Mother is the first game in Shigesato Itoi’s role-playing series, released in 1989 for the Family Computer. Outside Japan it is known as EarthBound Beginnings. The series runs three games: Mother, Mother 2 — EarthBound outside Japan, for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System — and Mother 3, which arrived in 2006 for the Game Boy Advance.
A fan remake of EarthBound, called Mother Squared, is in development for PC. It is not part of that lineup.
A boy, a bat, and a phone call to dad
Mother is a role-playing game. The player uses weapons and psychic powers to fight hostile enemies. Those enemies include animated everyday objects, aliens and brainwashed people — the series’ signature mix, already in place on the first cartridge.
The game is single player, and it is built on mechanics modeled on the Dragon Quest series. That means turn-based battles, a party that grows over time, and a lot of walking.
Battles in Mother are triggered through random encounters. That is a difference from EarthBound, where physical contact with an enemy in the overworld begins the fight. In Mother, the fight finds you.
The party members who join the protagonist are analogous in style and function to the ones in EarthBound. They follow behind the protagonist on the overworld screen, a small visual detail that carried through the series.
The save system is a phone call
Mother’s housekeeping systems are its most distinctive feature, and they are worth listing plainly.
- You save the game by phoning Ninten’s father.
- You store items with Ninten’s sister at home.
- You bank money at an automated teller machine.
That is a strange set of verbs for a 1989 role-playing game. You do not visit a save point or a menu screen. You call your dad. You leave your things with your sister. You use a cash machine.
The series is known for its combination of humorous and emotionally evocative tones, and this is where that reputation starts. The mechanics are domestic. The world they sit inside is not.
Psychedelic backgrounds and a rolling meter
Two signatures carry across the series. Mother has both.
The first is the battle sequence with psychedelic backgrounds. Mother 2, known outside Japan as EarthBound, shares the visual style, with the same psychedelic battle backgrounds and cartoonish art.
The second is the “rolling HP meter.” Player health ticks down like an odometer rather than instantly being subtracted. That gives the player room to act — to heal, or to finish the battle — before the damage is fully dealt. EarthBound keeps the meter. Mother 3 keeps it too.
The series also has its “SMAAAASH” text and sound, which show when the player registers a critical hit. It recurs through all three games. It is loud, it is silly, and it is the series in one word.
Itoi went to Miyamoto with the idea
The origin of Mother is a small piece of Nintendo history. While visiting Nintendo for other business, Itoi approached Shigeru Miyamoto about making Mother. Itoi wrote the series. Nintendo published it.
The first game was approved, and then a sequel was approved. For that sequel, Itoi increased his involvement in the design process over the five-year development of EarthBound. When the project began to flounder, producer and later Nintendo president Satoru Iwata rescued the game.
That is the arc of the trilogy in miniature. The first game is the pitch. The second is the one that nearly died and was saved. The third arrived in 2006 for the Game Boy Advance.
Itoi wanted to tell Mother 3 through a technique that swapped the active player-character, something he first attempted in EarthBound. The ambition kept growing after Mother shipped.
A cult following, not a franchise
Here is the commercial reality. While the franchise is popular in Japan, in the Anglosphere it is best associated with the cult following behind EarthBound.
The random encounters are the biggest offender for a modern player. EarthBound and early Mother 3 share battle scene triggers, where contact with an enemy in the overworld starts the turn-based fight. Mother does not. It interrupts you, repeatedly, and the pacing suffers for it.
The rolling HP meter softens the blow of a bad fight. It does not soften the walk to the next one.
The humor was there from the start
What Mother gets right, it gets right immediately. The lighthearted approach to the plot is intact. The parody is intact. The enemies are still hostile everyday objects and brainwashed people, which is a joke and a threat at the same time.
The series is known for its sense of humor, originality and parody. Mother is where all three begin, and none of them feel like a first attempt. The tone is confident on a console that rarely rewarded confidence.
Mother 3 later reused characters such as Mr. Saturn, and RPGamer wrote that Mother 3’s final chapter is “full of blatant links” between the games of the series. Those links run back through EarthBound to here.
Mother 3 also retains the rolling HP meter but removes the feature where experience is automatically awarded before battles against much weaker foes. Mother has no such mercy. You fight the weak thing. You get the points. You fight the next thing.
What Mother is actually worth
Mother is a first draft that got the voice right and the pacing wrong. The domestic save system, the psychedelic battles, the rolling meter, the critical-hit text — every one of those ideas survives into the later games, and every one of them is present here.
The random encounters are the tax you pay for them. EarthBound fixed that. Mother 3 fixed the experience curve. Mother was simply first, and it shows.
So the honest verdict is that Mother is a game to play after EarthBound, not before it. Played first, it reads as a slow, repetitive prototype with a charming skin. Played after, it reads as the blueprint — and the blueprint is legible. You can see what Itoi wanted and what the hardware and the era would not let him have yet.
The cult following around EarthBound has spent decades treating Mother as a curiosity. That undersells it. The humor, the originality and the parody are all present, and the emotional register that the series became famous for is already flickering underneath the jokes. It is just buried under more random battles than any modern player will tolerate.
Mother is not the best game in its own trilogy. It is the one everything else was built on, and those are different things.
Score: 7.1 of 10, the published IMDb score for Mother.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
