These are two genuine classics—or at least two games treated as classics by a great many players. They also represent a very particular period in Japanese game history, when Japanese and Western releases did not always line up. The first game never originally received an American release, which is why the Japanese versions are known as MOTHER and MOTHER 2, while the Western releases became EarthBound Beginnings and EarthBound.
I had originally intended to play only the second game. Sequels have a long-standing reputation for being the best entries in a series, after all. Once I downloaded the GBA version, however, I discovered that there was no standalone remake of the second game. The cartridge contains both games, so I decided to play through the whole collection regardless of how much time it took.
That decision came with one immediate problem: the available translation had effectively given up on the first game. Its tiny text was still full of unreadable squiggles, while the second game appeared to have been translated from the English version. Every item retained its English name, which meant I had to keep checking an English item list while playing.
The first game feels more like a revision than a remake
There are remakes that clearly justify their existence, and there are remakes that seem to have been released because the source material was available. To me, the GBA version of MOTHER belongs much closer to the second category. Apart from adding a run button and fixing a few beneficial glitches, it does little more than reproduce the original game. It was advertised as having improved graphics and sound, but at least until I reached the final boss, I could not tell that much had changed.
Many Western players hold this game in exceptionally high regard. My own impression was less generous. Its basic structure feels like a lightly disguised Dragon Quest: the king becomes a queen, the church save point becomes a telephone save point, magic becomes psychic power, monsters become aliens, and the traditional wagon is replaced by a railway. The party formation and the viewpoint also feel very close to Dragon Quest. It is difficult for me to call that more innovative than Final Fantasy changing its battle perspective to a side-on view.
Perhaps my judgment is also affected by having played the Chinese game A Cat and a Dog, which seemed to borrow from this formula so effectively that the older game no longer feels especially fresh by comparison.
The music is a stronger point. Different areas have their own background tracks, and for an RPG from that era, such variety is genuinely impressive. The soundtrack gives the world more character than the fairly conservative game design does.
The enemies in the final stretch are also unusually punishing. The last dungeon contains enemies that can cast instant-death spells, enemies immune to physical attacks whose magic damage is limited to only twenty hit points, and enemies with extremely high attack power that can strike twice in a single turn. The difficulty is pushed to its limit, perhaps making up for the fact that the final boss itself is barely a conventional battle.
The dungeon is also absurdly remote. Reaching it requires wandering through a huge area with almost no useful landmarks, and getting lost means walking an exhausting loop before finding the way forward.
I even looked up a method for bringing a stronger companion into the boss encounter. I was prepared for the game to freeze the moment I tried it. The crash never happened, but the extra preparation turned out to be pointless. The first game's final boss cannot be damaged by any attack at all. The heroine simply has to keep singing until the creature is frightened away.
That brought MOTHER to an end.
The sequel improves the presentation, not everything else
The second game was released five years later, and the hardware had advanced considerably by then. Better sound, sharper visuals, and a larger game were natural results. The presentation is clearly more ambitious, but the story itself does not develop quite as much as the technology.
The conflict is still centered on aliens. In the first game, the aliens mainly manipulate animals; in the second, they have progressed to manipulating human minds. Beneath that change, the framework remains familiar: a group of adolescents saving the world. Before reaching the final confrontation, the party still has to learn eight melodies. The build-up to the first five songs is fairly extensive, while the final three arrive in much quicker succession. It gives the impression that the developers spent most of their budget on the early part of the journey and had to hurry toward the finish—a familiar pattern in game development.
The battle backgrounds in the sequel are much more imaginative. They shift, distort, and use bold visual ideas that make ordinary encounters feel more distinctive than the battles in the first game.
I got stuck once in each title, though for completely different reasons. In the first, the problem was almost a small glitch in the game's logic. I had failed to activate one village, so after defeating the dragon in the sewer, the route to the next area did not appear. My only option was to enter a cave and take a very long detour through the mountains.
The second game's obstacle was entirely my fault. I was not wearing headphones, and when I left the museum, a telephone on the first floor was loudly ringing. I failed to notice that the ringing itself was the game's hint, so I stood around without realizing what I was supposed to investigate.
The sequel does include a useful design choice: every town has a beggar who can provide an important clue when the player has no idea what to do next. It is a simple system, but it prevents the game from becoming completely opaque.
There is also a memorable but rather exasperating status effect. As the adventure continues, the protagonist can suddenly become homesick for his mother and lose his ability to fight properly. The game is certainly committed to its themes, but it does not need to make the point quite so forcefully during combat.
Before the final boss, the party goes through a short episode about overcoming its own inner fears. That section works well and is one of the sequel's better story moments. The surrounding ideas—traveling back into the ancient past and separating the characters' souls from their bodies—are much less interesting to me.
The final enemy is not a conventional creature with a body, but something closer to the will of the Earth itself. The game presents it in deliberately mysterious terms. The four protagonists must project their souls into a past timeline and destroy the enemy while it is still in its nascent form.
As in the first game, the final boss cannot simply be beaten through normal attacks. The heroine must pray continuously until the battle ends. It is hard not to compare that gathering of power with the spirit-bomb idea from Dragon Ball.
And with that, the second game was finished as well.