EarthBound Beginnings (Mother)

83K plays 1989 #RPG

EarthBound Beginnings, originally released in Japan as Mother, is a 1989 role-playing video game developed by Ape Inc. and Nintendo and published by Nintendo for the Family Computer. It is the first entry in the Mother series and was first released in Japan on July 27, 1989. The game was re-released in Japan along with its sequel on the single-cartridge compilation Mother 1+2 for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. The game follows a young American boy named Ninten as he uses his great-grandfather's studies on psychic powers to put an end to the paranormal phenomena spiraling the country into disarray.

Writer and director Shigesato Itoi pitched Mother's concept to Shigeru Miyamoto while visiting Nintendo's headquarters for other business. Though Miyamoto rejected the proposal at first, he eventually gave Itoi a development team. Modeled after the gameplay of the Dragon Quest series, Mother subverted its fantasy genre contemporaries by being set in an offbeat parody of the late 20th-century United States. Itoi sought to incorporate standard RPG staples within the framework of a modern-day setting, parodying Western culture and Americana. As such, throughout the game, players use medication and hospitals to restore their health, utilize baseball bats and toy guns to fight enemies, and encounter aliens, robots, possessed objects, and brainwashed animals and humans. Mother uses random encounters to enter a menu-based, first-person perspective battle system.

From Wikipedia's article EarthBound Beginnings, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Keyboard controls

NESPlayer 1Player 2
D-pad↑↓←→IKJL
BZN
AXM
SelectShiftB
StartEnterSpace

Hotkeys

  • 1 Quick save state
  • 2 Quick load state
  • 3 Change save slot

Gamepads are detected when you press a button. Remap any key from the emulator’s Controls menu (gear icon).

Emulator help & troubleshooting

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Keyboard controls

NESPlayer 1Player 2
D-pad↑↓←→IKJL
BZN
AXM
SelectShiftB
StartEnterSpace

Hotkeys

  • 1 Quick save state
  • 2 Quick load state
  • 3 Change save slot

Gamepads are detected when you press a button. Remap any key from the emulator’s Controls menu (gear icon).

Emulator help & troubleshooting

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Pixel Verdict

EarthBound Beginnings (Mother)NES

3.5 Good job

Critics 76 · 7 reviews

What the reviews talk about

Key wordsblandcutecomplexdetailedchallengingdifficult

What the critics said

  • He added that the game has "a sense of wonder and magic realism... in the context of childhood imagination", as Ninten can feel more like someone "pretending" to be a Dragon Quest-style hero than a hero in his own right.

    — Dragon, 2014

  • Cassandra Ramos of RPGamer praised the game's graphics and music, and considered it among the console's best, with "rich,... nicely detailed" visuals, Peanuts-style characters, and "simple but effective" audio.

    — RPGamer (Cassandra Ramos)

  • USgamer's Parish noted how the game's non-player characters would "contemplate the profound and trivial" instead of reciting the active plot.

    — USgamer, 2014

  • Parish wrote earlier for 1UP.com that in comparison to EarthBound, Mother is "worse in just about every way", a clone where its sequel was "a satirical deconstruction of RPGs".

    — 1Up.com, 2007

From the Reception section of Wikipedia's EarthBound Beginnings article, under CC BY-SA 4.0. The words are the critics'; their full reviews are on the publishers' pages.

Scores

  • Famitsu 1989 8/10, 8/10, 8/10, 7/10
  • IGN 2015 6.5/10
  • Game Informer 9/10
  • Nintendo Life 2022 8/10
  • Nintendo World Report 7.5/10
  • RPGFan 2022 75/100
  • Famicom Hisshoubon 1989 3.5/5

From the review table of Wikipedia's article. The face takes, first that applies: the Metascore for this platform, GameRankings' archived average, our average of the critics (one number per publication, a panel averaged), one review alone, the players' rating. Critics and players are never mixed.

Players' rating: 82/100 · 283 votes

Full reviews

Face key

  1. 1.00+
  2. 1.540+
  3. 2.050+
  4. 2.560+
  5. 3.068+
  6. 3.575+
  7. 4.080+
  8. 4.585+
  9. 5.090+

5.0 Outstanding! · 4.0 Great job! · 3.0 Good job · 2.0 Could be better · 1.0 Wake me up when it's over · A thumbs-up adds half a point. Our own drawings, in the spirit of the faces GamePro magazine used in the '90s.

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