreting this as Teddy shielding Anna and ninten from the robot's attack and I personally like this read a lot and will also assume that this is what happened Teddy seems to have matured greatly in the few minutes we've had him around but then Lloyd here drops my favorite line of dialogue in the game foreign [Music] it looks like now we need to scale the mountain again but it's admittedly a bit harder this time without Teddy's brute strength once we make it up there however we find that there's a huge lake near the peak Lloyd fires up an abandoned boat and we ride it into this Whirlpool which sucks us down into the secret underwater laboratory I like seeing the fish swim around in the window here it's a really nice little detail to be honest I didn't mention this before when I was talking about Phil sandhop and how he left the Run button in the game but essentially the Run button just doubles the speed of every character on screen so it's funny to just stand around holding the Run button just kind of makes it look like ninten is making the fish move around really fast with his mind but the people too I guess we find this tall red robot in here named Eve she boots up when we get close to her and explains that George remember him from the intro created her to protect us what we can gather from what she explains to us if it wasn't obvious already was that one George is our great grandfather he's the one that wrote The Diary that we use to get to Magic hand and to learn side techniques and two he was abducted by aliens and then some point dropped back off on Earth the windows in the facility start to crack presumably due to the sheer power of Eve being powered back on and we end up back on the surface of the mountain Eve is so powerful that she makes all of these ridiculously strong enemies that gave us hell coming up here seem like nothing at all it's honestly like indescribably cathartic to Breeze through all of these Random Encounters up here I genuinely cannot express with words how satisfying it feels some people's ultimate power fantasy is committing thousands of counts of vehicular manslaughter or becoming the most charismatic womanizer on the planet but mine is Reviving a giant red robot lady and blowing up dozens of green spaghetti aliens Different Strokes and all that now what we're supposed to do here is climb to the top of the mountain and Eve will lose a battle with another one of those big robots and out of her corpse we get the seventh Melody but I [ __ ] things up and somehow managed to die to a random encounter or something and Eve ended up in remains at the bottom of this final part of the game we get the seventh Melody from her like we're supposed to but now we have to travel throughout this entire section without the aid of a big Power robot lady that one shots every enemy this ended up being fine because ninten has fourth dimensional slip which is an ability that lets you immediately run away from a battle but I get why everybody complains about Mauna toy they're over exaggerating how hard it is but it's no walk in the park for sure look I had objectively the worst possible time at Mount a toy I did things the wrong way but I still won't [ __ ] about it just run away from the battles it's fine Duncan's Factory was way worse than this at the top of the mountain this is waiting for us laughs [Music] foreign [Music] it's really satisfying to hear the full song that the eight melodies come together to make the full song is very creatively named eight Melodies and if you remember earlier it's actually the song from the really cool TV commercial for the game this game's soundtrack was actually arranged as a full studio album with keichi Suzuki hirokazu Tanaka and shigesado a toy all like in charge of it with performances commissioned from English singers and songwriters like Catherine Warwick she did most of the vocals for the album but I couldn't find much about her online she didn't have much of a career after this unfortunately other than the occasional single the last thing I could find from her was that she contributed vocals to this dance song from 2005. [Music] foreign yeah I hope so too bud no idea the version of eight Melodies that's present on the studio album the version that was in the commercial was performed by Saint Paul's Cathedral choir which is a Young Men's Choir in London and have apparently been active as far back as 11 27 and to my knowledge still actively release CDs and [ __ ] I thought that was kind of cool now that we've completed the song it's time to go back to Magic hand to help Queen Mary remember it thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] I find the scene of Queen Mary remembering her own identity as Maria George's wife to be really amazingly directed she slowly remembers who she is while everything slowly gets darker and darker around us she cries out the name of someone named geek and evaporates out of existence along with magic hand [Music] Jesus Christ we're back at the peak of Mount datoy and this final cave has a side path with a room full of human beings held in stasis pods or something it seems like this is where all of the disappearing adults from Youngtown are along with Anna's mom and anyone else that mysteriously vanished recently one guy in a pod tells us that there's no point in trying to rescue them until we deal with the mothership oh [ __ ] he did it he said the thing he said the name of the game guys guys do you get it do you get that we enter the final room of the game this unsettling dark Cavern with a giant spaceship ascending in front of us it's gig this final battle has a sort of Haunting atmosphere to it instead of one of the game's many awesome battle themes were stuck listening to the single high-pitched hum repeating over and over again this scene really sticks out to me we've been fighting a lot of unsettling creatures and robots and little UFOs and [ __ ] but we're now face to face with an honest-to-god alien it's kind of chilling gig is unkillable none of our attacks do anything to him at all he talks with us in between hurling ridiculously strong attacks at us telling us that he's grateful to our family as George and Maria were the ones that raised him years ago George stole Vital Information about Psy techniques from his race it would seem that George and Maria whether they meant to or not apparently made contact with the aliens 80 years ago and they took them into their ship geek's race experimented on them and observed them gathering information on human beings while George secretly was observing them at the same time Maria took on the role of mother to geek raising him and loving him like he was her own son I assume that at some point George either found a way to escape or was exiled from the ship although if that's true I don't know why they wouldn't have just killed him maybe the aliens loved Maria and she influenced them to just letting him go free I don't know this is all speculation on my end and I'm sure there's thousands of threads on message boards and wikis online where people have studied this with supplementary material and [ __ ] but basically geek's race are planning on kidnapping a large selection of human beings and destroying the planet for whatever reason gig offers ninten and ninten alone a chance to board the mothership and avoid extermination but ninten obviously refuses and geek continues to attack telling us to just perish along with the other ugly Earth people the battle screen has a new option for all of us that we can click now called Sing if we click it we start to sing Maria's Melody but this really sets him off and he can't stand to hear it and screams at us to stop he interrupts us numerous times by attacking us while we sing but if we keep at it alternating healing and singing between the three of us eventually he's worn down completely he tells us that he'll be back at some point and flies off in his ship that's it we're done Anna gets reunited with her mom we free the rest of the earth people Teddy fully recovers and has apparently found some kind of Peace the parents are reunited with their children in Youngtown we drop Anna off at her home in snowman and Lloyd is regarded as a hero back at his school in Marysville ninten takes a nap and that's the end overall I find this to be kind of a melancholic ending despite a lot of the characters reaching happy resolutions for themselves geek is a very interesting character to me and it's kind of heartbreaking to see how much unresolved conflict has inside of him regarding Maria and his relationship with humans this ending doesn't answer a lot of questions that people playing the game probably have but I think that this game's minimal storytelling really pays off towards the end despite this I know this game isn't as loved and revered by people that like the series but I definitely implore anyone that likes Earthbound to give this game a shot I know Earthbound uses a lot of similar ideas present in this game with arguably better execution but I find this game's tone and atmosphere to be pretty unique even now and I would even say that I like it the most out of the three games in the series if Earthbound and Mother 3 are comparable to an album like in rainbows I would say that mother is like kid a it's a lot less upbeat it's a bit less accessible and maybe it won't do anything for you at first but there's Beauty to behold here that the right people will appreciate and cherish this is a really bad analogy but [ __ ] it I'm tired and I've been listening to a lot of Radiohead lately so this is the analogy that you're getting the way I see it mother is an even more influential game than Earthbound is people that worked on this game would go on to develop Pokemon Red and Blue versions and a lot of themes and ideas that were conjured up during the day development of mother bled into Pokemon and obviously without this game Earthbound wouldn't exist at least not in the form that it does now this is extremely hyperbolic but in a way mother is really the most important game ever made it's truly and honestly a Trailblazer in every sense of the word and so much of what I appreciate about video games wouldn't exist without it if this video convinces even one person to go back and give Mother an honest try then I'll be content in knowing that I covered a lot of what happens in this game but there's still quite a bit of stuff that I didn't touch on and playing the game yourself you might find that you do things in a different order or that you discover things that are pretty cool that I didn't bring up at all or you may even come to your own conclusions and interpretations of the story or characters or whatever maybe ninten really is nessa's Dad I don't [ __ ] know I definitely definitely recommend giving it an honest shot if you have a Nintendo switch and pay for the soy subscription or whatever then you already have this game in your NES Classics Library boot it up and give it a try I really think it's worth your time and effort shigesado a toy obviously ended up directing Earthbound after this and then years later contributed to Mother 3 which I will say is another beautiful [ __ ] game that everyone should play after that he pretty much retired from game development and has stated that he has no intention of continuing the series himself he said that if Mother 4 ever happened he would like it to be made by fans of the series and in a way that sort of happened already games like Hilux and yuminiki and Lisa share that same magical quality to them I think as well as that game Oddity which very transparently started out as a mother fan game but is now something completely original if that game is still being worked on I'm not 100 sure I can't find much information online about the game's creators or if it's still being worked on or not I hope it's still being worked on but I can't be sure I don't know how to end the video you should play mother if it looks interesting to you at all I think it's a really special game and if you can get past some of its archaic design choices and some of its mild tedium it's a great experience all three of these [ __ ] games are fantastic in their own distinct ways and they're all worth your time and attention but I think I'm content saying that the first is my favorite I'm going to bed thanks for watching [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Lute

Views: 230,821

Keywords: Earthbound Review, Earthbound Zero Review, Earthbound Beginnings Review, Earthbound Zero Retrospective, Earthbound Beginnings Retrospective, Mother Series, Mother Series Review, Mother Series Retrospective, Mother 1 Review, Earthbound Video Essay, Earthbound Zero, Earthbound Beginnings Gameplay, Earthbound Playthrough, SNES Retrospective, Famicom Retrospective, Running Shine, Ninten, Giegue Theory, Adam Curtis Earthbound, Ninten Lloyd Ana Teddy, Mother Series Video Essay

Id: TDD2uIKFUCQ

Length: 66min 40sec (4000 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2022