Why do Earthbound "fans" hate this game so much?
>>741642657NES jank, that's all
I rarely ever see Earthbound fans discussing itThey usually only talk about Earthbound and Mother 3
>>741642657It's a great game. I just don't want to ever touch it again.
>>741643062yeahit's ok if you are a fan of NES dq clones but it isn't as good as mother 2
Because it's literally just Earthbound but worse in almost every way.
>>741642657It's not worth hating, it's just overall bland, a solid foundation if nothing else.
>>741643275This. I replay EB and Mother 3 once every year, but I've only ever played Mother 1 twice, and the second time only reminded me why I haven't really replayed it in 15 years, and that was with Tomato's easy mode patch to make it more bearable. That being said, as much as I like the rolling HP meters, the DQ style battle menu is nice in that I can just put the controller down mid battle and not care.
Better story, worse gameplay
>>741643594Have you checked out that hack that turns Earthbound into Mother 1?
>>741644025I've seen it, I might give it a shot when I do this year's replay.
>>741642657I enjoy playing the NES Dragon Warrior games so for me Mother 1 is great. Even Mount Itoi is fun to me, you don't really get final dungeons like that in games.
>>741642657Doesn't hold your hand as much, actually have to really utilize PSI to survive, enemies can wreck your shit instead of just tanking through with rolling HP
>>741642657because it isn't earthbound (which they didn't play either)it's the same as undertale fans who hate deltarune and vice versa
>>741642657If you can get a romhack that modifies the random encounter rate, then it's bearable.
>>741642657it's worse than almost everything else that was released on the NES at the timethe real question is why faggots pretend M3 is good when its pacing is fucking dogshit
>>741646214TRVKE. Earthbound is indeed the best in the trilogy.
>>741646214Mother 3 really picks up after the timeskip, but yeah.
>>741643854don't they have the same story?
>>741646649It rhymes with similar themed story beats in Earthbound. Not exactly a 1-for-1.
>>741646649No. Not at all
>>741646214M3 is not a good video game, it is interactive art.
>>741646776>>741646769what the fuck? People always told me they have the same stories. You fight Giygas, right?
>>741646962You fight giygas (giegue) before he goes insane and has a schizo breakdown about boys with striped shirts and red baseball hats
>>741646962That's about the only thing they have in common. All the details are different.
>>741646962I mean, kinda.
>>741646962The details and exposition are different, but the gathering of <multiple important things> and fighting Giygas are the same.
>>741647075>All the details are different.Like what? I'm curious now.>>741647064Ok, so like the protagonists are the same guy, right?
>>741646962You fight Giygas and there are melodies, the main characters look similarEverything else is different. M1 is a bit more serious.
>>741642657It’s Earthbound but worse. It’s almost a prototype. You could call Earthbound “Super Mother”.
I guess nobody played the recent remake
>>741647401>>741647362see>>741647267
>>741646962Everyone who said that is wrong, I think it was kind of a "myth" everyone parroted without actually verifying. It probably comes from the narrative connections between the two being left quite ambiguous and both games having you collecting melodies, going to magicant, etc.You do fight Giygas but it's a separate event from Mother 2 and it presumably directly leads to everything he does in 2 and why he's so fucked up
>>741647362Would that make Mother 3, Mother Advance?
It's my favorite of the three. >>741647401I really enjoyed the remake. It felt super authentically SNES. I like the pre-patched version with bugs and super enemy spam and all, it's really fantastic.
>>741647481Yes.
>>741647171I can tell you're baiting so here's the rundown to make you look like a faggot.>Mother 1>Ninten's grandfather stole the secrets to psi after being abducted with his wife Mariah and his whole family line is cursed and targeted by said aliens (giegue)>Ninten leaves home to try and figure out and stop the cause of the poltergeist attacking his house.>he rescues a little girl who was taken by zombies and made hero of the city.>finds the cause of the occurrences in the zoo after beating a starman>travels to magicant after following instructions left by his grandfather in his diary>learns about the melodies and is given a task by the queen >Meets a boy who is bullied, and becomes his friend after committing domestic terrorism>returns a hat to a psychic girl who lives in the snow town "snowman">defeats giant robots in the desert>learns to teleport from a baby>all while learning said melodies>pussy ass nerd gets kicked out by Teddy (chad) who wants to avenge his parents deaths on the mountain>teddy dies>nerd rejoins>group confronts space alien and defeats it through the power of music and friendship>Earthbound>a meteor lands and causes animals to go wild>gasp, its giygass, this is told to you by a deus ex bee from the future>bee is killed by a woman, given task and told literally everything and what to do in its dying breath>go look at feet and find YOUR sanctuaries (you) to listen to music>meet your predetermined friends (you dont bond well)>your neighbor is a faggot the entire time>confront giygass in the past>he has a schizo meltdown because you look like ninten>Kill him through prayer and God or something
Magicant is so beautiful The literal happy place away from the real world
>>741647171Where you get the melodies from, why you're collecting them, Magicant and Ninten and Nes are different guys. One has two sisters.
>>741648138Pretty much this
1 > 2 > 3Simple as that
>>741644025I guess you play this since Mother Encore is taking its sweet time
>>741648138damn. Mother 1's story sounds a lot more interesting than Earthbound's
>>741649207being stuck on FC and the random encounters and map traversal bring it down several notches. unforch
You ain't a real nigga if you didn't beat original Mt. Itoi
>>741649943jrpgs are not about difficulty. grinding starman jrs is not difficult.
>>741649180encore fucking sucks my guy
>>741648160i want to fuck the cats
>>741648182Is it ever actually explained in 2 what the melodies are or where they came from?
Pro-tip: If you go in this room with a full inventory you can check which presents contain which item since you’re only allowed one. I went for the Boomerang.
>>741649207It is. He also left out the finer details and narrative explanation of the conclusion which is really what makes it special I think, go play it
>>741650847It's the original lullaby echoing through time, which is why it sounds distorted when you listen to it through the sound stone
>>741648138Sounds like a philip K. dick novel
If you haven't played the first Earthbound (Mother ), you're really doing yourself a disservice.You can play it last after Earthbound and Mother 3 and still appreciate it just as much
>>741650041>grinding starman jrshow I know you didn't play the game>>741650853the PSI Stone is a man?
>>741651025Is that just a theory though?Also why is it a totally different song
>>741642657fail to meet required specsmainly having a soul
I found that M1 left a stronger impression when I played it. Yeah M2 and M3 are better games but M1 has charm that can't be replicated and I think anyone discrediting it or trying to 'fix' it missed the point completely.I'll always call it Mother or M1, Beginnings missed the fucking point, it's not a prequel.
>>741653732I still like calling it Zero.
I don't hate the game, I actually think its comfy and I own a repro cartridge of it. I do hate, people who think its the best because they're contrarians since both sequels have a huge cult followings.
>>741644959This is exactly why I hate fandom culture.
>>741643062FPBP
>>741649207Because summarized both in a way to make Mother 1 look good and Earthbound look bad. It's subtle like a jackhammer.
>>741655418EB essentially doesn't have a story the way Mother 1 does though
>>741642657There's always been that type of person who only likes 1 game out of a franchise.
>>741655653Do people who say this even play Mother 1 past the Zoo? Mother 1 has even less of a story. Everything that happens between your first trip to Magicant and Mt. Itoi is basically one big filler arc with no worthwhile exposition. It's no wonder Pippi gets so much attention from the fans, because she's a better defined character than Teddy, who gets 2 sentences worth of exposition before he joins your party for a half of a dungeon and dies.
>Mom’s Eyes still does the continuous attack>Dad’s Eyes can fly into a rage and increase his offense SoulfulNo gooning over the Mom’s Eyes!
>>741655697cute pippi to be honest
>>741649207Too bad it’s not well told at all in the game itself.
>>741659460it is, you're just a faggot
>>741643062I love NES games but most RPG's are unplayable today. You can only see so many games with turn based black background 3-4 large sprite encounters before you've seen them all.
>>741655653EB has a character arc dealing with Ness’s latent potential, where you collect eight melodies and get a glimpse of Ness’s past and character, culminating in the Magicant section late game where you explore his mental world and fight the manifestation of his doubts and fears, gaining great power after he triumphs over it. It’s not much of a story but it’s there.
>>741659460what should the game have done differently?
i feel like i see OP on /vr/ a lot. mother 1 IS shit though.
>>741659460What? It literally spells the entire thing out for you, if anything it's too blunt about it.
>>741659835That's not really "the game's story," it's just a thing that happens.
>>741659460What part was too vague for youThere's not a lot of ambiguity
>>741659728Nah, not really. The Giygas fight at the end lacked emotional impact because his relationship with Maria wasn’t explored at all (that and the “boss music” is literal torture to listen to).
>>741659886Spelling out something explicitly is the opposite of good storytelling
>>741660062Yeah anon I just said that
>>741655697sex
>>741647640>I like the pre-patched version with bugs and super enemy spam and alli feel like this was intentional to evoke the original's high encounter rate but people cried about itthe dungeons are actually brutal compared to the original while the overworld encounters are boring as shit wtf
Currently playing through I just got Ana in my team. There’s so much to love that has been brought to life thanks to the power of SNES. A big one being that you can see enemies on the overworld (no more random encounters), the music and different palette changes of each area really gives each location its own unique identity (different renditions of the same songs is ingenious! Along with new original songs based on some Earthbound locations), the same witty and wacky dialogue you see in Earthbound/Mother 2 is still present here and expanded upon!By the way, does Ana look cuter without the hat? I think she’s cuter without the hat.
The world of Mother 1 would actually be really scary to live in, you could be taking a stroll around Merrysville or Reindeer and you’ll see Cars, Trucks, Fugitives, Noosemen, Bag Ladies, etc all out in the open and you’ll do everything to avoid them, especially the vehicle enemies because they always set off Ninten’s Asthma and then its GG, back to your last save. You can pick your battles wisely here then to be dragged into an unwinnable battle like in the OG.
>>741649207He left out a shitload of Earthbound's plot.
>>741654523Genuinely a fundamentally differently minded people than me. They used to contained to tumblr but when that died they've gone everywhere
>>741660473An NPC said God protects them which must be true because monsters don't spawn in the town
>>741660473>go out to get milk>get assaulted by a hippie>he screams at me about my mom>run away>get jumped by rabid stray dogs>crow steals my keys
>>741656561>Mother 1 has even less of a story.You cannot be serious, there's the whole backstory with George and Maria and you learn what they actually did that kicked off the game's events. By the end you understand everything that happened in the game, what the melodies are, what magicant was, and the final battle is almost purely narrative regarding who Giygas is and why he's attacking and how you break through to him.Mother 2's story is just "there's this evil bad guy you're the chosen one you gotta stop him!!" and you do all this unrelated bullshit for 20 hours, and nothing at all gets explained by the end. Any explanation for really any of it only comes from theorizing with the actual story that Mother 1 told.
>>741660665like what? when the later half of the game drops off a cliff in quality and how fucking everything between fourside the cave of the past is basically meandering filler?
>>741659948That's most of the stuff in Mother 1. The cactus in the desert? Oh, it just sort of had the exact macguffin you were looking for. Must've been hallucinated there by Maria, who happened to spawn a whole dreamworld just so you can get aliens to fuck off. Spookane? You were just hanging around the terrorized town with people driven out of their homes, entered the mansion, got your stuff and left, who cares about them. Loid has no reason to hang around after you blast the rocks off the railroad, he just sort of does. Ana's participation in the story is the exact sort of deus ex machina that 1fags love to point out in Earthbound. The chip you get out of Eve? Yeah, Ninten can hallucinate himself and his party back to the broken robot at any time, no problem. It's psionics.
>>741662098>Must've been hallucinated there by Maria, who happened to spawn a whole dreamworld just so you can get aliens to fuck off.This alone is more story than anything in EB
the entire 3rd act of Mother 1 is so fucking kino
>>741662316It's basically the whole story of Mother 1 and it's less than Ness saving Paula from clutches of not-KKK, Jeff escaping his boarding school with the help of his faggot friend and bubble-blowing monkey, encountering loch ness on the way or Poo's preparations for joining the party including a scene where he has all of his senses taken away as a test.
Played it for the first time earlier this year. It was fine, and I see the appeal, but I definitely prefer 2 and 3.The difficulty and grind is part of the issue, but then there's other shit like PSI Beam Gamma just being a 1/3 chance that your unprotected party member will instantly die and there's nothing you can do about it.Duncan's Factory was actually kind of fun to map out myself BUT I got fooled by the room with the second Franklin Badge in it and that really annoyed me. Basically every room has one thing in the top middle and nothing else so I stopped checking the corners that are slightly off screen, except for the one room that has the badge that has a present in the top center AND the badge in the bottom right.The openness that people laud doesn't actually amount to much either, and the early parts of the game railroad you just as hard as EarthBound does so I don't know why people jerk it off so much.The overworld controls are utter shit if you're not playing the GBA version, and having to open the menu to speak to someone every time is annoying as hell (thank god for the GBA L button). Graphically it's a standard NES game but not one of the better ones, it really made me appreciate the jump to SNES all the more. Music was great though, no complaints there.
>>741660217>i feel like this was intentional to evoke the original's high encounter rate but people cried about itthere are enemies that possess and inflict status effects on you in the first area of the game, I think the "devs" are just completely clueless when it comes to balancing
>>741664450the ghost in the graveyard doing this was such bullshit
I played them in order, and Mother 1 ended up being the most interesting and memorable of the three games, despite having the worst gameplay. Earthbound felt like a retread of the first game just wackier and with less substance. Mother 3 was just a melodrama with no actual character growth to make the plot interesting.
>>741665349the NES limitations means they had to get pretty creative with the storytelling and it works
>>741647401Isn't it unfinished?
I find Mother 1's NPC dialogue to be more enjoyable than the other two games but I'm not sure why. All the games have great NPCs.Maybe Mother 1's world and environments feel more "empty" so the cute NPCs are a bit more impactful because of that.
>>741648138I love how there’s a galaxy background with the whole beginning plot set up. It’s the little things that count and go a long way.
>>741649180Encore's writing is so bad it's impossible for me to enjoy the game.
>>741663080None of those scenes have anything to do with the overall plot though. That's the point I'm trying to make
>>741653732>>741653828Try to come up with a hypothetical localization name for Mother 3.I came up with Earthbound Endings (lol) or Earthbound Armageddon or simply Earthbound: Mother
>>741655697This is based on an unused Pippi Battle Sprite, one of the cool things about Encore.Honestly I see Encore as a “Metroid Zero Mission take” on Mother 1. Both games are using their GBA counterparts as a base anyway. They should go above and beyond and include the NES OG just like Zero Mission did.
>>741653732That's exactly how I feel. A lot of the charm of M1 comes from its minimalism. Because the game rarely ever directly tells you where to go next or what to do, it captures the feeling of being a lost child wandering the world without supervision and ending up out of his depth very well. The EB romhack was neat, but it does destroy the atmosphere of the original.Encore has fun dungeons, but everything else is a travesty.
>>741659825I could never slog through the NES Dragon Quests or Final Fantasy 1 and 2. FF3 isn’t too bad imo as with Mother 1 itself. The Japanese must’ve had insane patience with the former games I mentioned.
>>741666289yeah but this was absolutely kinohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kMCGqUzrpY>>741666421you gotta remember that just like americans, jap kids probably had only one game to play for a long time
>>741660864Earthbound is more relatable than we thought
>>741663664>The openness that people laud doesn't actually amount to much either, and the early parts of the game railroad you just as hard as EarthBound does Yeah you're railroaded early until you leave Magicant but after that you can do whatever you want.You can walk the train tracks to get Ana before ever talking to LloydYou can head to the final dungeon and nab the ultimate weapons after you beat Duncan's FactoryYou can kill off Eve, replace Lloyd with Teddy, and then you never have to go back to LloydAll sorts of crazy stuff you can do if you feel like it
>>741645831If you modify the random encounter rate than wouldn't grinding (a necessity of the game) become even more of a chore?
>>741662365At what point is the 3rd act for you? Be more specific.>Lloyd joining your team>Ana joining your team>Teddy joining your team
>>741666581Usually mods that adjust the tedium have an exp boost thing too
>>741666581I think he's talking about the hacks that add the easy ring which both lowers the encounter rate and boosts the exp received from fights to compensate
>>741642657Expressing fondness for this game is a purely performative act intended to "stick it" to Earthbound fans.
>>741666669if you play it the intended way, when you get to Youngtown and the swamp. the game just gets darker and the stakes get higher.
was this from the failed timeline or was it just a depiction of the aliens invading onett near the end of the game
>Mother BTFOs DQ>Xenoblade BTFOs 3D FFIf only Fire Emblem could BTFO Disgaea, the Nintendo RPG domination would be complete
>>741666580Sequence Breaking?!In my RPG?!
I feel like a lot of the later towns in Mother 1 don't really have much to "do". You really just pass through them while barely interacting with any of them or fixing any of their specific problems
>>741667194you fix it by getting giygas to fuck off which is as good as it's gonna get for an 80s RPG
>>741666953I wish the invasion played a bigger role in the game. Drop the weird Lumine Hall and make the final sanctuary location be within a newly exposed area within invaded OnettHonestly the whole second half of Earthbound is pretty weak. I get it's supposed to be that you're going further away from home and everything's unfamiliar, but it just becomes a pretty basic RPG once you leave Summers since it's basically the wilderness from there on out.When you think of Earthbound, you think of the first four cities, after that it all becomes a blur
Earthbound has the Dark Souls problemOr rather, Dark Souls has the Earthbound problem, the second half falls apart and only gets something together for the final boss.
>>741665692When I saw that Dr. Distorto was an actual character I was really hoping they'd base parts of Encore off the Mother 1 book
>>741666971>Mother BTFOs DQIf only we still getting actual games and not talking about indie inspired games I mean games with the title and moniker of Earthbound or Mother. In a different we’d probably be waiting on Mother 6 or 7.
>>741666971Disgaea has way better designs so no, I don't want that happening.
>>741667679Dammit I cannot type, time to get the heck off here ***If only we were still getting actual games and I’m not talking about indie inspired games, I mean games with the title and moniker of Earthbound/Mother. In a different timeline we’d probably be waiting on Mother 6 or 7.
>>741666289>Because the game rarely ever directly tells you where to go next or what to do, it captures the feeling of being a lost child wandering the world without supervision and ending up out of his depth very wellYeah, and wandering too far from a town can cost you, or force you to fight. I really liked it personally, and your bread had a second purpose too. Leveling up Loid and Ana later on was a breeze because of this.
>>741666696>>741666726seems to me like the better thing to do would be to just boost xp rate and therefore lower grind without altering the actual intended difficulty
>>741653732I think they all have different strengths and weaknesses but I did like 1 more than I expected. I think it honestly wasn't that bad for a NES RPG gameplaywise, the very beginning had some grind to it but otherwise I never felt particularly overwhelmed, just leveled up naturally from wandering around.I really liked the emotional atmosphere, it was very good at having shit suddenly get real (tbf Itoi's pretty good at that) and I also loved everything surrounding Magicant. It's not the most detailed backstory but I really liked the story of Gyiyg and Maria.The music was overall great too but this was moving just from the NES version alone, not posting the vocal one because that's just cheating.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI3PobnV_jsOverall it's not the best thing I ever played or anything but I had a fine time, then again I played it at a pretty alright time in life.I infinitely miss my cat.
>>741669765the NES version of Wisdom of the World makes me tear up a bit every time
>>741669765Mt. Itoi to this day is the best final area theme in all of video games.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEQUShjyyo
>>741671481Also has the most scariest and creepy final boss theme which is just alien spaceship hissing noiseshttps://youtu.be/0stjIUqZRs0
>>741642657I don't think they hate it at all. But it does feel horrible to play as >>741643062 said
