In the early 1900’s, a dark shadow covered a small country town in rural America. At that time, a young married couple vanished mysteriously from their home.
The man’s name was George, the woman’s name was Maria.
Two years later, as suddenly as he left, George returned. He never told anyone where he had been or what he had done. But, he began an odd study, all by himself.
As for Maria, his wife… She never returned.
80 years have passed since then.
It was with this ominous title crawl that Shigesato Itoi’s Mother franchise began, taking him and his fans on a journey that would cement memories of fun and sadness, smiles and tears.
Mother is not an RPG quite like many others of its time, in fact, its still pretty unique compared to anything that has come afterwards. Mother is a game that is years ahead of its time in certain aspects, yet at the same time it feels dated and awkward in some other places.
When Shigesato Itoi set out to make Mother, he wanted to make a game that went against many of the established norms and conventions of RPGs at the time, thus creating an experience that was truly unique and approachable by people of all kinds, even non-gamers. The result is a game that truly breaks ground in aspects like story, themes, art direction and music.
The first difference one might notice about Mother that distinguishes it from RPGs at the time is the setting, which drops the European Fantasy of games like Dragon Quest and instead moves towards a satirical, yet affectionate parody of 1980′s America. Instead of playing as a warrior or mercenary who kills orcs and dragons with Swords and Magic, you’re just an 11 year old kid beating up Hippies with your baseball bat and Psychic Powers. Through most of the adventure, Mother drops any and all pretenses of taking its setting seriously as a consistent society or universe and instead decides to poke fun at whatever silly situations and imitate pop culture constructs we’ve become accustomed to over the years with a signature charm and a confident smile that make you laugh at its sincerity and lack of pretense. Its pure innocence.
To add to that running theme of innocence, Mother also featured another one of its most significant deviations from RPGs at the time, which was its art direction, which boasted a more simplistic and cartoony look, reminiscent of that of Peanuts. Aside from this, the game also features a unique change in perspective, showing the world through a skewed isometric angle. Keeping up with the wackyness of its world, the character designs in Mother are equally as unique and interesting with many unique enemy types ranging from crazy Hippies to Alien Robots. This iconic art direction, while it hasn’t aged very well due to the hardware limitations, still gives this game a sense of uniqueness and still stands out from amongst the crowd today.
The final element that makes Mother stand out from its competition is the score, composed by Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka. Mother’s soundtrack pushes the limitations of the NES hardware to it’s extreme, ranging from upbeat Pop-Rock inspired songs with a lot of personality and some of the very best bass and drum lines of the entire system’s lifespan like Pollyanna or Bein’ Friends; to somber and deeply moving songs like the Eight Melodies or And Fallin’ Love and even mysterious and foreboding tracks like Mt. Itoi and Magicant. The effort put into making the musical score of Mother is something to be commended and an aspect of Mother that really makes it stand out from the uncharacteristic pseudo-orchestral compositions of other RPG’s of the era.
All of these aspects would be enough to make an enjoyable RPG about nothing more than fun and games, which is what Mother appears to be on the surface, but when you look deep enough you’ll find that Mother is a game with a story unrivaled by any other game of its era.
The excellence of Shigesato Itoi’s work as a writer comes from his ability to juxtapose surrealism with a general light-hearted and comedic feeling, while also hiding a deep layer of philosophy and emotion behind the characters and worlds that he creates; Mother is no exception of this. The story is told mostly non-linearly, with very little scripted events happening during the course of the story, leaving most of the events of the game up to the player’s own experience with the characters and strange situations they find themselves in, featuring a journey that entirely avoids being epic while giving the story a certain sense of simplicity that elicits the basic emotions one would associate with childhood experiences. But behind these pleasant emotions lies a deeply resonating story about longing, regret and love, because unlike many other RPGs or even games at the time, Mother is not a game about the fight of good versus evil, nor is it about the strength and ability of our heroes. Mother is a game where our protagonists need their mother almost as much as their antagonist, and the latter being in conflict over their feelings about them and the mission they want to accomplish. Mother is not a game where you defeat the “bad guy” by simply being the strongest one around, you don’t even defeat him, all you do is remind them of the memory of love, the memory of mother, the memory of infancy.
Though many of these aspects elevate Mother conceptually and make it a unique and interesting experience, they can’t quite outweigh the negatives of Mother’s antiquated gameplay design, which actually does little more than place the game below many of the titles it was supposed to compete with. This is because Mother is not a fun game, even though it shows promise of being one.
Mother’s gameplay is mainly derived from that of the original Dragon Quest, where the player must explore a 2D overworld, interacting with objects through menus, until they encounter an enemy randomly on the field who they must fight in a battle from the first-person perspective. After winning said battles, the player earns experience that they will accumulate up until the players gain a level that will increase their statistics in battle; and money that they will use on new items and gear. Unlike other RPG’s though, Mother doesn’t give you money right away, rather depositing it on your bank account requiring that the player go to an ATM in order to retrieve money. The game also doesn’t allow the player to save anywhere, rather requiring the player call their dad in order to save, which can become a little frustrating as Phones are rather scarce in the game. Many of these aspects are executed in almost the exact same way as Dragon Quest, leading Mother to be considered just a clone of said game, which couldn’t be any more true.
These excruciating similarities to a game released three years prior makes Mother feel like its dated even for the standards of the time. The interface is clunky and unintuitive, often requiring multiple presses to accomplish basics tasks such as conversing to someone, like how the game requires two distinct menu prompts for observing things and for talking to people. The battle system is also very antiquated, featuring very mind numbingly simple mechanics for an RPG, often lacking any strategy besides healing or powering up. This often leads to the player opting for Auto battles for most battles, which are incredibly constant and offer very little variation. Inventory space is also very small, while also requiring the player carry around important items like the Cash Card in order to progress though the story, which creates a lot of unnecessary inventory management.
Mother’s open-endedness also leads to a lot of frustration, for there are times where its never made clear where your objective is at any given time, leading to plenty of backtracking and wandering around aimlessly, which wouldn’t be as frustrating if not for the game’s high encounter rate. The overworld is also not evenly laid out, featuring many branching paths that might either lead nowhere, or to the next objective. The game’s cryptic nature also stems from not explaining mechanics well enough or putting your next objective in odd places, like using Telepathy to progress through certain dialogue prompts or the one melody which is encountered by checking a specific cactus in the middle of the desert.
Though, this all would be forgivable if not for Mother’s terrible balance. Almost every single area in the game leads to a difficulty spike, often requiring grinding from the part of the player just to be able to stand a chance against the new enemies they encounter. Grinding is also required each time the player encounters a new party member, since they all start at level 1 and have very low growth rates, often being completely useless for a very long time until they reach a certain level, yet never being quite as useful as the main character. Aside from this, there are also many abilities which offer the enemy chances to instantly kill the player character like PK Beam y or PK Freeze y, a problem that is not alleviated by the player possessing those same abilities, since it will put a serious strain on the player’s Psychic Points, which cannot be regained since the player is unable to stock up on most PP regenerating items because of the small inventory space and rarity of said items, while also not being able to backtrack to a healing spot because of how much distance and random encounters the player has to go through just to heal. All of these difficulty problems turn Mother into little more than a grind fest, where most of the time spent playing the game will be on random encounters with lowly enemies just to get the team to a decent enough level to get to the next one.
It is this kind of poor gameplay design that sadly reduces Mother to little more than an interesting experience, rather than the must play it should have been. Though, looking back on it all, the core essence of Mother is one that still holds up to this day and I could probably recommend this game to the most dedicated of Mother fans, willing to look past most of the gameplay to get immersed in one of the most engrossing games of the NES era.
Mother serves as nothing more than a testament that Shigesato Itoi once had an idea to make an RPG that completely broke conventions, and defied the common perception of many Role-Playing games of the time. This game served as a blueprint for the games which would follow, and for that I appreciate what it tried to do, because its future would shine brighter than ever before.
With a solid enough foundation having been established in the original Mother, it was all up to the sequel to live up to its groundbreaking and genre-shattering ideas and make of the Mother franchise a household name in the gaming industry, and it certainly accomplished the former. Bearing the name Earthbound in America, Mother 2 was finally ready to make the definitive Mother experience.
When compared to its predecessor, Earthbound seems to polish almost every single aspect of its predecessor, addressing many of the issues and doubling down on many of the ideas presented on the original, offering a familiar landscape of ideas, artwork, music and writing, while also making more fully realized game mechanics and setting.
The game starts when in the middle of the night, our hero Ness is woken up by his neighbor Porky, who asks him to check out some strange occurrences going on outside their house. This just so happens to be meteor that landed in the middle of night, and inside the meteor a small bee-like creature, which is indeed not a Bee, talks to Ness about how he must defeat the evil Giygas, who has taken control of the world in the future. Upon learning this, Ness and Buzz-Buzz the not-Bee embark on an adventure… Which is very short lived since Buzz-Buzz is killed shortly after, not like it matters though. After this encounter, Ness wields his favorite baseball bat, puts his cap on, stocks up on some cookies and a homemade sandwich from his mom, eats his favorite meal and embarks on an adventure to save the world… or something.
While the original Mother was a game that was original in virtue of the way it presented ideas almost radically different from its competition, most of the originality and charm of Earthbound almost borders on its ability to parody most of the tropes associated with RPG’s and pop-culture as borderline satire, and it works incredibly well. Most of the inconsistencies that distract from the world of other, more serious, RPGs of the time are used as punchlines for the abstract joke that Earthbound tells through its own writing. Many characters seem to be fully aware of the absurdity of their presence, and just play along with it or subvert it, carefully constructing an atmosphere where everything in this game pleasantly surprises the player, and a laugh or chuckle is to be expected from any piece of dialogue that is encountered.
Aside from that, Earthbound is not only a game that actively looks to comment on a player’s notion of what a RPG is, it’s a game that actively goes out if its way to subvert said notions and confuse the player in a good, kind-hearted kind of way. It uses the contrast between the player’s own narrative and the narrative that is presented inside of the world to separate the players from the experience, while also making them feel more immersed in the world.
One thing Earthbound does really well is immersing the player in its world; a world consistently quirky and full of surprises, a world where pedestrians are familiar to our own world but still have a distinctive oddness to them, yet their quirks are delivered in a casual way that feels completely natural to them, unaware of the fact that their personalities and dialogue is rather alien to the player.
And the world of Earthbound is a very well-constructed one, with consistently odd and creative enemy designs ranging from Annoying Old Men and Crazy Ducks to creatures from somewhere around outer space. Another technique Earthbound uses to give its world a sense of uniqueness is to give almost every single enemy, and non-player character an interesting bit of dialogue or joke to run along with them, ramping up the memorability of the experience.
To accompany Earthbound’s odd, contemporary, borderline Sci-Fi setting, we have a highly experimental and equally as rewarding soundtrack to listen to, making it one of the most unique musical scores in gaming, not only limiting itself to the SNES era, but expanding to the entire gaming landscape as a whole. Once again composed by Hirokazu Tanaka, the Earthbound soundtrack ranges from many different genres such as the familiar Pop tunes of the first game, to catchy electronic tunes, Rock and Roll, Jazz, Metal and even haunting and disturbing ambiance tracks; all executed with a distinctive minimalism that sets them apart from any of their own kind.
The artstyle of the first game has also been given a major overhaul, featuring a similar cartoony style with an isometric view, the difference being that this time a lot more attention has been given to the technicalities of the artwork. Sprites are well crafted and have a memorable distinctive look, environments are lively and have very pleasing color palettes and battles now have psychedelic backgrounds to boot, making them have a unique look that invokes an interesting disconnect between the world and the battle, with an especially effective use on the final battle.
The gameplay has also been given a somewhat major overhaul too, with the addition of a significant number of new features that not only help Earthbound improve from its predecessor, but also from its inspiration: Dragon Quest. Be it minor balancing fixes like expanding your inventory size, leveling new partners closer to your own level when you obtain them and making them more useful in battle by giving them more affinities and attacks, and allowing the player to interact with objects and characters in the world merely by pressing the L button, thus nullifying the cumbersome menu navigation of the first game. What has truly been changed from Earthbound, are the ways that the overworld and combat is managed.
Overworld progression has taken a whole new direction in Earthbound, by removing the expansive yet cryptic overworld of the first game and replacing it with more linear progression which breaks out into multiple paths near the end of the game, making each new area and the path leading to them interesting by taking the time to polish them up and fill them with interesting sights to see and quests to partake in.
Aside from this, the combat has received a minor yet key difference from its predecessor, that somehow manages to change up the way the player approaches the game by a significant bit, which is the removal of random encounters. Instead of encountering enemies by chance in the overworld, Earthbound decides to spread them along the world and making them visible on the map. Once the player spots an enemy, they can choose not to engage in combat by walking away from it, but they must be careful, because enemies have the chance the engage the player once they’ve turned their back on them, giving these enemies an extra turn in battle. Though, this works the opposite way too, allowing players to get an extra turn in battle by engaging enemies from behind. This approach to combat minimizes the tedious grind of having to plow through random encounters from the original, and gives the player a breathing room to explore the overworld by simply choosing to ignore the enemies onscreen.
The other key feature that has been altered from the combat is inside battles themselves. This feature makes it so that when the player takes damage, it gradually decreases in number until reaching zero, which leads to the death of the character who’s recieved the hit. Thus, the only way to survive a mortal blow is to either finish or escape the battle before the health counter reaches zero, or heal very quickly so that the battle can continue as normal. This mechanic changes up the priorities of the player who’s received a mortal blow, by making them prioritize speed or damage over planning so that they can ensure their survival, and it also keeps some of the tougher battles constantly engaging, as the player has to quickly move through menus in a struggle with the speed with which the counter decreases.
Its not like the gameplay is perfect though, its not even amazing either, since it has a couple of flaws here and there that don’t quite elevate it to that status. First of, the game has a very poor difficulty curve throughout the first half of the game, often showering the player with enemies and giving them very little room to breathe or heal aside from backtracking, and the simple nature of the combat makes this more aggravating. This issue also makes it so that the player grinds with normal enemies until reaching a high enough level to take care of all of them, but it also makes it so that the difficulty of the area boss gets drastically lowered, thus changing the balance of difficulty from fighting the boss and more towards getting to the boss itself. Aside from this, its also very though to avoid battles either, as enemies somehow manage to move faster than the player and the lack of a run button doesn’t allow them to increase their own pace, an issue which is elevated with just how hard it is to run from battles in the game.
Once the player reaches the second half of the game, progress becomes a lot less clear than the start, making it so that the player is quite lost between the new areas that they’ve unlocked and locking progress away for the times it’s not made quite clear that the player is supposed to backtrack or they’re supposed to use a specific item.
On a different note, in spite of the increase in inventory size, the player still has to struggle a lot with managing the items in their inventory, especially those which have to stay there forever and those who are completely necessary and useful for the player’s journey.
Once we’ve taken into account all of these aspects of the game, what does it all add up to anyways? Earthbound may seem like a lot of well executed facets of a simplistic and basically meaningless story and game, but I believe there’s more to it than that, for Earthbound takes advantage of all of its elements and delivers an experience that manages to becomes far more than the sum of its parts.
For you see, Earthbound’s satirical elements, exaggeration of modern day qualities, subversion of RPG standards, usage of common pop culture tropes and elements; it all serves to deliver a story with a certain air of innocence, a child’s own innocence. When you get to see the kind of experience Earthbound offers, it almost feels like you’re going through a child’s own fantasy. A child’s fantasy of having to save the world with his best friends, encountering mundane aspects of their lives, while still giving them their own unique charm by making most of its qualities and turning them into a whole adventure, by looking at facets of the adult world that they cannot still comprehend and being somewhat afraid of what they might entail. But at the end of the day, a child still has their mother, a mother that will be waiting for them back home, a mother that will help them when they are in trouble, when they are sad and rejoice in their victories and smiles. And even when its time to say goodbye to their friends, looking back at the adventure that they just went through, a child will return to their mother, tell her of all the interesting things they did, eat their favorite meal and then go back to sleep, to experience another day full of adventure.
Earthbound is a game that invokes simplistic, yet powerful emotions through the combination of all of the elements that comprise it. It presents this idealistic view of childhood, that reminds you just how important it is to be alive, and how important the people you love are to you. Though its nature is very interpretative, and the message may be lost in the minds of many others, Earthbound still managed to make me feel something beautiful, and gave me memories that I will remember in the years to come.
“Being weird or goofy isn’t my only aim, though. […] I have this strong desire to make people feel distraught. I want to give them laughter and joy too, of course, but I’m always filled with the desire to make people feel ever-so slightly heartbroken. Not just in games, but all sorts of things I work on.” - Shigesato Itoi
“It’s both strange and funny, but then it also gets heartrending.”
After a long development process and a 12 year development cycle which included the cancellation of a Nintendo 64 version of the same game, Mother 3 finally came out on the Gameboy Advance and it turned out to become the kind of sublime experience that only a 17 year career would deliver. But, to talk about Mother 3, to talk about the specific reasons as to why this may be the best entry of the entire franchise, to talk in depth about the kind of impact this one specific game has on myself and many other people; is not really possible without giving away the whole story.
Mother 3 is a game full of surprises, full of heart and passion for the craft. Its the kind of game that is certain to make the player feel something, deep inside. So you will just have to take my word for it, Mother 3 is an amazing game that you should play without hesitating much, but also without knowing much of what entails after this journey has started. Though, if you still aren’t convinced of playing the game, I’ll try my best to describe some of its greater strengths without resorting to spoilers.
Playing Mother 3 is also facilitated by Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin’s fan translation of the game, which is probably one of the very best, if not the very best fan-translation for a game ever made. It stays true to the core writing style of Earthbound and adapts the source material in a way that makes it feel intact and completely appropriate for the audience.
Mother 3 takes place in a whole new setting, separated from the modern, psychedelic and pop-culture referencing setting of the previous games. This new setting, The Nowhere Islands, is the World of Mother 3, and invokes a peaceful Old West utopia, where there is no such thing as money or conflict; everything is shared in this world and everyone lives peacefully with one another. Until a day comes where strange things start happening around this one village, leading to the norms and ideas of their society being changed as a whole.
The setting of Mother 3 is one of its greatest strengths, as the player witnesses its change along the course of several years and the conflict of ideas between its peaceful utopic origin unto its more comfortable change into a more modern society more akin to that of the previous games. The other reason why the setting is so consistently engaging are the characters that populate this world, who each have established personalities and a certain prevalence over the backdrop of the story, as the player witnesses their morals change with the evolution of their society.
Characters in Mother 3 feel more real and genuine than characters from previous installments, as they are more emotionally driven and have insecurities and problems of their own, yet they also evolve along the course of the story, becoming completely involved with the politics of its world and being affected by the situations that they have to face. Also contrasting with the simplistic and weird characters from the previous installments, Mother 3′s characters have more of an upfront personality and wit to their dialogue, making them more likable and relatable than previous characters from the franchise.
Though, some weakness in the narrative is presented towards the later parts of the game, as the first two acts seem to prance around with no clear objective and the goal of the narrative is established much close to the end with little to no fanfare. Mother 3 also tries to give extra depth to its world by revealing certain things near the end, but these hold no weight since they do not re-contextualize the meaning of the whole experience and do not alter the goal of the player or the way the player perceives said goal in any way. Though, these are somewhat minor criticisms from a much larger story with plenty of other positive aspects to boot.
The added depth of many of these elements comes from the change in direction when it comes to presenting its narrative since Mother 3 is structured more like a stage play, dividing the story in eight chapters that set up the stage and later evolve it to deliver a highly effective narrative. Scenes in Mother 3 are more cinematic and dialogue heavy, feeling less laid back than previous games while never truly being too heavy handed with its presentation. This also makes it so that the game is far more linear than its predecessors, doing away with the immersive world of the previous games and presenting a smaller world with very little room for exploration and discovery, which is somewhat disappointing. Though, the more linear nature helps Mother 3 present its story and themes much more elegantly than previous Mother games did.
The writing of many of these scenes is still top notch, relying a lot less on satirizing common RPG tropes and instead delivering its own potent story with plenty of subtlety in both humor and drama. Though its story is certainly darker than its predecessors, Mother 3 still doesn’t quite take itself dead serious, creating a deliberate balance between the lighthearted moments and heavy moments, a contrast that elevates the latter by having the tone be reinforced by the former.
Aside from having a better script, Mother 3 also improves upon many of the long standing problems with the Mother franchise, by polishing up the gameplay in order to create the best gameplay from the entire trilogy. The first important thing that has been reworked is the UI, which is more accessible than the previous games, allowing the player to accomplish actions with minimal menu navigation. The game also added a Dash button, which allows the player to run and move at a faster speed. This Dash feature makes it so that the player can actually avoid enemy encounters in the field without resorting to exploits, unlike its predecessor. This feature also makes it easier to approach an enemy from behind.
Another improvement that the Mother franchise desperately needed is answered in Mother 3, by making inventory management much less cumbersome. This is accomplished by storing Key or Plot Related items in a special tab, as well as incorporating item abilities into the player’s skill set. This makes it so that it’s easier to stock up on healing items, making the game much easier to manage as a whole.
The battle system has received some marked improvements as well, by giving each party member a special ability that they can use during battle, ranging from PSI abilities to Special Items. This allows for more strategy during battles, as the player now has to consider use of their special abilities, buffs and debuffs to get an advantage over the enemy. Mother 3 also makes it so that HP decreases at a much slower rate compared to Earthbound, making this mechanic much easier to use and take advantage of.
The most interesting feature that Mother 3′s battle system has is a Rythmic Combo system, which makes it so that the player can achieve up to 16-Hit combos by pressing the A button according to the beat of each individual battle theme. This idea is not only unique, but also adds a lot of depth to those who pay close attention to the technicalities of the soundtrack and incorporates the overall importance of music to the franchise into the gameplay mechanics. It is hard to get used to though, but its advantages are not exactly necessary to beat the game anyways, it’s a great feature for those who are invested enough to master it.
What truly compliments this mechanic is just how good the soundtrack to Mother 3 is, composed by newcomer to the franchise Shogo Sakai. Despite the limitations of the Gameboy Advance hardware, Mother 3 has still managed to create a mesmerizing, albeit less experimental, soundtrack. Its wide collection of battle themes which include Rock and Roll, Chiptune, Orchestral and more unconventional dissonant tracks help set up a strong tone for the game and make enemies stand out. Aside from battle themes, Mother 3 also features a touching orchestral score with highly memorable themes, that while sounding somewhat different from previous installments, they hit the mark in terms of quality.
Though the most impressive quality of the Mother 3 soundtrack is its usage of leitmotifs, settings, characters and situations in Mother 3 invoke melodies which are repeated along the course of the story with different arrangements, creating a sense of familiarity once these play or a sense of discomfort once they are arranged in a different way to suit a different tone. Associating characters and themes with music is a clever method of making situations stand out, while also giving a sense of nostalgia once more significant melodies play.
An aspect of Mother 3 which can be considered an improvement upon its predecessors is the artwork, which conserves the same cartoony look of the previous games but with a lot more attention put into animations and the details of the environment. Another difference Mother 3 has from its predecessor is doing away with the skewed isometric angle of the previous games and presenting environments with a lot more detail and believable layouts.
The aspect that makes Mother 3 most unique, not only in comparison to its predecessors, is the kind of narrative arcs that its characters face. Mother 3 isn’t really a story about kids defeating evil, or stopping an alien invasion. It is instead a story about kids having to face their insecurities, trying to live with the things that have tormented them in the past, and finding their place in a constantly evolving world. Though there is more to be said about these aspects, Mother 3 wouldn’t be the same kind of experience if I gave these aspects away entirely, for one of the best things about Mother 3 is finding these aspects yourself, and taking whatever meaning you can from them, be it analytical or sentimental.
Mother 3 is the best kind of wrap up this franchise could’ve had, it’s not only a summation of some of the best aspects of the franchise, but a wholly unique experience on its own, an experience that gamers and non-gamers owe to visit at some point in their lives. Mother 3 is not just a mesh of sound, visuals. story and mechanics that creates a game, it’s a summation of all of these things which join together to create an experience which lies above all of these elements individually. It’s the conclusion to a man’s journey through his work in the videogame industry, and a final hurrah to all those who followed his career and will carry on his legacy.
“Mother, as unexpected as it may be, is a story about family. However, when you think about that theme, I didn’t create it that way on purpose. You can probably say it turned out that way on accident. Then again, maybe I’m able to talk like this cause it’s been 19 years.” - Shigesato Itoi
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I love this review. I love the way I delved into the more interpretative and abstract elements of the franchise, as well as why it is so memorable and works so well from an emotional standpoint. I also did a good job at respecting Shigesato Itoi, whom I greatly admire.
Overall, an excellent review of a franchise I really love. It also took me a long time to do and I was incredibly tired by the time I finished it. In fact, I didn't like it all that much when i first finished it because I could only associate it with the tiring process of writing it. I even got very sick during the writing of the Mother 3 review.