Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Mother Series

JRPGs are a dime a dozen these days, They are everywhere and on every video game platform. They are full of anime style characters carrying massive swords and summoning magic fireballs as if they were born with fire in their bones. Some of these are actually really good. Chrono Trigger is easily one of the best JRPGs ever made. I think even objectively, it could be said that nothing tops it. But I'm not here to talk about the best JRPG ever made; I am here to talk about something slightly different.

The Mother series of JRPGs is my all time favorite. This series consists of three games:

1. Mother [Earthbound Beginnings in the US.]

2. Mother 2 [Earthbound in the US.]

3. Mother 3 [Unreleased in the US. However there is a fan translation available online.]

I have played all three of these games, and I really cannot think of a better JRPG experience for me, a lover of fairy tales and fairy lore. And that is not to say that the game really is based on any particular fairy lore. The Mother series reinvents fairy lore and implements it into a modern day setting. But that is not the whole story, merely a small part of what makes these games so wonderful.

Many JRPG begin with a similar premise: A young boy who starts of small but grows and becomes a powerful hero by the end of the game. The Mother series does this in all three games; however, there is a far more personalized aspect to this trope that captured my attention more than the other JRPGs out there. It all has to do with the title of the game itself which is paramount to the story as a whole.

The use of the word "Mother" in the title had to do with the connection we have, not only with our origins, but all the things that are familiar and dear to us when we start off on this journey called life. Our minds always wonder back to their beginnings. It's where our home was. It's where our friends were. It's where our mother was when all this began.

Why do most of us still dream of the first house we live in? It's because we still feel that connection to it. The term "Mother" denotes everything about where we started. It's an aspect of us that we never let go of, and we take it with us to the very end of our lives, for better or worse. As a series, these games take this concept and build on it from beginning to end.

The most well-known of the Mother series was the first US release called "Earthbound." Although this was the second game in the series, it had no connection at all with the [then] unreleased first game. What we were given was a brand new type of JRPG that had absolutely no anime influences at all. The art of this game looked like it was localized in the US. It all looked like the silly cartoons of a child, yet this really still was a JRPG from beginning to end.

For the first couple of hours of the game, your missions center around your hometown and, of course, your actual home. The things you were fighting were pretty bad, but it was also forgiving because you could always return home and spend time with your mother and sister for a bit. It made everything better, and you could go right back out with a renewed spirit.

Unfortunately, your missions will soon take you further and further out and away from your home town. Although you can still travel back home whenever you want, it becomes more and more difficult. Eventually, you begin staying in hotels and just calling your mother up on the many phones around the game. These phone calls are important because you can actually get "homesick" which can drastically hinder you as go along.

This problem goes away once you start making friends. The more friends you make, the less you will see the homesickness that plagues you in the beginning. They give you the comfort you were missing and help you continue on as the world around you tries ever so harder to beat you down.

Now, the story of Earthbound is a serious one with deadly consequences for failure, but the actual journey itself is filled with fun and sometimes silly moments. A lot of it comes across as goofy and even ridiculous, but there is always the idea that something dreadful is right around the corner. But there is a reason for this strange contradiction. The game wants you to see life for what it can be: wonderful. And the idea of losing it to something that hates it... Well, by the end of the story you have something very important that you want to defend.

All the laughs along the way... the funny moments... even the strange and often silly creatures you had to fight... There was something so wonderful about all of it. And if the bad guys win, you lose all of that. And worst of all... you lose the very place where you started from. You lose your home town, your home, your mother. Earthbound had a way of making you truly love the world. It removed all pessimism from your mind and gave you all the positives. And realistically, there are more positives in this world than negatives. But a single negative can seem to overshadow all the many positives.

And I think the creator of this series understood this and wanted to give to us how he felt about the world. He wanted us to know that evil was worth fighting... because there was so much good in the world that needed to be saved. Love, friendship, and the connections we make are what make this world a better place. It's also what makes us stronger.

This blog is already a bit long, so I'll begin working to a conclusion. The second and third game is connected to each other. The first game is it's own thing, but it isn't as well-made at the last two. I consider Mother 3 to be the best, but it's a bit of a double edged sword. It is also the game that will tear you up the most emotionally. All the aspects of the other games are there, but it feels like the writer could have suffered a horrible tragedy and used the game to deal with it [unconfirmed]. The hope and faith of the other games are still there. It's all there. But his tragedy will become yours as the game goes on, and sometimes, I feel like I suffered through it with him. There are times when we have to come together and deal with our losses.

Although Mother 3 seems to be the last of the games slated to be made, there is something interesting on the horizon. A game called Oddity will be coming out soon. It is a fan made game originally called Mother 4. They changed the name to avoid legal hassles, but for all intents and purposes, it is the next game in the series. I fully intend to play it when it comes out.

Sorry for the long blog. I really adore these games. They were some of the most wonderful gaming experiences in my life. They are true and meaningful works of art. I recommend any and all of them; however, if you are not fond of very difficult games, I would avoid Mother 1 [Earthbound Beginnings]. But if you do play through its very hard campaign, you will be pleased with its story and ultimate conclusion.

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