Only the ultimate MOTHER 2/EB fans know this stuff... so learn it! There'll be a test on it at the end of the semester!
- Two players can play the game together! Just plug in two controllers! It's not that useful or anything, but it's neat!
- Press the R button while riding the bike to ring the bell! It's surprising how often this goes unnoticed.
- MOTHER 2 / EarthBound can be played entirely with one hand. The L button is a shortcut for Check/Talk/Accept, and the Select button acts the same as the B button. To bring up the main menu outside, press Select and then L.
- The mysterious "M.D. Seeger", who is credited with the rock guitar on the gas station screen right before the main title screen, is none other than Shigeru Miyamoto himself. But weirdest of all, apparently Miyamoto might not even realize that he had been made into this mysterious foreign guitarist.
- When you finish typing your names and hit OK, a tiny clip saying, "OK desu ka?" ("OK?") plays. This is Shigesato Itoi's voice, and apparently the sound designers added this in at the last second, without Mr. Itoi's knowledge. The clip was also recorded when Mr. Itoi didn't realize he was being recorded, so he was very surprised when he eventually heard it in-game.
- At the naming screen, if you press the Start button instead of choosing "OK", it'll play a different sound instead of "OK desu ka?".
- At the very beginning of the game, when it's night outside, you can see the traveling entertainers by the shack. Sometimes you might have to be patient, but they're there!
- Although it takes hacking to see it for yourself, Captain Strong and the orange guy in glasses don't say anything if you talk to them when they're standing around the meteorite at night. They weren't given any text to say.
- Itoi wasn't responsible for Moonside's creation. That was one of the locations where he let his assistants have free reign. The art director Kouichi Ooyama made some interesting artwork for it, an assistant writer Akihito Toda had a good idea to go along with it and wrote some pretty unusual lines of dialogue, and game musician Hirokazu Tanaka created some music that fit with their work.
- Itoi revealed that he used a certain episode of his childhood as the basis for Giygas' character. Apparently, when Itoi was a boy, he accidentally walked into the wrong movie at a movie theater. In the movie, he saw a woman getting raped near a river (note: his memory was wrong; it wasn't a rape). The images he saw were like "direct attacks to his brain". He was so shocked that when he returned home, he stayed silent and worried his parents. He says that he used those strong feelings of fear and shock as the basis for Giygas' character and dialogue.
HOWEVER, this story has evolved into a big, unstoppable Internet rumor. The movie Itoi saw was NOT a porno movie. It was simply a mystery movie intended for more mature audiences. The movie was called "The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty". Here is a description of the film:
The year is 1937, and it has been six months since the Sendai Infantry left for Manchuria. The rotted corpse of a young woman is found at the bottom of a well, but her face and limbs are gone. The military police begin an investigation and search fervently for the person responsible, but they can't even determine the victim's identity, much less find any clues. However, the incident is made public when newspapers give wide coverage to the story, so Staff Sergeant Kosaka is dispatched from Tokyo to solve the case. Eventually, General Tsunekichi is taken into custody by local infantrymen because of the testimony of another unit, but the spirit of the dead woman appears before Staff Sergeant Kosaka, who continues to investigate on his own...
This is the first work in Shin-Toho's cult-hit "Military Policeman" series. The detective drama setup, combined with the sinister portrayals of corpses being chopped up and people being whipped while hung upside down, has a maniacal charm distinctive to Japanese cinema.
This is NOT a porno movie. But it's clearly a movie children should not see. With Giygas' character and text, Itoi tried to bring the same feelings he felt as a kid to the player. For a detailed English summary of this movie that includes pics, see this.
