Topic: What is so special about the Mother/Earthbound series?

Anyone pick up Fangamer's Mother 3 guide. Now that was a work of art. Gorgeous!

That is going to take a while.

@Adam....are u still enjoying FF7 though. Its prob one of the all time greatest RPGs also. Ive yet to play 3 and 4, but will pick them up soon. I actually had to go get the English patched ROM as bad as I didn't want to, its the only way to be able to play it and I didn't know that existed. Im goin to play through soon. Loved Earthbound so Im sure Ill like that one as well. How long is it to play thru?

@Corbie.....OMG that is awesome, as soon as we get this house finished Im buying that for sure. That is amazing. It has freaking clay models in it. This is a complete translator also?

The style (and amount) of humor is special, something I myself have never experienced in any other video game. If you mean gameplay, then yes, you're completely right.

@Stuffgamer1: People are entitled to negative comments, just as they are entitled to positive comments.

I haven't quit playing it, but I also haven't been playing it. I played for about an hour when I got it, but most RPGs (Mother and one or two others are exceptions) don't interest me enough to play for long periods of time. It'll be a long time before I finish it, and I'd really be surprised if I finish it at all. The farthest I got in a FF game was halfway through 6.

For your other question: Mother 3 is a bit shorter than Earthbound. It was maybe 22 hours for me to beat it my first time. Of course, this is coming from someone who tries to beat every single line of dialog out of every single NPC (the writing is really good), so for the normal player, probably quite a bit less than that.

Currently running a level 7 Cloud-only run of the game...forgot how fiendish this is! I've heard some people can do this run frogged..../baffled

Mother series is great fun..though for all those people that say Zero and Earthbound are "so similar!"...have you actually played both? I got hooked out of the gate on EB for SNES...I've been wandering around, bored, in Zero for several hours and have no interest in ever picking it up again.

Haha, who would ever say that? They are similar only on the surface. Ness and Ninten look the same, and Itoi actually said it is up to the player to decide if they're the same character or not. Their house is in a similar location. The general story and the final boss are the same, too. EB Zero's game play sucks. It's way, way too hard. I beat it once, but now I'm having trouble playing it even on an Easy Mode hack. I don't know how I did it the first time, though I did enjoy it that time. It is not nearly as charming as its sequels, but it does do some interesting things along the way.

Good =! Special

That's what I quoted and responded to, special.

Of course nobody decided the game was good for you.

But not nearly as many people thought it was the greatest RPG ever until the Earthbound nuts got together and said it was. Now the praise for that game is off the charts, and there's not really a reason why.

Heck, now kids even go around saying it's the greatest game ever and that it needs to come to the Virtual Console. And that's without them ever previously playing the game.

It's not nearly as special as people say it is. It's a solid RPG like many others on the SNES and it's in no way 100 times greater as some fans would like us to believe.

Well, it's "as special as people say it is" to those people.

If anyone presumes to say it should be that special to everyone, yea, that's laughable because there are certainly more who don't like the game than who do, but every game has that kind of overzealous fan who thinks his favorite game should be everyone's; it's not just Earthbound fans.

Mother, Mother 2/EarthBound & Mother 3?
I played them, finished them, and i love them.
That's all i need to know.

I don't care for people speaking how much Overrated/Underrated that series is.
Gyigas is enough to blow minds.

The gameplay probably isn't groundbreaking, but the atmosphere is great! And i think that is what counts!

Oh boy...

@MrPinguy: It appears to me that most Earthbound detractors never played all the way through the game to GET to Gyigas.

It's true that people are entitled to negative comments, of course, but I never appreciate when someone comes along with a comment so negative as to ignore the possibility that the game IS great, but not for them, like AlexSays did.

I find it worth noting that the guy who does the "Zero Punctuation" videos hates almost all JRPG's with the exceptions of Earthbound (though he hasn't done a video about it that I could find, so I don't know for sure exactly WHY he likes it) and the Paper Mario series. Granted, this probably doesn't mean much if anything to someone who just plain hates the game for their own reasons, but I find it VERY interesting information, personally.

In my previous comment I can only personally vouch for Mother 1. But if EB is anything like it, it's an amazing game.

@ Stuffalupagus
Alexsaid it was a solid RPG, just overrated. He never said it was bad.

Plus, you shouldn't expect people to play through an entire game to decide if they like it or not, especially RPGs which are naturally a bit slow.

Typically people stop playing games they don't like. Not even The Great Wiiloveit can make me play through Niki Rock N Ball just so that I'll be qualified to say I don't like it.

You mean Yahtzee; I didn't recall him singling those out, so that's nice to know.

I never get tired of watching the Halo Wars review -- simply priceless and Yahtzee at his very best.

Agreed

You may be right. All the same, like many RPG's, Earthbound STARTS a bit slow and picks up after a couple hours. If you don't give it a reasonable chance, you might miss out entirely.

The game takes an entirely different take on RPG's. Whereas other RPG's at the time were focused on medieval settings, the Mother series is based on real life (even though things can get more surrealistic later on). There is also the amount of humor implemented in the game, yet I had not played enough Mother 2 for that.

(The only other realistic RPG series that I know is Persona, by the way...)