Know Your Roots
It’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement of Mother 3’s imminent release. After all, for the first time, its release date can be measured not in our hopes, dreams and speculations, but in months, days and hours. Our long, ten year wait is finally coming to an end; the Jesus of the RPG world has risen, and further more, He’ll be here by Easter.
If you’re reading this, either you enjoy Mother games enough to visit a huge fan site and read essays about them, or something went gone horribly wrong while you were surfing the net, and you crashed-landed, cold and confused, on my virtual doorstep. (For the latter – keep reading anyway; it’ll make me feel loved.) I’m assuming you’re here because you desperately want to play Mother 3 and are rabidly soaking up any and all information about it. But let me ask you what might sound like an odd question, given the circumstances: what did you think of Mother 1 (or, as some know it, Earthbound Zero)? Have you finished it? Have you even ever played it?
Buried deep within the abyss that is my closet, I have a T-shirt that I wore so much, the stitching started to unravel and one could see my armpit through the sizable hole it left. On the front was an 8-bit Nintendo controller, with the words “Know your Roots!” scrawled across the bottom. Know your roots indeed, Earthbound community. Mother 2 might have been the only installment of the series we’ve officially seen (and probably ever will see) in English, but Mother 1 has been available, just as Nintendo was planning to release it in the United States, for eight years now. There’s nothing wrong with being excited over Mother 3, but if you still haven’t played the original, you’re missing out on an indispensable part of the Mother trilogy.
Every summer, devoted Mother fans everywhere break out their copies Earthbound and their likely-decaying Super NES control decks to participate in Starmen.net’s Earthbound Funktastic Gameplay Event. According to the slogan, we’re “getting back in the game;” that is, we’re reliving the experience that (cliché alert!) started it all. Yet, Starmen.net has never had a gameplay event (to my knowledge) for the title that REALLY started it all, Mother 1. So ponder this: wouldn’t it be wild if in the seven or so weeks before Mother 3’s release, everyone banded together for the first ever Earthbound Zero Funktastic Gameplay Event? We could call it the “Know Your Roots Campaign.” See, we’d only need about 30 days of gameplay points for the event, which is almost double the time we have left before Mother 3 hits the shelves in Japan. And if it’s done right, the last leg of the event could coincide with Mother 3 day. With delicious Earthboundian gameplay fresh on everyone’s minds, what a huge boost to community morale THAT would be!
But, like I’ve said before in previous articles, you don’t have to wait for Starmen.net to have a gameplay event before you can enjoy Earthbound. If you’ve never played Mother 1 much (or at all), give it a whirl – I think you’ll like what you find. And even if you’ve finished Mother 1 before, load it up and walk around for an hour; take in the sights and sounds of a surreal adventure that smacks of a childhood you once knew. Listen up, everyone: it’s time to know your roots.
Yes, Mother 3 is finally coming. But Mother 1 is already here.
It’s hard not to get caught up in the excitement of Mother 3’s imminent release. After all, for the first time, its release date can be measured not in our hopes, dreams and speculations, but in months, days and hours. Our long, ten year wait is finally coming to an end; the Jesus of the RPG world has risen, and further more, He’ll be here by Easter.
If you’re reading this, either you enjoy Mother games enough to visit a huge fan site and read essays about them, or something went gone horribly wrong while you were surfing the net, and you crashed-landed, cold and confused, on my virtual doorstep. (For the latter – keep reading anyway; it’ll make me feel loved.) I’m assuming you’re here because you desperately want to play Mother 3 and are rabidly soaking up any and all information about it. But let me ask you what might sound like an odd question, given the circumstances: what did you think of Mother 1 (or, as some know it, Earthbound Zero)? Have you finished it? Have you even ever played it?
Buried deep within the abyss that is my closet, I have a T-shirt that I wore so much, the stitching started to unravel and one could see my armpit through the sizable hole it left. On the front was an 8-bit Nintendo controller, with the words “Know your Roots!” scrawled across the bottom. Know your roots indeed, Earthbound community. Mother 2 might have been the only installment of the series we’ve officially seen (and probably ever will see) in English, but Mother 1 has been available, just as Nintendo was planning to release it in the United States, for eight years now. There’s nothing wrong with being excited over Mother 3, but if you still haven’t played the original, you’re missing out on an indispensable part of the Mother trilogy.
Every summer, devoted Mother fans everywhere break out their copies Earthbound and their likely-decaying Super NES control decks to participate in Starmen.net’s Earthbound Funktastic Gameplay Event. According to the slogan, we’re “getting back in the game;” that is, we’re reliving the experience that (cliché alert!) started it all. Yet, Starmen.net has never had a gameplay event (to my knowledge) for the title that REALLY started it all, Mother 1. So ponder this: wouldn’t it be wild if in the seven or so weeks before Mother 3’s release, everyone banded together for the first ever Earthbound Zero Funktastic Gameplay Event? We could call it the “Know Your Roots Campaign.” See, we’d only need about 30 days of gameplay points for the event, which is almost double the time we have left before Mother 3 hits the shelves in Japan. And if it’s done right, the last leg of the event could coincide with Mother 3 day. With delicious Earthboundian gameplay fresh on everyone’s minds, what a huge boost to community morale THAT would be!
But, like I’ve said before in previous articles, you don’t have to wait for Starmen.net to have a gameplay event before you can enjoy Earthbound. If you’ve never played Mother 1 much (or at all), give it a whirl – I think you’ll like what you find. And even if you’ve finished Mother 1 before, load it up and walk around for an hour; take in the sights and sounds of a surreal adventure that smacks of a childhood you once knew. Listen up, everyone: it’s time to know your roots.
Yes, Mother 3 is finally coming. But Mother 1 is already here.
