Earthbound vs Mother 3 (a meditation on reserved storytelling)

[PurpleShoes]

So, my girlfriend and I have been playing through Mother 3. It’s probably my first time playing it since 2014 or 15, back when I was being hit by the full onslaught of puberty--the perfect time to experience the Mother games. Back then, I remember all these talks about which Mother game was superior, and remember Earthbound winning that argument most of the time.
As a teen, the answer was obvious to me: sure Earthbound was really cool with its starkly dark plot detours and hellish final boss, but Mother 3 was everything! Oh dude it was so cool!

Spoiler: minor Mother 3 spoiler. Play it blind.

Lucas’ mom DIES in the first half hour! Then his brother follows suit!

See, real writing--no, real ARTISTRY, is in depicting the full suffering of the human experience and darkness of the human soul. Earthbound couldn’t hold a candle to Mother 3’s bold and unflinchingly dark narrative. So badass.
…or at least that’s what teenage PurpleShoes thought. Excuse him, he was thirteen. In the mid-2010s. Oy.

As I prepared to revisit these games from my youth, I’ve found myself re-listening to a lot of music from the trilogy, and something sticks out to me...

I think I get more emotional over the Earthbound songs.​

Yeah, Mother 3 has the more emotional story for sure, but in its constant onslaught of bombastic plot twists and turns, there’s not a lot of time to breathe. I couldn’t see it back in High School, but those many moments of calm in Earthbound--relaxing in those cozy Winters tents, getting lost in the Desert, fighting millions of Starmen Supers for that goddamn sword, I was forming my own feelings within the sacred space that is that expensive grail of a SNES cart… SOMEDAY…
I can recite the entire plot of Mother 3 to you, and could even before replaying. It’s a great story told fantastically that etched itself into my memory on first play--and several subsequent obsessive plays certainly helped! In that vein, Mother 3’s soundtrack means a list of story beats to me. My heart races as I hear the Natural Killer Cyborg’s theme, tears well up in my eyes as the Love Theme Plays. Etc. etc.
Earthbound, on the other hand, I could tell you the basic plot outline, but I can’t really recall each moment the way I can with its successor (and funnily enough, I’ve played Earthbound several times more in the time between). Likewise, the sound of Winters’ theme, to me, is that one semester in High School where we played volleyball for some reason, and I absolutely sucked at it. The Peaceful Rest Valley theme still sounds like a particularly bad canker sore on a Pizza Night in 2012. I remember being left to my own devices. That’s where the real experiences are formed, in my tryhard opinion!

I can’t really say I prefer one approach to storytelling over the other, maybe just that in my slightly older age, I can kind of see where everyone was coming from. I guess all the people on Starmen.NET telling me I’d ‘get it when I was older’ were right… SIGH…

 

[RageBurner]

I really appreciate your thoughtful writing.

I only have experience with Mother 2 (Earthbound) so I can't comment on Mother 3, but I have a feeling they are pretty strongly tied overall. People just have a tendency to want to bring what they like up and what they don't down, without providing balanced discourse around their thoughts.