The Mother Series

[TheRaven]

So I haven't played the first and third games in the series yet but are there any Mother (Earthbound) fans here? Which game is your favorite? Mother 1 (dubbed as "Earthbound Zero" in the US) is the first game in the series and it was supposed to be released here but never was released. Instead we got Earthbound in 1994. Now since I have yet to play the first and third games in the series this post will be talking about Earthbound. I finished the game back in April and I loved every second of it. The music which takes up most of the ROM space is wonderful, some tracks are very creepy. (Here's looking at you "The Place". Giygas' theme has nothing on that one! :?) Other tracks are just simply beautiful. Unlike most RPGs in this game you can see your opponent before actually battling them, making them easy to avoid in some cases. Another feature is that if you are at a very high level and are about to fight a weak opponent, the battle sequence is skipped over and the game awards you automatically after playing a little jingle. xD

[MechaGS]

I'm a new Earthbound fan, considering they've never really been on my radar until the Wii U eShop release, now I can't get enough of it!



Nintendo need to release more classics we didn't get in the west... More Earthbound titles would be excellent.

[tailszero]

Well, the problem with bringing the other Mother games over is that the games have a ridiculous number of copyright issues. For instance, they apparently used SFX from the old Batman cartoon somewhere in the second or third game.

[MechaGS]

I didn't know that, no wonder they've had so many issues with the series and moving it to the West. I know there's no plans to release any of the others for the foreseeable future so I'm not really going to wait for them.



It was a great run through the first one though. Hopefully some day, they sort the licensing out.

[TheRaven]

For now there are fan translations of both the first and third games. The first one was for the NES, while the third game is for the GBA. If you go to starmen.net they have the hacks ready for download. You can read up more on the series on that site as well, and their walkthrough helped me get through Earthbound. xD I heard the first game in the series is difficult, and the site states a certain way of playing if you feel like giving up.

[tailszero]

Earthbound is actually the second in the trilogy. The first game was apparently ready to be released in the US, but the lack of interest after the Snes launched had it canned, but a beta cartridge got sold on eBay, so the hacking community raised money and got the rom from the cartridge. Mother 3 & Earthbound had most the issues due to the people who made the games refusing to make some changes or hunt for permission to use copyrighted materials to allow a western release. Earthbound did end up getting a Wii U release, but Mother 3 has just as many problems if not more involving localization. At least the hacking community made an English patch.

[MechaGS]

Sounds like Nintendo goofed a bit on this series. Shame as well cause it's a lot of fun.

[TheRaven]

Not to mention back in the day when Earthbound came out it was a whopping $80, even expensive for today's standards on new games but I think it came bundled with the player's guide though. I'm wanting to play through Mother 1, I really should some time. ^_^

[Weejus]

I got Earthbound as soon as it came out on the eShop and I really enjoyed it. It definitely ranks in my (currently incompiled) Top 5 SNES RPGs (of which Chrono Trigger would be number 1 anyway). I remember playing an English patch of Mother 3 a few years ago and enjoying that too, I think Brownie Brown just hates Europe as not a single Mother game was released here (until Earthbound's eShop release). I mean, they even removed the London Life RPG from the PAL version of Professor Layton 4, which wouldn't have affected the game's sales, as Layton is very popular almost everywhere (oh well, at least they changed Luke's voice in the PAL version).

[TheRaven]

Oh yeah I forgot the game was never released in the UK until it was just re-released on the Wii U. It's a shame it wasn't released in Europe until now. I don't like it when they do that, it's not really fair to those who live in a different country. :\

[Weejus]

Oh yeah I forgot the game was never released in the UK until it was just re-released on the Wii U. It's a shame it wasn't released in Europe until now. I don't like it when they do that, it's not really fair to those who live in a different country. :\

Yeah. We Brits missed out on a lot of SNES RPGs. Final Fantasies IV-VI, Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, Super Mario RPG (we only lost out on that one because Croco calls Mario a 'persistent bugger', and 'bugger' is an offensive word in the UK, I don't know why, also it was changed to 'pest' in the VC release as a result), the Fire Emblem games, the list goes on. We did get Terranigma though. Thankfully most of these have been released on the Virtual Console in Europe since.



And as far as being unfair is concerned, in most cases the biggest problem is finding a publisher. Even nowadays those b******* at Atlus refuse to release the new Shin Megami Tensei games in Europe, instead relying on NIS America and *shudder* Ghostlight (all the games they publish aside from Atlus JRPGs are shovel ware, for example Dancing on Ice (based on the UK game show) for Wii) to publish their games for them. We don't even have the 3DS port of SMT: Soul Hackers yet. That's how little Atlus cares for us.

[MechaGS]

Don't forget, Ghostlight do games like the Agarest series and used to do the Shadow Hearts games for us too. It's only in the last 10 years that Square Enix and NIS America have stepped in to help European gamers.



I do agree though, it's one of the reasons I believe that Index Holdings are going down (other than the fraud) and Atlus are being sold off. I know that the front-runner for taking Atlus at the moment is SEGA but Nintendo is poised to bid, along with Square Enix and other equity firms.



Having a European publishing arm these days is a money maker. NIS America noticed and they've been saved twice from bankruptcy thanks to their expansion into overseas markets and new languages. When someone like Atlus uses an outside publisher, all they're doing is losing money on marketing and production costs.



It's also the reason that I believe XSEED also needs to up their game. Those guys get some amazing franchises but never release in Europe and we usually have to wait 3~ years for them to be published by one of the above.



There's plenty of proof out there that shows that publishers which do publish games worldwide make better profits and have more space for error than targeted market publishers.



But yeah, it's 2013 and a lot of companies still seem to be dwindling in the past. Random thought though, why couldn't some of the companies that don't publish in Europe not just release the games digitally via XBL, PSN or eShop? It makes a lot of sense if they don't want to deal in physical goods. I know that scares off a chunk of the market but at least they've got a foot in the door.