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Message: [QUOTE="PurpleShoes, post: 160083, member: 216169"] 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![/SPOILER] 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... [HEADING=1]I think I get more emotional over the Earthbound songs. [/HEADING] 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… [B]SOMEDAY[/B]… 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--[I]and several subsequent obsessive plays certainly helped[/I]! 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 [I](and funnily enough, I’ve played Earthbound several times more in the time between)[/I]. 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… [B][SIZE=4]SIGH[/SIZE][/B]… [/QUOTE]

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