The original Famicom is so massively overshadowed by it's successor that it's very easy to forget just how ambitious and cool so many of the games on this thing were. I suspect, although I have no evidence to back this up, that a lot of people would draw the line between "playable" and "unplayable" retro games right between the third and fourth console generations. I get it to some extent, it doesn't help that all the best titles (Mother included) didn't make it to the west, and it definitely doesn't help that the big staple Nintendo franchises, your marios, zeldas, and metroids, were all WAY better on the snes. Still, I've got a soft spot for this system despite how little of it's library I've actually experienced, and Mother embodies just about everything I love so much about it. This game is absolutely bursting at the seams with passion and ambition. It came out at the absolute end of the Famicom's lifespan and it's pretty apparent, you can tell Itoi was aiming for stuff far beyond the physical capabilities of the console. The sense of scale the world has and the pacing are incredibly impressive for the era, almost every aspect of the game is punching above it's weight. The story is refreshingly unique even today, it's been mimicked and copied thousands of times especially in recent years but that basic concept of an epic adventure RPG about kids with psychic powers in Rural America, circa 1988, is still so much fun. Everything in Mother feels like an attempt to push the envelope for Nintendo RPGs and just take the basic idea into all the craziest places possible, people joke about jrpg plots going from saving cats to fighting God but only in Mother do you go from fighting hippies (who don't die, they just go "back to normal") to singing a lullaby at the top of a mountain to defeat a psychic alien from the year 1900. The story is consistently fun, and for it's era Mother has maybe the coolest and most original conclusion of any rpg. The music is catchy, the visuals are charming, and the humour is great. it's more sporadic than in Mother 2, but most of the jokes were really good. I particularly liked the "Unsinging Monkey", who asks you if you have any questions for him after introducing himself, and if you say Yes he responds with "I bet it's a stupid one, too" and the conversation immediately ends before you can ask anything.

At the end of the day, everything here is expanded on and arguably improved in the sequel, but the fact that all the stuff people love about Mother 2 was present here on the Famicom, albeit slightly more unformed, is truly impressive. I used to think this was largely unremarkable in comparison to 2 the first time I played it, a few years ago, but going through it again I think there are areas where the ambition shines through the technological limitations to a level that even surpasses the more sheer quality of the sequel. It's translated and easily available in various forms now, so if you skip right to Earthbound you've got no excuse! Mother is absolutely worth playing, don't let anyone convince you otherwise. One of the true gems of Nintendo's first-party offerings on the Famicom, and probably the system's library in general.