"A story is a series of memories. Memories are remembered with other memories, and in turn become memories themselves. If you don't take care to preserve your memories, you'll forget them. So, please tell us frogs your memories of everything so far... That is what people refer to as 'saving'."
This isn't really a review, more of just some...thoughts on this game and my relationship to it. Fair warning, it's pretty navel-gazey and self-indulgent. You may not really get on with this one.
One of the all-time best Hard Drive headlines remains "Huge Earthbound Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time". It's a good gag, an playfully teasing dig that is funny because it's true, and could only come from a place of understanding of the EarthBound/Mother fandom. I know, because once upon a time, I was a Huge Mother 3 Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time.
It's hard to emphasize how much of a fetish object Mother 3 was for the western EarthBound fandom, even for the wider JRPG fandom. I became aware of EarthBound through Smash Bros, as I am sure most people my age did, and was immediately taken in by how out-of-a-piece it was with the rest of Nintendo's stable, and my interest only skyrocketed when I searched the internet and found out that EarthBound was super fucked up and weird and scary in a way only slightly off-beat Nintendo games hyped up by 14-year olds who don't really know anything else could be.
(See also: Majora's Mask, and endless features in Official Nintendo Magazine UK swearing that the ReDeads in Ocarina of Time were the scariest shit in the fucking world man you'd fuckin shit and piss your pants)
And then, of course, there was the sequel on the Game Boy Advance, that never left Japan and never would, implicitly because it would emotionally scar anyone who played it and was even more messed up than it's fuckin twisted predecessor. EarthBound has a habit of being slightly spoken over by many of its most ardent fans, certainly, those I was privy to in my days lurking on noted Haven for Absolute Unhinged Freaks Starmen.net, but Mother 3 was on a whole other level. Everything about this game was spoken of in terms of absurd religiosity, which was only heightened by its relative inaccessibility. Speaking about the game in hyperbolic terms practically became a core tenant of the EarthBound fandom, as if an official translation could be physically evoked out of the ether if enough people were enthusiastic enough for it. Entire swathes of the game were freely discussed, both before and after the (also given a kind of quasi-religious status by the fandom) fan translation were released, spoiling every single conceivable thing in the game in order to entice someone, anyone to give it a go and join the chorus, never quite seeming to realize that, mostly, they were was just talking to each other, and to impressionable 13-year-olds like me.
I swallowed all of this. It was hard not to. I remember one day, on what was probably at the time the most exciting website ever devised, the Smash Bros. Dojo, which contained daily updates for the sure-to-be greatest Smash Bros. ever made when Lucas and New Pork City were announced. To say I lost my shit was an understatement. I freaked out to just about any of my friends who would care to listen, performing the same role of Eulogist that all the people I saw online do for Mother 3, giving away every possible twist and reveal and plot point to people who, maybe might have actually played EarthBound on their own one day and liked it well enough. To say that I was a fan of Mother 3 at this point would be incorrect: I was a religious convert, a cultist, a Happy-Happyist passing down the teachings that I had taken in from sermons of the mount like "Blues Brothers Symbolism in EarthBound". Blue, blue.
I did play EarthBound, and really loved it, mostly because like 80% of the conversation around the game, when I was getting into it, was about how totally fucked up the final boss battle with Giygas is, and the remaining 20% was endless relitigating about why a game so impossibly magical and amazing didn't sell well enough, which carried the implicit conversation with the unreleased status of Mother 3. Because of this, I found so many surprises and things I found personally resonant, things that I had nothing to bring to other than myself. I didn't even have this feeling with the even-more over-discussed Final Fantasy VII because the things culture remembers of that game are bafflingly at odds with what it actually is and what I took away from it when I came to it.
But with Mother 3? I can't say the same thing. It's partly because it's a much shorter, more focused game than it's predecessor, it's partially because it stands alongside Far Cry 2 and Dark Souls as one of the most over-analyzed games in existence. But mostly, I think it's because the fandom conversation around this game warped my perception of it and turned every step on the Nowhere Islands into charted territory, where everyone had left their mark, and I had no space to make mine, no space to find myself beneath everyone else.
There are a huge amount of things that I love about Mother 3, so many things that I appreciate, and so many things that make me smile. But I've never been able to feel like my experiences of it were entirely mine. I've never been able to find the unique resonances with my own life or experiences that characterize all of my favorite games. Everywhere I look, every corner I turn on the Nowhere Islands, I see the words of others, the perspectives of others. I look at little elements like the doorknob, and instead of being able to turn it over in my head, and place it within the wider whole, all I can hear is a cacophony of voices echoing throughout the years, the interpretations of posters on Starmen.net, Itoi and Brownie Brown's own comments on the subject, drowning out any thoughts I might have.
Yes, I could definitely discuss my thoughts on the fact that the village of Tazmily was in some way doomed to it's fate from the very beginning because of it's pursuit of an idealized vision of a specifically American past draped in western imagery that conveniently ignores the great darkness of that time in material history...but even this thought echoes with perspectives I've read countless times before. Wess' abuse, the Magypsies as a deeply clumsy but earnest attempt to explore gender non-conformity as it relates to the social and "nature", the way forgetting haunts the entire game world, as if everyone else on the Islands knows what a terrible mistake has been made by choosing to move backwards rather than forwards and desperately wishes to avoid it by enshrining themselves in your memory...it's possible you've read stuff here and thought "oh, that's interesting!" But every time I go to speak, every time I open my mouth on these things the words of others spill out, so ingrained and intertwined that I don't know which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are creeping in from forum threads long, long ago. Playing this game is like playing with a director's commentary track inside my head that I cannot switch off, commenting on the meaning or intent behind every single pixel on the screen, and it's heartbreaking because I truly believe this kind of voracious all-consuming analysis is completely antithetical to why these games are good.
Mother/Earthbound games are free-wheeling, lackadaisical, and rarely concerned with all-consuming arcs and statements. Those things are there, but the real pleasure of playing one of these games is just meeting the weird and wonderful people of this odd and beautiful world. You can see it in the battle system, in how it is playfully carefree with it's rules and rhythms, with many boss battles being beaten after you have technically been dealt lethal damage, but the game is kinda taking it easy until it gets to you. You can see it in the, frankly, absolutely astonishing soundtrack that freely mixes and matches genres and tones and instruments all processed through the woeful GBA speakers. You can see it in how the MacGuffin that dominates the first half of the game's plot is basically forgotten about and never mentioned again afterwards, in the lack of interest in connecting the dots between EarthBound and this game, in how the same reverence that the fandom spaces I hung out in hold this game and EarthBound are viewed with huge scepticism via Porky's Museum of EarthBound ephemera.
Mother 3 is not a religious object of absurd fervour, it's not a mythical Dark Dragon waiting to be unleashed. It's a video game, one that is laid back, at ease and confident in itself. And I wish I could be the same with it, but I can't help but play this game with the same awkward, nervous, stammering energy that comes with meeting an internet acquaintance in person. I wish I could be normal here, I really could! But my brain is too filled with EarthBound fansite trivia, I'm so sorry. Did you know there's an unused sprite that depicts the creation of the Masked Man, but that it was never used because it's probably just too fucked up and scary f-
Boney attacks!
...yeah, ok, I deserved that.
I've read a lot on games I love, and games I don't, but never do I really feel like those perspectives take me over, leave me unable to see the game beneath them. Certainly, my perspective has been altered by the perspectives of others, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill but with no other game do I feel so wholly unable to find myself in, no other game has this opaque wall around it made of What Other People Thought About It. Not even EarthBound has this for me. And it makes me really sad. Mother 3 is a special game. A really great one. And I think I do love it but...it's a love with a lower-case L. Despite it's reputation as a merciless feels machine, my appreciation of Mother 3 is extremely emotionally detached in a way I find kind of upsetting. There are definitely things about it that I feel strongly about, things about it that provoke profound emotion in me, but I wish I had been able to find those things for myself, instead of my love for the game sold to me by overzealous fans.
No, that's wrong. It's not the fan's fault. Well, not entirely. I do think that a lot of the conversation with these games is kind of fundamentally opposed to what they actually are in a way that speaks to the relative immaturity of a lot (not all) of the people talking about them at the point in time where their critical reception was still cooling. But ultimately, It's not the fault of people just talking enthusiastically about a game they loved, or at least, wanted to love. Mother 3 is just...as a result of my interactions with it, how long its shadow is cast across my mind as a child...trying to find personal meaning in Mother 3 that relates personally to myself is like trying to find something new in Citizen Kane. When something is that storied, that discussed...what hope do I have?
When people who were there talk about their first interactions with EarthBound, it's so often framed as this unfolding flower of a work, that grew beyond whatever humble thoughts they may have derived from the game's legendarily misguided marketing campaign. They weren't expecting to find one of the best games of all time inside it, but they did. It's the same I feel about when I played my favourite game for the first time. I wasn't prepared for the things it would do and show me. This is not to say that novelty is an inherent facet of a game I love. But at the same time...I don't know how fully I can love something that falls into a dutiful checklist of the things I already expect to find there.
I think Mother 3 is a great game. But I think people should be allowed to find that for themselves, or not if that's how it goes. It is, ultimately, A Video Game, after all, a children's video game at that, the video equivalent of a Ghibli or Pixar film, and not a holy missive from on high. Because I don't know if I feel, in my heart, that Mother 3 is a great game, and I think that's terrible. I think fandom and conversation can be really special, and I hope this doesn't come off as a condemnation of the western Mother/EarthBound fandom. But I think sometimes, Fandom can do terrible things to work, warp it to fit their enthusiasm. I see it in games like Persona 5, Xenoblade, Dark Souls, games that become disseminated by voices that come to dictate the scope of their meaning.
Maybe you would find Mother 3 weird, funny, or heartrending. Maybe you would think of it as super fucked up and nasty and scary. Maybe it will be the saddest thing in the world for you. But I think, as with any game, you owe it to yourself to find out for yourself, rather than have some ageing boomer online tell you what it should be.
It's like the frog. You can dissect it forever, but nothing you learn or examine or analyse will change the fundamental fact that the frog is dead. Wouldn't you much rather meet it for the first time when it's still alive, while it can still save your game?
This isn't really a review, more of just some...thoughts on this game and my relationship to it. Fair warning, it's pretty navel-gazey and self-indulgent. You may not really get on with this one.
One of the all-time best Hard Drive headlines remains "Huge Earthbound Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time". It's a good gag, an playfully teasing dig that is funny because it's true, and could only come from a place of understanding of the EarthBound/Mother fandom. I know, because once upon a time, I was a Huge Mother 3 Fan Excited To Play It For The First Time.
It's hard to emphasize how much of a fetish object Mother 3 was for the western EarthBound fandom, even for the wider JRPG fandom. I became aware of EarthBound through Smash Bros, as I am sure most people my age did, and was immediately taken in by how out-of-a-piece it was with the rest of Nintendo's stable, and my interest only skyrocketed when I searched the internet and found out that EarthBound was super fucked up and weird and scary in a way only slightly off-beat Nintendo games hyped up by 14-year olds who don't really know anything else could be.
(See also: Majora's Mask, and endless features in Official Nintendo Magazine UK swearing that the ReDeads in Ocarina of Time were the scariest shit in the fucking world man you'd fuckin shit and piss your pants)
And then, of course, there was the sequel on the Game Boy Advance, that never left Japan and never would, implicitly because it would emotionally scar anyone who played it and was even more messed up than it's fuckin twisted predecessor. EarthBound has a habit of being slightly spoken over by many of its most ardent fans, certainly, those I was privy to in my days lurking on noted Haven for Absolute Unhinged Freaks Starmen.net, but Mother 3 was on a whole other level. Everything about this game was spoken of in terms of absurd religiosity, which was only heightened by its relative inaccessibility. Speaking about the game in hyperbolic terms practically became a core tenant of the EarthBound fandom, as if an official translation could be physically evoked out of the ether if enough people were enthusiastic enough for it. Entire swathes of the game were freely discussed, both before and after the (also given a kind of quasi-religious status by the fandom) fan translation were released, spoiling every single conceivable thing in the game in order to entice someone, anyone to give it a go and join the chorus, never quite seeming to realize that, mostly, they were was just talking to each other, and to impressionable 13-year-olds like me.
I swallowed all of this. It was hard not to. I remember one day, on what was probably at the time the most exciting website ever devised, the Smash Bros. Dojo, which contained daily updates for the sure-to-be greatest Smash Bros. ever made when Lucas and New Pork City were announced. To say I lost my shit was an understatement. I freaked out to just about any of my friends who would care to listen, performing the same role of Eulogist that all the people I saw online do for Mother 3, giving away every possible twist and reveal and plot point to people who, maybe might have actually played EarthBound on their own one day and liked it well enough. To say that I was a fan of Mother 3 at this point would be incorrect: I was a religious convert, a cultist, a Happy-Happyist passing down the teachings that I had taken in from sermons of the mount like "Blues Brothers Symbolism in EarthBound". Blue, blue.
I did play EarthBound, and really loved it, mostly because like 80% of the conversation around the game, when I was getting into it, was about how totally fucked up the final boss battle with Giygas is, and the remaining 20% was endless relitigating about why a game so impossibly magical and amazing didn't sell well enough, which carried the implicit conversation with the unreleased status of Mother 3. Because of this, I found so many surprises and things I found personally resonant, things that I had nothing to bring to other than myself. I didn't even have this feeling with the even-more over-discussed Final Fantasy VII because the things culture remembers of that game are bafflingly at odds with what it actually is and what I took away from it when I came to it.
But with Mother 3? I can't say the same thing. It's partly because it's a much shorter, more focused game than it's predecessor, it's partially because it stands alongside Far Cry 2 and Dark Souls as one of the most over-analyzed games in existence. But mostly, I think it's because the fandom conversation around this game warped my perception of it and turned every step on the Nowhere Islands into charted territory, where everyone had left their mark, and I had no space to make mine, no space to find myself beneath everyone else.
There are a huge amount of things that I love about Mother 3, so many things that I appreciate, and so many things that make me smile. But I've never been able to feel like my experiences of it were entirely mine. I've never been able to find the unique resonances with my own life or experiences that characterize all of my favorite games. Everywhere I look, every corner I turn on the Nowhere Islands, I see the words of others, the perspectives of others. I look at little elements like the doorknob, and instead of being able to turn it over in my head, and place it within the wider whole, all I can hear is a cacophony of voices echoing throughout the years, the interpretations of posters on Starmen.net, Itoi and Brownie Brown's own comments on the subject, drowning out any thoughts I might have.
Yes, I could definitely discuss my thoughts on the fact that the village of Tazmily was in some way doomed to it's fate from the very beginning because of it's pursuit of an idealized vision of a specifically American past draped in western imagery that conveniently ignores the great darkness of that time in material history...but even this thought echoes with perspectives I've read countless times before. Wess' abuse, the Magypsies as a deeply clumsy but earnest attempt to explore gender non-conformity as it relates to the social and "nature", the way forgetting haunts the entire game world, as if everyone else on the Islands knows what a terrible mistake has been made by choosing to move backwards rather than forwards and desperately wishes to avoid it by enshrining themselves in your memory...it's possible you've read stuff here and thought "oh, that's interesting!" But every time I go to speak, every time I open my mouth on these things the words of others spill out, so ingrained and intertwined that I don't know which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are creeping in from forum threads long, long ago. Playing this game is like playing with a director's commentary track inside my head that I cannot switch off, commenting on the meaning or intent behind every single pixel on the screen, and it's heartbreaking because I truly believe this kind of voracious all-consuming analysis is completely antithetical to why these games are good.
Mother/Earthbound games are free-wheeling, lackadaisical, and rarely concerned with all-consuming arcs and statements. Those things are there, but the real pleasure of playing one of these games is just meeting the weird and wonderful people of this odd and beautiful world. You can see it in the battle system, in how it is playfully carefree with it's rules and rhythms, with many boss battles being beaten after you have technically been dealt lethal damage, but the game is kinda taking it easy until it gets to you. You can see it in the, frankly, absolutely astonishing soundtrack that freely mixes and matches genres and tones and instruments all processed through the woeful GBA speakers. You can see it in how the MacGuffin that dominates the first half of the game's plot is basically forgotten about and never mentioned again afterwards, in the lack of interest in connecting the dots between EarthBound and this game, in how the same reverence that the fandom spaces I hung out in hold this game and EarthBound are viewed with huge scepticism via Porky's Museum of EarthBound ephemera.
Mother 3 is not a religious object of absurd fervour, it's not a mythical Dark Dragon waiting to be unleashed. It's a video game, one that is laid back, at ease and confident in itself. And I wish I could be the same with it, but I can't help but play this game with the same awkward, nervous, stammering energy that comes with meeting an internet acquaintance in person. I wish I could be normal here, I really could! But my brain is too filled with EarthBound fansite trivia, I'm so sorry. Did you know there's an unused sprite that depicts the creation of the Masked Man, but that it was never used because it's probably just too fucked up and scary f-
Boney attacks!
...yeah, ok, I deserved that.
I've read a lot on games I love, and games I don't, but never do I really feel like those perspectives take me over, leave me unable to see the game beneath them. Certainly, my perspective has been altered by the perspectives of others, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill but with no other game do I feel so wholly unable to find myself in, no other game has this opaque wall around it made of What Other People Thought About It. Not even EarthBound has this for me. And it makes me really sad. Mother 3 is a special game. A really great one. And I think I do love it but...it's a love with a lower-case L. Despite it's reputation as a merciless feels machine, my appreciation of Mother 3 is extremely emotionally detached in a way I find kind of upsetting. There are definitely things about it that I feel strongly about, things about it that provoke profound emotion in me, but I wish I had been able to find those things for myself, instead of my love for the game sold to me by overzealous fans.
No, that's wrong. It's not the fan's fault. Well, not entirely. I do think that a lot of the conversation with these games is kind of fundamentally opposed to what they actually are in a way that speaks to the relative immaturity of a lot (not all) of the people talking about them at the point in time where their critical reception was still cooling. But ultimately, It's not the fault of people just talking enthusiastically about a game they loved, or at least, wanted to love. Mother 3 is just...as a result of my interactions with it, how long its shadow is cast across my mind as a child...trying to find personal meaning in Mother 3 that relates personally to myself is like trying to find something new in Citizen Kane. When something is that storied, that discussed...what hope do I have?
When people who were there talk about their first interactions with EarthBound, it's so often framed as this unfolding flower of a work, that grew beyond whatever humble thoughts they may have derived from the game's legendarily misguided marketing campaign. They weren't expecting to find one of the best games of all time inside it, but they did. It's the same I feel about when I played my favourite game for the first time. I wasn't prepared for the things it would do and show me. This is not to say that novelty is an inherent facet of a game I love. But at the same time...I don't know how fully I can love something that falls into a dutiful checklist of the things I already expect to find there.
I think Mother 3 is a great game. But I think people should be allowed to find that for themselves, or not if that's how it goes. It is, ultimately, A Video Game, after all, a children's video game at that, the video equivalent of a Ghibli or Pixar film, and not a holy missive from on high. Because I don't know if I feel, in my heart, that Mother 3 is a great game, and I think that's terrible. I think fandom and conversation can be really special, and I hope this doesn't come off as a condemnation of the western Mother/EarthBound fandom. But I think sometimes, Fandom can do terrible things to work, warp it to fit their enthusiasm. I see it in games like Persona 5, Xenoblade, Dark Souls, games that become disseminated by voices that come to dictate the scope of their meaning.
Maybe you would find Mother 3 weird, funny, or heartrending. Maybe you would think of it as super fucked up and nasty and scary. Maybe it will be the saddest thing in the world for you. But I think, as with any game, you owe it to yourself to find out for yourself, rather than have some ageing boomer online tell you what it should be.
It's like the frog. You can dissect it forever, but nothing you learn or examine or analyse will change the fundamental fact that the frog is dead. Wouldn't you much rather meet it for the first time when it's still alive, while it can still save your game?
12 Comments
I, for one, always enjoy reading your thoughts when you get introspective about your relationship with art. I think you have a talent for communicating those feelings in a way that, as drifty and listless as you might feel, comes across with clarity and precision in the writing down of it, which is something I hugely admire.
I often think we find ourselves on similar wavelengths in our opinions on stuff but I am also often like “wow look at that what a neat thought” when you write about a game, which is cool right. People who by and large have very frictionless discourse in conversation producing occasionally really different thoughts about things on paper.
I challenged myself at the beginning of 2021 to write about every single game I finish and with two exceptions I’ve done that and I’m not sure how beneficial the exercise has been; I feel that over time my writing was getting better as I was thinking more deliberately about the games I was playing beyond “game good” “game bad” but somewhere along the way I feel like I kind of walked myself into a zone of like, doing Reviews which is not I think what I actually want to be doing. And I’ve had to adjust my thinking about how I want to approach things even if that means I don’t have a ton to say about a game. That’s fine.
But some games are just like Mother 3 right? Sometimes you play an all time classic and it’s like okay I have a very personal relationship with silent hill 2 I can talk about that, sure, but what WOULD I have to say about Mother 3 if I ever play it beyond like “ah yeah pretty good”? It’s not necessarily about feeling like I have to have an original thought I think, I’m not like, that presumptuous. But it makes me think about what the lines are in my head for what a worthwhile contribution is when I’m the one making it. A write up on a blog or a website like Backloggd feels more of a formal submission of feeling and intent than a message in discord or even a tweet or something. I dunno! Something that’s in the back of my mind a lot these last few months.
Great piece haha
I often think we find ourselves on similar wavelengths in our opinions on stuff but I am also often like “wow look at that what a neat thought” when you write about a game, which is cool right. People who by and large have very frictionless discourse in conversation producing occasionally really different thoughts about things on paper.
I challenged myself at the beginning of 2021 to write about every single game I finish and with two exceptions I’ve done that and I’m not sure how beneficial the exercise has been; I feel that over time my writing was getting better as I was thinking more deliberately about the games I was playing beyond “game good” “game bad” but somewhere along the way I feel like I kind of walked myself into a zone of like, doing Reviews which is not I think what I actually want to be doing. And I’ve had to adjust my thinking about how I want to approach things even if that means I don’t have a ton to say about a game. That’s fine.
But some games are just like Mother 3 right? Sometimes you play an all time classic and it’s like okay I have a very personal relationship with silent hill 2 I can talk about that, sure, but what WOULD I have to say about Mother 3 if I ever play it beyond like “ah yeah pretty good”? It’s not necessarily about feeling like I have to have an original thought I think, I’m not like, that presumptuous. But it makes me think about what the lines are in my head for what a worthwhile contribution is when I’m the one making it. A write up on a blog or a website like Backloggd feels more of a formal submission of feeling and intent than a message in discord or even a tweet or something. I dunno! Something that’s in the back of my mind a lot these last few months.
Great piece haha
I ADORE this piece so much! MOTHER 3, to me, has always been a desperate cry for hope in humanity, even though it's always felt futile. It brought me out of a deep depression a few years ago. But I was totally taken aback when I found out most people did not like that interpretation of the game online! So in some ways I resonate with this - the idea that a game has already been "decided". It's part of why I couldn't get into Hollow Knight.
I am glad you put this back up.
Agreed with the other commenters, this is a great piece that deserves to be read. This captures an obsessive quality of video game fandom that strikes me as specific to having been a certain age at a very particular time, which I remember well. I had a friend who maintained a PowerPoint with every image related to GTA: San Andreas in the year prior to its release. It was a wild time.
Whatever mutated form of that sort of fandom persists today feels different -- not necessarily better or worse, but even more maximalist in its response (consider the prototypical 10-hour video analysis as an example). I'm not sure if that's a factor of an increased interest in critical thought among certain gamers, or just that games themselves are getting "bigger." I tend to avoid YouTube content about games, so someone with more experience on that front should feel free to correct me if I'm off base.
I was lucky enough to miss getting wrapped up in the Mother 3 frenzy by maybe one or two years, but I definitely remember the clarion cry around it and even singing the game's praises myself a few times despite knowing almost nothing about it. In retrospect, Mother 3 seems to have been a straw man not only for "what Nintendo refuses to give us," but also by extension for "what society owes us" -- at least, that was the mentality among the entitled, middle-class white boys I knew who were particularly rabid when it came to this game. Naturally, they had never played Mother 3 either.
@polyfuh You bring up an interesting point about the perceived obligation to review something, or at least to write up one's thoughts even in the absence of feeling you've got something to say. I've experienced this on Backloggd, on Letterboxd, and on League of Comic Geeks (bad name, good platform... essentially LB or BL for comic books), and it tends to burn me out although I'm almost always happy with what I've produced.
With that said, and I don't know how exactly to situate this with what I've just said on this, but I really enjoy your writing here. In fact, you and Woodaba's review pages are among a small number of open tabs I've kept on my browser for several days now, and every so often I treat myself to one of your older write-ups. You both are writing in a compelling way that mixes narrative, design, fandom, and personal analysis. I could talk more about this but this comments section probably isn't the ideal venue. Just know that I see your work, I recognize it as work, and I really appreciate it.
Whatever mutated form of that sort of fandom persists today feels different -- not necessarily better or worse, but even more maximalist in its response (consider the prototypical 10-hour video analysis as an example). I'm not sure if that's a factor of an increased interest in critical thought among certain gamers, or just that games themselves are getting "bigger." I tend to avoid YouTube content about games, so someone with more experience on that front should feel free to correct me if I'm off base.
I was lucky enough to miss getting wrapped up in the Mother 3 frenzy by maybe one or two years, but I definitely remember the clarion cry around it and even singing the game's praises myself a few times despite knowing almost nothing about it. In retrospect, Mother 3 seems to have been a straw man not only for "what Nintendo refuses to give us," but also by extension for "what society owes us" -- at least, that was the mentality among the entitled, middle-class white boys I knew who were particularly rabid when it came to this game. Naturally, they had never played Mother 3 either.
@polyfuh You bring up an interesting point about the perceived obligation to review something, or at least to write up one's thoughts even in the absence of feeling you've got something to say. I've experienced this on Backloggd, on Letterboxd, and on League of Comic Geeks (bad name, good platform... essentially LB or BL for comic books), and it tends to burn me out although I'm almost always happy with what I've produced.
With that said, and I don't know how exactly to situate this with what I've just said on this, but I really enjoy your writing here. In fact, you and Woodaba's review pages are among a small number of open tabs I've kept on my browser for several days now, and every so often I treat myself to one of your older write-ups. You both are writing in a compelling way that mixes narrative, design, fandom, and personal analysis. I could talk more about this but this comments section probably isn't the ideal venue. Just know that I see your work, I recognize it as work, and I really appreciate it.
thank you for the kind words, everyone! apologies for the late response here as i haven't been looking at the website for a couple of days. but i really appreciate it <3
We appreciate you!!!
This is the shit I'm in it for frankly. This is why we type stuff about games not the star ratings or even the analysis but the humanity of it. Good piece!
Also I'm unlike you in that I will not be nice about fandom I just hate it lol
Also I'm unlike you in that I will not be nice about fandom I just hate it lol
This treatment of the more investigative obsession is interesting since I've always associated as an early internet forum thing, and it sounds like you were actually on a lot of videogame forums like Something Awful or the IGN boards or probably even something more intimate than that.
In comparison you have the videogame fandoms that are more creative around the work itself, like how tumblr and twitter attached to reproducing visual designs, in universe OCs, or passionate fanfic. These two threads are not incompatible but they are culturally different in how they treat the original work (Toby Fox obviously was inspired by the more creative side in his work with the production of the October RPG mod but I think a lot of the energies of the character writing from Undertale reflects being more around and courting those kinds of people).
That being said, I wouldn't have expected people to be so analytical about Mother 3 just because of how simple and railroaded it seemed (not that those things are bad characteristics). Opinions aside I think this is a very generative write up for helping reevaluate fandom so I appreciate your work here a lot.
In comparison you have the videogame fandoms that are more creative around the work itself, like how tumblr and twitter attached to reproducing visual designs, in universe OCs, or passionate fanfic. These two threads are not incompatible but they are culturally different in how they treat the original work (Toby Fox obviously was inspired by the more creative side in his work with the production of the October RPG mod but I think a lot of the energies of the character writing from Undertale reflects being more around and courting those kinds of people).
That being said, I wouldn't have expected people to be so analytical about Mother 3 just because of how simple and railroaded it seemed (not that those things are bad characteristics). Opinions aside I think this is a very generative write up for helping reevaluate fandom so I appreciate your work here a lot.
Oh I think that's totally incorrect and I really apologize if I gave off that impression: the western Earthbound/Mother fandom has always been hugely creative and incredible art has been generated by that community. Of the fandom spaces I interacted in when I was younger, I would actually say that Final Fantasy was the most...analytical, as you might describe it, though really, a huge part of that was miserable older men constantly bitching about how the modern games were not identical to the idealized vision of the games they liked that exists in their head, with a lot of sexism and homophobia to boot. The phenomenon with Mother 3 that I'm describing here is best thought of as an expression not of analysis but of enthusiasm, the deep reads of each individual aspect of the game being an outward expression of "hey, this game is so amazing, please play it/localize it!". It's similar to the way a lot of critical pieces will invoke the auteur not to analyze or critique their style, or look at how a work relates to an auteur's style or body of work, but to use the work to construct a fantasy of praise of the auteur. It is critique as a means to the end of expressing the enthusiasm of the critic, rather than simply as critique, and I think that is closely related to the very present artistic output of the Mother 3 fandom as well.
i think this is an amazing retrospective regarding how much this game has become synonymous with its cult status and its ardent fanbase, almost to a fault as it's lead to many projecting their experiences incredibly hard. this includes details of the game, and (where it differs from earthbound's less narrative driven focus) general story beats so hard that it almost wipes out any sense of a unique experience a new player possibly could have. i've observed similar effects with other similar games, like undertale and omori where it leads to a lot of people getting preemptively spoiled, not because of an intentional act of malice but out of pure, obsessive, as you said, enthusiasm.
coming from someone who played it over a decade after release, even though it still is one of my absolute favorites, the entire emotional angle was definitely overblown by said fans, and of course spoilers did affect how i felt about certain segments. it really does feel like my experience wasn't entirely mine, and that really the only way to set your playthrough apart is comb through the village p much every time you come back to it after a major event (there's a decent amount of interesting or funny dialogue you can find that i rarely see discussed but even then obviously that stuff has been datamined)
coming from someone who played it over a decade after release, even though it still is one of my absolute favorites, the entire emotional angle was definitely overblown by said fans, and of course spoilers did affect how i felt about certain segments. it really does feel like my experience wasn't entirely mine, and that really the only way to set your playthrough apart is comb through the village p much every time you come back to it after a major event (there's a decent amount of interesting or funny dialogue you can find that i rarely see discussed but even then obviously that stuff has been datamined)
I'm glad I played through both Earthbound and Mother 3 completely blind
Woodaba
1 year ago