[annotation start sound effect]

 

CAT

Cat here again with another annotation, continuing our journey into the history of paranormal paranoia in Japan, and ancient civilizations and the end times in video games of the 90s. You'll remember I mentioned that article in the magazine MU, "The Truth About MOTHER 2, the 90s Occult Masterpiece, 30 Years Later! Was Gyiyg the Great King of Terror?" So, what's that “great king of terror business”? Well, it wasn't just Mu that entered the cultural zeitgeist in 70s Japan; it was also the prophecies of Nostradamus. In 1973, Tsutomu or “Ben” Goto wrote The Prophecies of Nostradamus, a heavily embellished translation of Nostradamus's prophecies, mixed with blatant fiction, that preyed upon Japanese insecurities amidst a period of unrest. This paperback book was a massive overnight success; it introduced Japan to Nostradamus, and was, unfortunately, perceived as, more or less, fact. 

 

Similar things happened with Nostradamus's writings the world over, but apparently in Japan it was particularly intense. Paranoia about these prophecies reached a fever pitch in the 90s, thanks to one Nostradamus quote in particular: “In the seventh month of the year 1999, the Great King of Terror will come to Earth and destroy mankind.” In Sugiura's article in MU about MOTHER, she says, “As many of you may remember from back then, this prophecy of human extinction was so commonplace that ordinary adults, whether they fully believed it or not, would say in everyday conversation, ‘I hear that humanity will go extinct in 1999.’ In other words, Nostradamus's prophecy was alive and well in Japan in 1994.” Sugiura suggests that, at that time, it would've been easy for the average Japanese person to interpret Gyiyg as “the Great King of Terror” leading to humanity's end.

 

These apocalyptic ideas tie into Illusion of Gaia, as well. It's part of a trilogy of games, alongside Soul Blazer and Terranigma, sometimes called the Soul Blazer trilogy. All of these games are about the death and resurrection of civilization and humanity's relationship with the Earth. The connection between MOTHER 2 and Gaia by way of Mu is funny to me, because years ago, I zeroed in on another parallel between these two game series. At Camp Fangamer 2016, I hosted a panel called "MOTHER 3 and the Soul Blazer Trilogy", exploring parallels between these games' apocalyptic stories of rebirth. Now it seems to me that the parallels run deeper and can be more clearly traced to the message of a particular cultural and generational moment. A message that, all occult trappings aside, still intensely relevant.

 

If you'd like to learn more about the Soul Blazer trilogy, I can point you to my old podcast Nerdy Show. You can still find it in your podcast players━just look for an episode we put out in July 2016 called "Terranigma and the Quintet Legacy". It's a spoilery overview of these games, which I think you'll find very relevant to this discussion. Also, that Camp Fangamer panel I mentioned was recorded and you can hear it over on our Patreon or Supporting Cast. We'll link to all these things on this episode's page.

 

MonkeyNess mentioned Chrono Trigger, as well. These games and many other pieces of Japanese media at the time all feel the mark of this shared cultural influence. I'd gotten a sense of it over the years, but I wasn't able to put my finger on what exactly it was, this vibe… until now, thanks to Biozilla and Minako Sugiura.

 

Now back to the exhibit and more discussion about Gyiyg…

 

[annotation end sound effect]

 

MONKEYNESS

It's interesting that, post MOTHER 1, it seems Itoi became set on what was more important to him about Giygas was who he was, rather than what it is he actually aims to do. Because it seems like the plan has always kind of had this sort of generic element to it, like of world demise, world domination, with these flourishes on it. And it always has seemed to be more important to Itoi, the mental struggle Giygas faced throughout his life and how it ended up ruining him. 

 

CAT

Yeah. The two things that that always makes me think of is kind of like… One, when it comes to the obscurity of Gyiyg's plan, there's the nature of the cosmic horror of like H.P. Lovecraft: The less you know about something, the more inexplicable it is and, therefore, the more terrifying it is. Which is, you know, valid and true. But then, also, it always comes back to something that I heard Guillermo del Toro say once, which is if you can't view a monster in repose, then it's not threatening, because it doesn't seem real. You have to know what the monster looks like when he's asleep. And so, there's both this extreme obscurity and, like, no elaboration on the plans and, at the same time, you also are constantly bearing witness to Gyiyg's weakness as a being.

 

MONKEYNESS

Gyiyg in both games very much is given the acousmêtre element of storytelling, where it's everyone talking about him until the very end, when you see him, to maximize that impact, right? To not let you have to dwell much after the game actually is over to think about what he literally is.

 

CHARLIE

Which is very much contrasted with the other villain of the game, who eventually kind of supplants Gyiyg entirely, which is Pokey, who is with you the entire time. You know exactly what he is. He's the annoying kid next door, but he becomes more and more of a threat until, eventually, he's the one who is your real threat that lingers after the game is over, whereas Gyiyg seems like he is just gone and almost an afterthought.

 

MONKEYNESS

Well, yeah, it's playing into that thematic motif that you can't really get rid of the evil in the world, right?

 

CAT

Yeah. There are some later meeting notes; these are from October 27th, 1992. Itoi is generally asking questions considering the state of the current iteration of the plot. “What was Gyiyg's motivation? - Was it just to fight the prophecy?”  “What's the point of Porky?” “Why does Gyiyg come to Earth?” That's like the big question and there's, beneath it, two possible answers: 

• “To get rid of Ness and the same reason as MOTHER 1, to take over the world?”

• “To fulfill his wish from 1.”

 “Why does he have to get rid of Ness?”

• “Because the Apple of Enlightenment said that Ness would destroy Gyiyg.” 

“How is Ness able to defeat Gyiyg?” 

• “Because Ness is blood-related to Ninten?” and then that says, “This is not the case.” He's not related to Ninten. 

• “Was fate just pulling a prank?”

• “Ness is the chosen one.” 

And then, “Does Porky survive?” 

• “In the next game, does he become a medieval king?” 

[laughs] 

“Is the one who kills Gyiyg the descendants of Ness?” 

• “So, to prevent Gyiyg's demise from happening, is it that Gyiyg has to go to the past, then?” 

And then he says━and again, these are notes from 1992━“That's maybe a bit too much like Terminator 2.”

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, I was about to say, this is getting very Terminator.

 

MONKEYNESS

Yeah, absolutely. That's so interesting, October 1992, because the first footage of the game was shown only a month and a half later, in, like… late November, early December, something like that?

 

CAT

Yeah.

 

MONKEYNESS

That's crazy that there was still these kinds of heavy story issues that had not been resolved yet, especially for a character as major as Porky.

 

CAT

Yeah. And, following that, it says: 

“Porky's position” 

• “Is he Gyiyg's trump card, hence the battle with Ness?” or 

• “Did he just end up getting in Gyiyg's way?” 

And there's no conclusion. He doesn't know. Not at this point, anyway.

 

MONKEYNESS

It's interesting to think of Itoi putting a character into a project like this that he doesn't know the end purpose of, because everything comes across as so purposeful throughout these games. And dropping in a character that plays such a major role, he's still asking, “What's the point?”

 

JESS

That's interesting. I mean, I feel like there's definitely purpose to a lot of things, but also, Itoi just likes to do things and then sort of figure it out later, you know? I think Porky was initially supposed to be like the childhood bully or like the frenemy that eventually… you know, [their] intentions kind of escalate. It's something that's relatable for children. And I'm just guessing here, but I kind of feel like, maybe, Itoi thought, “Oh it'd be kind of fun,” if these two rivals━kind of like in the Pokémon games━going on their own adventures and coming into contact every once in a while but constantly in conflict with each other… just kind of become the ultimate fight, you know, they're still going at it. And how do you explain that? I think it may be as simple as, just, he thought that it would be cool and relatable for kids playing the game, and then, figuring out why it's like that later.

 

CAT

Yeah, and there are themes that carry over. Porky━and we'll get into this in future seasons, but━Porky is very adjacent to a character from The Talisman, Morgan Sloat, and then also, especially combined with what was being considered for the plot of MOTHER 2, ties into a character from The Sirens of Titan. And this idea, of somebody who is very selfish and then gets kind of placed into this outside-of-time position of power where he can influence things… That, for Itoi, snowballs into, I think, some bigger ideas that… I think he's sort of like, “Oh, this feels good, this feels good.” And then, when you get to pages like those ones from October in '92, then he's asking like, “Okay, well, in the scope of what we have in the game so far, what is visible? We've chased down these feelings; do they make sense enough? Do we need to address them?” And that's me attempting to interpret this work, what the exhibit shows. It's not that he doesn't know, but he's chasing the feelings more than he's working on a meticulous steel trap of a plot.

 

MONKEYNESS

Yeah, and, you know, development-wise, it would probably make sense that a lot of these things ended up, after Iwata stepped in and they more defined the engine of the game and actual technical aspects like that… Why a lot of  these story issues he's having just get resolved━or possibly just unresolved, but they had to decide on something ━because, now, the game is solidified in its technical state.

 

CAT

Yeah. Rewinding back to the beginning a little bit, there was a second round of handwritten notes that had a bunch of very sparse ideas, just kind of scattershot notes like, “The Flying Man returns,” so that makes sense. There was what looked like a sketch of a gathering of planetoids and their orbits. And that's a little fuzzy on what that is in these notes, but we'll come back to that later, because there's this idea of star maps that, for this version of the game, seemed rather important. We also see a planet that's colonized, a ghost space Station, and, “If your photo is taken, your soul is taken.” Well, that doesn't happen. [laughs]

 

CHARLIE

And yet, I did, whenever I used to play the game, try to avoid the photo-man like the plague. So, I sensed it, I sensed it deep down.

 

MONKEYNESS

What was he doing?

 

CAT

The Tonzura Brothers are originally written "Tonzura Blues Band", which then, the note says, “You'll later see them in Foggyland.” Which is interesting because, one, the Runaway Five never go to Foggyland or Winters, and also, that it is actually written as "Foggyland here", because Foggyland and Chommo don't appear anywhere in the actual finished game, in terms of those names.

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, those specific names.

 

CAT

Ness would first learn about Jeff on the news via a TV that's playing in the Twoson bus station. And this is also where we learn about the list of towns and Fiverent, which would have been a parallel to Cape Canaveral, and that's how you would get, then, to the Moon. Interestingly, in terms of towns and stuff, I believe that a page that showed up in the promotional materials for the exhibit, but actually wasn't at the exhibit, was the page that talks about Twin Pigs Village.

 

MONKEYNESS

Hmm-hmm, which is a very, very interesting section of the manga, as well. And, you know, obviously, Twin Peaks was a huge inspiration for a lot of Japanese media at the time because it was just so huge there. But it's interesting, particularly in Itoh's envisioning of it, how much it resembles a Twin Peaks kind of premise: There's a detective looking for somebody and all that, and there's a lot of weird paranormal activity going on.

 

CAT

Yeah, so, on this paper that was in the promotional materials for the exhibit and was translated by PineappleCarl, we see mention of Twin Pigs Village. And then that, as MonkeyNess just said, appears in Benimaru Itoh's manga in a huge way. It takes up most of the manga, really, as a place that's outside of time, and that there are two parallel Twin Pigs Villages and you can kind of get lost going between the two of them. There's a part where the kids go check into a hotel, and then Ness and Porky go walking around, and then come back and they've never checked into the hotel and they've never seen them before, because they're in another version of the same town. And then, this detective who's trying to find out more about the disappearance of Mr. Saturn, and the detective is named Georgia [Heard]. And he's always drinking what appears to be canned coffee, and that would be probably because of the serialized Twin Peaks Georgia coffee ads that were playing in Japan. he's not just a reference to Dale Cooper because he's a trench coat-wearing detective; he's also drinking the canned coffee that Kyle MacLachlan, as Dale Cooper, was selling on television at the time.

 

Mr. Saturn looks very different, and Mr. Saturn is, throughout most of this exhibit, referred to as “Baka-san” (“Mr. Stupid”). We never see this design that was used in the manga anywhere; it could be purely an invention of the manga artist. But, there's this different kind of idea for what Mr. Saturn could be, which is just as ridiculous as Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians, so there's a lot going on here. And, the only explanation for why the manga has all these early notes somehow buried in it is, the manga was originally serialized, and it ran from March of 1993 to September of 1994. So, if the manga was started in the creative process years prior, it's possible that he got notes from 1992 and was like, “Okay, I'll make something out of what this is,” and that's just sort of what happened.

 

JESS

Seems like that's likely the case.

 

MONKEYNESS

Yeah. It's funny hearing about, not only is it a reference to Dale Cooper, but it's also a reference to the ads Kyle MacLachlan was starring in. That's so many layers of pop culture.

 

CAT

Yeah, and if I wasn't, like, a hardcore Twin Peaks fan, I would have no idea. [laughs] Like, it's very much like “you had to be there”, and if it was anything other than Twin Peaks that wasn't still so obsessively obsessed with decades later, then it would be 100% lost to time.

 

CAT

I see, again and again in these notes, Itoi attempting to explore mundane realism in the world of Eagleland. For example, early on, when you got your bike, your bike could get stolen and you'd have to have a combination lock to make sure that it wouldn't go anywhere.

 

MONKEYNESS

It kind of gives us this glimpse into… Perhaps, Itoi was somewhat responsive to the assessment the public had of MOTHER 1. 'Cause that's what comes across to me as why he would lean more into what could be seen as pointless or even mildly infuriating realism, like getting your bike stolen and stuff like that. It comes across to me like, perhaps he saw that that was something people really enjoyed about the game and he decided to lean more into it.

 

CAT

It becomes downright visionary. You know what, I'm just gonna– I'll fast forward to that. This is a part of the exhibit that's weirdly kind of out of sequence. Eventually, you get over to the corner; it's kind of over… If you're watching the video of the walkthrough, it's over near where the Mr. Saturn table display is. There is a bunch of notes from December of 1990 that I would say are the "SpaceBound" era of ideas for the game. And there are things in there… It's like he's envisioning the side quests of Grand Theft Auto IV and trying to make it happen on the Super Nintendo. There's a part-time job system where you could fish, fight cocks, draw pictures, be a door-to-door salesman, work at McDonald's, or get rid of moles in people's gardens. And to me, like, “Oh, we're talking about having little animals fight each other? Interesting… Interesting idea [laughs] for the first Motherlike, Pokémon,” you know? There's also character customization, it's not really elaborated on, but the sort of implication that, maybe, you would be able to customize your character. And this is tied to the idea, an idea that comes back from MOTHER 1, of a science teacher who allows you to waste your money on some kind of pointless character customization.

 

MONKEYNESS

Yeah, it's interesting, 'cause we've heard a lot about the development over the years of… Like, there are a lot of things and early concepts, and even mid-development concepts for MOTHER 3 that sound more akin to an Animal Crossing or something, which━we have also heard from other sources━Animal Crossing ended up becoming kind of a more codified version of some of the ideas Itoi had from this time, and perhaps they found their roots here.

 

CAT

Yeah, I think it's possible. There was a project codenamed "Cabbage" that Itoi worked on with Iwata and Miyamoto, and━we've never mentioned it on the show before━but very likely, it was an incubator for ideas that became Animal Crossing.

 

MONKEYNESS

It also had, like, the most hilarious one-sentence pitch from Itoi, which is, “It's a game where you can breed with your friends.” [laughs] It’s so crazy!

 

CAT

You said “breathe”, right?

 

MONKEYNESS

B– [laughs] No.

 

CAT

You said “breed”.

 

MONKEYNESS

“Breed”.

 

CAT

You said “breed”, okay, I was like… I was like, “No, there's no way you said ‘breed’.”

 

MONKEYNESS

“Whaaaat?” [Everyone laughs]

 

CAT

Wow… [laughs] What the heck…

 

JESS

What does that even mean?

 

MONKEYNESS

It was planned to use N64DD technology with all the possible combinations of code just to create an infimitennial amount of original creatures, and it sounded like it was kind of like this Pokémon breeding type of experience. You know, we never got a firm vision of what that would have looked like, but apparently, that was a heavy or a large element of it.

 

CAT

Wow, okay.

 

MONKEYNESS

Someone, interview more people about that experience.

 

CAT

[laughs]

 

JESS

Going back to the concept of jobs in the game for a second, I know that jobs are a concept that plays a big part in the Final Fantasy series. The first time that you could really change your job and, you know, have an impact on your abilities and stuff was in Final Fantasy III, which came out in 1990. I wonder if Itoi and the other creators at APE were looking at other games that were out at the time and sort of thinking, “How can we take that concept and put it into our modern-day JRPG about kids?”

 

CAT

That's a really good point, Jess. It is kind of like, just like the first game was the modern spin on Dragon Quest, having people have awkward part-time jobs is kind of like the MOTHER version of Final Fantasy III. [laughs]

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, it's a really fun concept of thinking of, like, what is the party role of somebody who has a fast food job versus, like, I don't know, cockfighting, apparently. [laughs] It's a really fun thing to explore: What is the modern equivalent of that? How do you form a party based on your friends with all their part-time jobs?

 

JESS

We're killing the third strongest mole in the neighbor's yard. [Everyone laughs]

 

MONKEYNESS

Yeah, and, you know, it gets back to that idea of parodying mechanics from RPGs contemporarily like that. Like, it makes a lot of artistic sense to further the identity in the next installment of the series in that way, since the first one is mimicking, obviously, Dragon Quest, and is mimicking that sort of thing with modern twists and humor. It makes sense that the next step for the series would be to continue to parody the other contemporaries.

 

CAT

Yeah. In these 1990 notes, there's some things, like an overall sort of technical assessment trying to figure out what's possible with the new hardware. So, at the most, four player characters and or two NPCs, which is like Flying Man or King, as in, adjacent player characters that can step in. There's an illustration, like a bubble of stars sitting on a flat grid, almost like a checked picnic blanket, and next to it, it says, “A Dune-style space map.” And then, I rewatched David Lynch's Dune recently, expecting to see, like, maybe there was some kind of space map like that. None of the space maps looked anything like this illustration or any of the other doodles of space maps. The thing that looks most like any of these doodles and anything that happened in Dune is the map system in Star Fox. But maybe that's unrelated; I don't know.

 

MONKEYNESS

They were all on very much a Lynch kick.

 

CAT

Yeah, right? But that's Itoi for you.

 

MONKEYNESS

Right.

 

CHARLIE

He does have a painting by David Lynch somewhere in the office; I have seen it.

 

CAT

There was originally going to be two dungeon builders, a master and disciple named “Dun” and “John”. And there was an event where you could hijack the aliens' UFO and the space police would catch you for speeding, and there's also a space taxi that would refuse service to you.

 

And then, weirdly, on these 1990 notes, there's an extremely loose sketch of what looks like someone running away from, or being spat out the back end of, a caterpillar or silkworm with a body made of conjoined circles with arms and wearing a crown. And I looked at that and I was like, “What the heck… is that?” It was like that– I felt like that scene in The Big Lebowski where the Dude's looking at that little sketch that Jackie Treehorn made and being like, “What's going on? What is that?” And then, when I was preparing my notes and trying to get all the enemy names together, I saw it: It's the Criminal Caterpillar and Master Criminal Worm that appear in the two desert settings. It's this weird very loose sketch of the same basic shape of this kind of like, two-armed, crowned, circle-bodied worm. And, for some reason, this obscure enemy is on these pages from 1990 in this weird way.

 

JESS

Itoi had a dream about a worm and he's like, “All right, quick, got to sketch it down. We're gonna put it in the game somewhere.”

 

CAT

It's like Gordon Cole's sketch of a deer in Twin Peaks: The Return.

 

CHARLIE

It's interesting to think of it as like– It sounds like it was intended to be like a little alien thing, which, if you think about its role in the game, it does seem like a stray alien that just kind of ended up stranded in a desert. Because, why otherwise would this little caterpillar be able to blast you with PSI powers? Why is it worth so much experience to defeat these things?

 

MONKEYNESS

Yeah, it's definitely meant to be jarring, somewhat. 'Cause, you know, they're so rare in each of those respective settings, that like it's supposed to catch your eye when it's there.

 

CAT

Yeah. I mean, maybe it's just part of like, another one of those little jokes, one of those little… little weird jokes tucked away all throughout the game, and this one just didn't have the punchline written in exactly.

 

MONKEYNESS

Right.

 

CAT

So, the exhibit, then, from that moment where it kind of turns the corner and you go in… The next thing that people encounter is the enemy art, all designed by Kouichi Ooyama. According to the placards at the exhibit, the first thing he did was he made the sprite art, and everything else came after that. So, the sprite art was kind of like the sketch phase, really. EVE appears on here in these sketches, as does the Flying Man and other characters who you know but you never fight. And it's possible they appear in the section because they're there as a kind of attempt to find the visual style by adapting things that had come before, but we don't know that for sure.

 

MONKEYNESS

The one that sticks out to me in particular is that they have this one unused enemy who looks remarkably like Jack Frost from the Shin Megami Tensei series. And, you know, could be just because “jester hat”, but the colorization of the face, as well as the particular way the face is drawn, just immediately sticks out to me.

 

CAT

There's a page of some notes, random notes about things that were given to Ooyama to develop enemies from, like lists of things to appear in regions. Like, for Mr. Stupid Valley, cockroaches, frogs, leeches, snakes, worms, spiders, lizards, generally like a list of━I never made this correlation before, that the Saturn Valley enemies are all pests━but the idea is just, it's pests that cause trouble for the Mr. Stupids.

 

So, in these lists of things, there's also some notes. A note from Itoi that says, “Aquatic lifeforms seen walking on land is probably going to make people uncomfortable, so try putting those enemies in weird places like the Underground, Deep Darkness,” which might reflect, like, the Manly Fish or the Zap Eel. But, “Fish with legs, desert starfish, land clam, land squid”━these are all listed━maybe land squids are Mooks. But, to me, this idea of like, “Hey, it's gonna make people uncomfortable…” That reflects the kind of discomfort that's caused by the Chimeras in MOTHER 3, and seems to be something that is a reocurring pattern, of something that Itoi [was] thinking about before, eventually, he figured out how to implement it as a plot component of MOTHER 3. In the early notes, it says, “The enemy characters change drastically due to some trigger.” And also, there's an enemy sprite of, like, a flower with a dog face inside the stamen, and that feels very familiar. It has a lot of aesthetic similarities to the Pigtunia, but the face of the dog is like the Dogfish, which then circles back to the idea of “aquatic lifeforms seen walking on land”. Maybe these things are unrelated, but it's kind of weird that aesthetic pieces of them are starting to coalesce here.

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, there's definitely a few MOTHER 3-isms that were in those early notes that ended up being… not scrapped, but seemed to just reside in Itoi's subconscious for another few years, before he ended up turning them into MOTHER 3 ideas.

 

MONKEYNESS

Especially with Itoi saying so early on, before MOTHER 2 had even really gotten started, that he already had ideas for a potential third game, of like, what that could have eventually evolved into had MOTHER 2 stuck more to the original script.

 

CAT

Yeah, I mean there was━in these early pages━there was a question written of, “Can I continue with MOTHER 3? I don't know.” But I think him reading Ágota Kristóf's The Notebook during the production of MOTHER 2 kind of reverse engineered a lot of things and, all of a sudden, he was pushing on with another idea when he eventually got to MOTHER 3.

 

MONKEYNESS

Perhaps a lot of these unused enemy designs ended up being scrapped from the final game because it comes from a time of development where he was becoming more assured that a third game was something he was interested in pursuing.

 

CAT

Yeah.

 

CHARLIE

One thing that was very interesting to me in those unused sprites were those non-enemy battle sprites, and having the context of them probably being used more for getting a feel for the game makes sense. Although I did enjoy… I think Biozilla brought up the idea that maybe there were plans for more non-battle uses for the battle screen early on. Similar to the Mu training encounter. And, like, I don't know if that was ever the plan, but I do really like that idea. It's something I've explored, myself, in games that I've made, and you can see similar ideas in other Motherlikes like Undertale, where something like the battle UI is used for date sequences instead. And it's also just, I think, funny to think of the Mu training sequence, which is the only thing that still uses the battle screen in that way, as sort of a remnant of when EarthBound had otome game sequences in it. [laughs]

 

CAT

Yeah. There's a lot of cool things. You, yourself, out there listening can see the walkthrough video and you can see a lot of this stuff now: different variations on Starmen, a spider variant of the Skelpion, a red beret military person; there's all these different sprites of military people and potentially military attack dogs, or something; an anthropomorphic lobster with a ray gun, a demonic potato holding a looking glass?! It's… wild stuff, and it might just be like when making Star Wars films like, say, Return of the Jedi. You can see this in the documentaries from Star Wars to Jedi. The Creature Shop designers would make all these different maquettes, all these different little alien designs; they'd line them all up and they'd say, “Hey, George, what do you want us to further develop?”

 

MONKEYNESS

And we would be remiss not to mention: Return of the Jedi was almost directed by David Lynch.

 

CAT

[laughs] That's true. Well, “almost” is– My understanding is that he went out to have a talk about it and he was basically like, “No. I don't want to do this.”

 

MONKEYNESS

[laughs] It's the best video ever, hearing him describe the experience. He was like, “My headache keeps getting worse.”

 

CAT

[laughs]

 

MONKEYNESS

I mean, yeah, a lot of these unused enemies that are weird hodgepodges of seemingly a bunch of different ideas, that feel like they're meant to be some sort of visual joke we don't have all the context for, perhaps… They certainly come across like that joke in South Park where jokes are being written by manatees putting a bunch of balls into a machine in a random order.

 

CAT

[laughs] Yes. Totally. And these crazy ideas are then further reconfigured a whole bunch. For example, there is a series of what looks like worms coming out of the grass, but they've got heads like french fry boxes, like red heads with eyes and yellow stalks coming out of them. And then, that same design kind of reappears later in the exhibit, in part of, like, a sprite test, where there's what looks like a proto-version of the Ranboob, which is one of the enemies from Milky Well in EarthBound. And I double checked and, yeah, that's the enemy's name across both versions of the game; I don't know what was going on there. But instead of his, like, cactus-looking little head, he has a head of these french fry monsters, except that, in this version, they're all green instead of red, with, you know, little french fries coming out of their boxes.

 

JESS

Yeah, you know, you got your part-time job at McDonald's, and while you're working, the french fries come to life and you have to beat them down.

 

CAT

Classic sci-fi trope, of course.

 

CHARLIE

Just breed the french fries with a hydra, and then you have infinite french fries, eventually. You just cut off one head; two more sprout up. That's how McDonald's can get away with offering $1 fries at any size. [Everyone laughs]

 

CAT

Over next to that same alternate Ranboob concept, there's a bunch of, just like, sprite tests that are in a very different color palette from the rest of the game. They're very sort of desaturated; it looks like a half step between the NES and the Super NES, or maybe it was even running on NES hardware to make these graphics. Like, Ness with a chain of other characters following him that, I think, are just very random, not meant to be any kind of early story ideas.

 

MONKEYNESS

That is what I heard from my source, that they were created as very early concept art. You know, everyone keeps pointing out that the fourth party member, who's in the black helmet, resembles a samurai or something, but, to me, it looks exactly like Darth Vader. Does anyone else see that?

 

CAT

Oh, yeah, no━

 

JESS

That's what I thought, too, when I saw that.

 

CAT

━it's very Darth Vader-looking. The only other thing that could possibly be, I think, is maybe not a samurai so much as, like, a ninja with the little metal headband thing. But the sprite reappears elsewhere in the exhibit. I think there's a battle sprite for something that looks kind of like that, but a ninja, if I'm not mistaken. Well, we'll find out when we get the book, right?

 

There's a section of hand-drawn illustrations of status effects, like where you get a mushroom on your head; when you're walking around, there's a little ghost following you. Most of them are in the game, but there were some that didn't make it to the game. For example, smoke coming out of chimneys, steam coming out of coffee cups, music notes coming out of a jukebox, and “honk honk” coming out of a car, little things like that, and there's lots of little things like that sprinkled throughout the exhibit.

 

JESS

I wonder why they didn't include them.

 

CAT

Probably just a hassle. Too much going on on the screen, more things causing slowdown, unnecessary…

 

MONKEYNESS

Yeah. There's already enough slowdown at many points in the game as is.

 

CAT

Yeah. There are these beautiful flowcharts━well, beautiful and/or hot-mess flowcharts━in the exhibit that are pretty neat. Upon scrutinizing all of them there, they're extremely detailed, and you can watch as the penmanship sort of deteriorates as someone tries to outline the entire game over the session of, like, a single meeting. Maybe there's something in there that's different, but by the time that these flowcharts were made, it appears that the core outline of the game is actually intact. There doesn't appear to be anything new in there.

 

One of my favorite parts of the exhibit was seeing these hand-drawn overworld maps; I'm not sure who drew them. And, they felt so familiar to me because, in like 1996, I started drawing out, writing, scripting, whatever, a Motherlike when I was like 12 years old. Because EarthBound just seemed so approachable, like, “Oh, I could make a game, too; this seems something I could do.” And so, my maps that I drew for the game that I was doing based on EarthBound look very similar to the maps that were being made in-house to develop EarthBound. Like, not only does that say, yeah, this kind of “DIY” aspect of the game is kind of part of its DNA, and very easily inspires others to do the same thing, but also, the most remarkable part was the hand-drawn quality of these maps. There's a charm that translated directly to the visual style of the overworld maps. Like, I would never call the overworld maps hand-drawn in quality, but actually, something from these hand-drawn illustrations does actually translate one-to-one in terms of the overall overworld visual aesthetic of the game.

 

MONKEYNESS

Oh, 100%. And again, talking about things that are in the game's DNA, it tells you, like, without Itoi, who━if he didn't draw these, at least helped kind of direct the direction they went in━you know, without him, there is no MOTHER. And, especially with how one-to-one it captures the pseudo-isometric view of the entire world, it feels like you could drop Ness right into it and this wouldn't be out of place in the entire world.

 

JESS

100%. That's exactly what I thought when I was looking at it, and it was making me think about the spritework in MOTHER 2 and how it almost looks like a child's drawing of the world.

 

MONKEYNESS

Yeah, I agree.

 

JESS

It started making me think, like, how does that sort of relate to the storytelling and taking the perspective of a child in the game, the way the child sees the world?

 

MONKEYNESS

I agree. 'Cause, like, the way the Kraken is visualized is just the funniest thing, 'cause it's not a kraken whatsoever. It has this ginormous lollipop head that, there's no way that would ever make any sense biologically. And, once again, I reiterate, it's not a kraken; it's like what a little kid imagines a kraken might be just from hearing it's a sea monster.

 

JESS

There are so many goofy-looking enemies in EarthBound; it's ridiculous.

 

CHARLIE

One of the things I liked seeing was the prominence of Master Belch. Like, he was in those early sprites; he had several different iterations over the course of it.

 

CAT

Yeah, we got Belch with arms.

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, yeah, the one with the arms and the ones with the budding Little Piles that, I don't know, would they pop off of him? Is this how he breeds? I don't know.

 

CAT

He's gestating Slimy Little Piles, maybe?

 

CHARLIE

Yeah. I didn't– You know, obviously, I couldn't read this myself, but the person I was with, based on what they were saying, I got the impression that there was more backstory to Master Belch that just never really gets explored, that I thought was fascinating. It sounded like he was an unusually effective soldier for the cause, driven to please his superiors. But nobody liked him, because he was gross, so he wasn't given very many opportunities for advancement. Like, he deserved more, but, like━yeah, just nobody liked him. He was kind of like a Dwight Schrute character. [Everyone laughs]

 

CAT

Wow. [laughs] That's so real.

 

JESS

It's interesting!

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, it's very funny for me, just generally, to imagine Giygas's army, Gyiyg's army, as being a bunch of petty middle managers all looking for advancement.

 

JESS

Now I want to see an Adult Swim-type show using all the original clay models, or like, you know, Robot Chicken, where they have these different scenes of Master Belch being upset because he's up for promotion and didn't get it.

 

CAT

Yeah, it's time for our EarthBound workplace drama. Where is it? [Everyone laughs]

 

MONKEYNESS

I'm glad that Itoi seems to have such an affinity for Master Belch. You can see there's so many designs for him; they made a plushie for him; he even has his own special sound effects for his battles, so… It's nice to see Itoi has such an affinity for a character you can tell he liked a lot, even though it ended up having to be a character that had to have its role in the final game reduced.

 

CHARLIE

But they still brought him back; they brought him back for one last ride there, near the end. It's like, “No, he is important. We're going to make him important for a moment.”

 

MONKEYNESS

[laughs]

 

CAT

He's going to go down fighting no matter what.

 

CHARLIE

And go down in a very spectacular way.

 

[annotation start sound effect]

 

JESS

We can actually further corroborate this background about Master Belch and the drama of his rank in Gyiyg's army. Similar character notes were given to localizer Marcus Lindblom when he was tasked to translate MOTHER 2 into EarthBound. His original source code scripting files━that is, the notes given to him by APE to help provide context for creating the English translation━were uploaded by Lindblom to the Internet Archive in 2021. It essentially says, “He's big, strong, and filthy. He's the toughest monster among Gyiyg's subordinates. Gyiyg himself seems to be disgusted with him, and as such, he's been denied promotion.” I'd say notes given for the translator to keep in mind while translating are as canon as anything in the game.

 

[annotation end sound effect]

 

CAT

Another section that's in the exhibit was a sequence of hand-drawn intro sequence storyboards, which also, I was like, “Oh yeah, I did this, too.” I still have pages of me drawing my own title sequence to the “naming the characters” section of a game that's drawn practically the same way as what's here in this exhibit.

 

In an early version of MOTHER 2, you first see a meteor orbiting the Earth, then slamming into it, and it says “Presented by Shigesato Itoi”. The Earth then moves to reposition itself to become the MOTHER logo, and the "2" below it appears, but it's straining━the logo itself is straining; it's going like [makes straining noises]. As it reads on the piece of paper, “It becomes tired and sad,” it “starts sweating and trembling.” But it pulls itself together and becomes the full logo, except then, it starts sweating and trembling again and it loses its number. It then cuts to Ness in an amorphous room with a door in front of him against a background represented by some squiggles, which I think is meant to be the trippy battle backgrounds. And it's kind of like a “Hey, you should move your character” sort of tutorial sequence, like, “Start here. Walk through the door. Okay, great.” And then, when you go through the door, you sleep in his bed and it starts the intro sequence of the game. So, that's kind of where the differences stop.

 

There are some sketches by Ooyama that were also very interesting; they're very random. Some of them have appeared before in different ways: There's a sketch of Dalaam suspended on the gushing water coming from a stone elephant, like the town is suspended on this thing, and that's a piece of art that, in its more finished version, has been seen in the MOTHER 1+2 art book. But there's also a very loose sketch of the main terminal of New York City's Grand Central Station, with the central focus being the iconic clock-topped information kiosk. It's an extremely loose sketch; it took me a while to figure out what I was even looking at. And then, near that are also sketches of really innocuous things, like a ticket box office that would be in, like, a theater or an amusement park. And then, a thing that's sort of like the Worthless Protoplasm, but it descends into a still image of a drop of water hitting a pool of water. And then, an illustration of two ears connected by a looping tube, like a memorial ribbon but upside down. And, best I could guess… I'm guessing that's just like, Ooyama had some sketches, the sketches were in the box, and it was like, “Here, these were from this time, but…”

 

MONKEYNESS

It's interesting to me [that] the town on top of the spreading water from the elephant is coming around again, because I remember that that was a big topic of discussion for people who really explored the concept art, back in, like, the latter days of Starman.net's peak. It was interesting to so many people, and it continues to intrigue me to this day, because it seemed like Itoi had a fascination with many towns and cities being in very illustriously high locations. 'Cause you see that in Dalaam, how it's on the mountain, and even earlier iterations of it, where it seems to have been either on clouds or in snow, or something like that. You see that with this elephant drawing, and then you also see that in the concept art, some earlier concept art of Dungeon Man, where it seems the top of his head was some sort of city, as well.

 

CAT

Yeah. Gosh, that'd be fun to explore that.

 

JESS

It's kind of like, when you're going on an adventure and you're going someplace that most people don't go, you're gonna go up or you're gonna go down, and you gotta travel a ways to get there. So, it might just be as simple as that, too, that it's just removed from the normal experience that most people have every day.

 

MONKEYNESS

Right.

 

CAT

It was really cool to see so many of the paper clay figures. Obviously, we spent a whole prior episode of Dimensional Slip talking about the inspiration that those have had for so many different artists throughout the history of the MOTHER fandom.

 

MONKEYNESS

I was not at all expecting the actual original paper clay figures to be there at all. I was under the impression that they were lost somewhere. I didn't know that they were preserved so well, but I don't know why, at the same time, that was so surprising to me and others with how much Itoi does love this series.

 

CAT

They're still in remarkably good condition.

 

JESS

With very minute details on them, too.

 

CAT

It is crazy how detailed they are. Really something to behold, something like the Violent Roach and I'm like, as an artist, like, “Oh my god.” Even new, I would be afraid of this thing falling apart. It's so precise, the limbs are so narrow, the points on it are so fine, I'm just shocked that this thing is still keeping itself together after all this time. They're beautiful.

 

JESS

Yeah, like, what kind of box or something were those being stored in? 'cause they look brand new.

 

MONKEYNESS

Thirty years, and it still looks like that's something that could have happened very recently. I hope that, before they pack everything away, they take some really high quality photos of each one on, like, just a white background or something. 'Cause it's just so jarring to think that this Ness I'm seeing in all these photos across social media is the same one that I saw in the Player's Guide when I was a little kid.

 

CAT

Yeah.

 

JESS

I'm hoping they're going to be included in the book that gets published.

 

MONKEYNESS

Yeah. Give me some new high-definition renders━

 

JESS

Like, full page!

 

MONKEYNESS

━for people to use in thumbnails, please.

 

CAT

Yeah, and turnarounds, 'cause I could look, I could pivot my head and see the backs of them, but they didn't have a mirror up. I would love there to have been a mirror up, so you could, like- These are three-dimensional figures, and there's a side of them we've never seen before.

 

MONKEYNESS

[laughs] The side of MOTHER you've never seen.

 

CAT

[laughs] Yeah, the butt.

 

MONKEYNESS

[laughs]

 

CAT

So, as the exhibit is wrapping itself up, there's a wall of forty-eight pieces of paper. The second programming director, Koji Malta, said that they couldn't release the game in the state that it was in May 5th, 1994. And keep in mind, MOTHER 2 released August 27th 1994, so just a few months beforehand. Changes needed to be made to string together the different events to make the game more playable. So, the staff as a whole checked the game and made a huge list of changes, many of them small, quality-of-life tweaks, but some of them, things that are absolutely shocking that were added so late. And I know this is a particular point of interest of yours, Charlie and this is the part of the exhibit that I was able to go over the least. So, I'm curious what you recall from this part of the exhibit, and the things that were on this extremely late-game series of changes and additions.

 

CHARLIE

I definitely was fascinated by that section, especially 'cause it should have been more together by that point. Like, certain things, like… Apparently, the Runaway Five hadn't been established as being bad with money at that point, so the reason why you're helping them out is not clear. I think, generally, things were just not clear about how things were connected at that point, and so a lot of the notes are about actually providing some narrative clarity. Which I think actually makes a certain amount of sense that things felt pretty disjointed at that point in the development. In part because game development is always very messy, and things don't really come together until the last few months of a project, anyway.

 

But also, EarthBound, I feel, far more than MOTHER 1, does feel like it has a clear narrative, at the end, that pulls you from one place to another. Part of that is because it's just designed more linearly, but it still feels more interconnected than MOTHER 1. MOTHER 1 feels like it's a bunch of locations that you just get unleashed on early on in the game, and I think anybody who plays EarthBound really feels that interconnectedness a lot more whenever it goes away. Like, whenever you reach Summers and you acquire Poo and, suddenly, the game feels open in a way that it didn't before, I know a lot of people who kind of stalled out at that point.

 

CAT

Oh, really?

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, it's like, suddenly, you have so many options, so many threads to potentially pull, and you're not sure what's important; you're not sure where to go necessarily from there. And I wonder if part of that is that they just didn't get to establishing that interconnectedness at that point, like they ran out of time to really keep that clear narrative. Although, I think the game also re-establishes a clear progression a little bit after that. Like, once you are on the boat from Toto going down to Scaraba, suddenly, it's linear again. But, yeah, I wonder if the game had felt like that a lot more earlier on because they hadn't made those final changes that they did.

 

JESS

Well, and the development of the game was so disjointed through the entire process, and, I mean, Satoru Iwata had to come in in 1993 to help them get things back on track. And I'm sure that his part of coming in was sort of like correcting the course of the ship to help them figure out where they really, ultimately wanted to be.

 

MONKEYNESS

There's something to be said that, this late in development, they were still trying to tie, you know, a group as major as the Runaway Five to why they're even involved. Kind of shows Itoi's mental state by the end of this, right? 'Cause he very purposely took the game and story direction in the sequel in a very different direction from MOTHER 1 and 2's structures, because he was tired of doing what he considered the “road trip movie” thing. I wonder if that was a driving force in that, just because of how many loose ends there are to tie up.

 

CAT

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, MOTHER, the first one, it is such an open world after a point…

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, even at the very beginning, like, you leave the house and it feels a lot more open than it really is. Like, there is a limitation of how far you can go, but you can also explore a lot before you even get to Podunk proper if you took a wrong turn.

 

CAT

Yeah, I think it's a fair guess that Itoi may have realized, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Well, it was barely manageable the first time; it was even less manageable the second time. And it was a good instinct and cool things happened, but it would be really great to focus on storytelling and not this kind of… huge explorable world concept. Because if you keep making that bigger, it's going to come back to bite you. So, maybe you should bottle that up a bit.”

 

MONKEYNESS

Mmm-hmm. And then, that way, he was able to reel it in and really focus on each individual character, which seems like a lot of his passion has always lied in.

 

CAT

Yeah. One of, I think, the most surprising things that I saw on this list of final changes is, the opening of the Magicant sequence wasn't there. So, when you collect all the Eight Melodies, they didn't automatically play; they made a change so that they would automatically play once you got all of them. And then, from what I gather from these notes, the entire black-and-white flashback to Ness as a baby, with his parents talking about his red hat, may have been added at this last minute because the transition to Magicant was otherwise too abrupt to make any kind of sense… which is wild, if true.

 

MONKEYNESS

Especially in a game that is so unapologetic about pulling you in a very weird, jarring direction so often.

 

CAT

If so, a very graceful solution. To just be like, “Okay, so we can add a little bit of a dream sequence here, and then you can just hard cut to Magicant like we were going to do anyway,” and people were like, “Oh, yeah, cool, cool, cool. That's a dream; that's fine.”

 

CHARLIE

Yeah, a lot of, I think, the notes there was just about making the game a little less jarring than it otherwise would have been.

 

CAT

And, good grief, they must have not slept very much those few months. [Everyone laughs]

 

MONKEYNESS

[sarcastically] No way.

 

CHARLIE

As is tradition.

 

CAT

[laughs] Yeah. So, after that section in the exhibit, there's hand-written dialogue from Shigesato Itoi. Very early on, there were these dialogue forms made up so he'd know exactly the correct number of characters in each of the text windows. But then, he later switched to dictating everything, which has been something that's been talked about quite a bit over the years. He dictated everything, character by character, including punctuation, and that continued on into the development of MOTHER 3. But it was really cool to see these early forms for fitting things into text boxes, and it was a pretty efficient and smart way to do it, but I guess it just didn't feel right in the end.

 

There were also the hand-written lyrics to "Smiles and Tears", a little background on the history of the Katsuman namedrop in MOTHER 2━a restaurant that now no longer exists, unfortunately; it died during the pandemic. And then, much to our surprise, a collection of MOTHER 2 / EarthBound memorabilia, much of it━maybe all of it━belonging to Koala, the #1 collector of MOTHER trilogy memorabilia in the whole world. Which is a forthcoming Dimensional Slip, where we'll talk to him and Muraishi, the #2 biggest collector in the world.

 

JESS

Yeah, that was weird turning the corner and seeing those things there, and I was like, “Wait a second… We've seen this before!”

 

CAT

“I know this! This was in my hotel room a couple months ago, and now it's here! That's crazy!”

 

MONKEYNESS

You know, something that was a really nice gesture to see in the exhibit, with how forthcoming recently Itoi has been about caring so much about the overseas fans is… It was such a nice gesture to see that they had the poster for the North American release there. Seeing the word "EarthBound" in that exhibit was incredibly surprising and, again, just a really nice gesture.

 

CAT

Yeah, absolutely. It sort of tied the whole thing together, almost as if saying, “…And there is another chapter to the story, but that's a story for another time.”

 

MonkeyNess, Charlie, thank you both so much for being here and exploring the Secrets of MOTHER 2 exhibit with us. What's next for you? Where can folks find you out there in the wilds of the internet?

 

CHARLIE

All of my stuff is with Fangamer, so anything that Fangamer is doing, I'm probably connected to in some way, even if minor. But we're mostly just a merchandise store, so go to fangamer.com and buy a little bit of everything. We don't have as much EarthBound-related stuff as we used to, but we do have a few things left over, in case you wanted to, you know, round out your Ness cosplay.

 

CAT

Still got those player's guides, right?

 

CHARLIE

We do still have the player's guides, yes. We got guides for EarthBound and MOTHER 3.

 

CAT

Hard to find a player's guide in the English language relating to those games, so, uh… And they're beautiful. They are absolutely gorgeous.

 

MONKEYNESS

They're very good.

 

CAT

If all of our talk about them in the prior episode didn't convince you already, head on over to Fangamer. We'll link to them on this episode's page. How 'bout you, MonkeyNess?

 

MONKEYNESS

If you'd like to check out more of what I do, I make videos discussing the development history, as well as doing video essays on the artistic side of the MOTHER series on my YouTube channel, and I'm also on Twitter under the same name.

 

JESS

Thank you so much to Charlie and MonkeyNess for joining us. And thank you for listening. We'll be back as soon as humanly possible with our continuation of the story of EarthBound Beginnings.

 

CAT

Expect our interviews with Shigesato Itoi and Keiichi Suzuki in the new year.

 

JESS

To help us with that extensive post-production process, join us on Patreon at Patreon.com/OmniverseMedia to stay up to date with Cat's production blogs.

 

CAT

Or drop us a line on our Discord at omniverse.media/discord to see what's up and get in on our community of in-depth MOTHER discourse.

 

JESS

But, for now…

 

CAT & JESS

That's all she wrote.

 

[upbeat music plays]

 

CAT

“Mother,” She Wrote is made possible thanks to the generous support of our Patreon Producers:

Amber Deveraux, Austin Brown, Becky Scott Fairley, Bob Hogan, C B, Danielle McDonald, Joe “Tank” Ricciardelli, Josh King, MjolnirMK86, Patrick Webster, Sean Hutchinson, Sean T. Redd…

 

And our Super-Deluxe Executive Patreon Producers:

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JESS

You can join the team on Patreon or Supporting Cast - just head to Mothershewrote.earth/support! And if you think “MOTHER,” She Wrote is simply smashing, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser  - and be sure to subscribe via your favorite podcast player.

 

CAT

This series is recorded and produced in Orlando, Florida and Louisville, Kentucky on lands stolen from their Indigenous people: the Timucua and Seminole, and Shawnee, Cherokee, Osage, Seneca-Iroquois, Miami, Hopewell and Adena.

 

JESS

Acknowledgement of the first peoples of these lands, and the lasting repercussions of colonization is just the beginning of the restorative work that is necessary. Through awareness, we can prompt allyship, action, and ultimately decolonization. 

 

CAT

For links to aid Indigenous efforts and to learn more about the first nations of the land where you live, visit omniverse.media/landback

 

JESS

“MOTHER,” She Wrote is written, produced, and performed by me: Jessica Mudd.

 

CAT

And me: Cat Blackard. Our original score is composed and performed by Jess. 

 

JESS

“MOTHER,” She Wrote is not affiliated with Nintendo, Shigesato Itoi, or any rights holders of the MOTHER and EarthBound intellectual properties. Please play the games' official Nintendo releases.

 

[Omniverse Audio Brand]