These two JRPGs were released five years apart — Mother 1 in 1989 for the Famicom, Mother 2 for the Super Nintendo — and, while Mother 2 technically happens a few years after the events of the first game, the sequel feels more like an improved version of the first game, rather than a proper sequel. Both have the exact same structure: from graphics, to battle mechanics, to the beats of the story. A few extra years of maturity in the industry have made it so that Mother 2 is a much more compelling experience.
The combat system is what one expects of JRPGs: using a lot of menu inputs, all characters are assigned an action to perform on their turn and, based on speed statuses, an order is assigned to actions of friends and foes. In both games, only a vague description of each ability is available during combat, players are required to memorize the finer details of spell effects. In Mother 1, players are actually on their own trying to figure out the details of each spell; Mother 2, blessedly, adds in-depth explanations that can be accessed outside battles.
Most spells have variants suffixed by a Greek letter, for example: Life alpha, Life beta, Life gamma, etc. They are not necessarily stronger versions of the same effect, instead the effect may be applied to multiple targets or be a different effect altogether. “Critical” physical attacks are possible, though the game does not use that wording; instead, a colourful “SMAAAAASH” text is displayed.
As expected, a character dies once they reach 0 HP, and they can be revived by visiting a hospital and paying a fee, using very special items, or late-game spells. Mother 2 introduces a mechanic I haven’t seen before, where HP is not subtracted all at once; instead, it is slowly drained and you’re given the chance to end the battle before a character’s HP reaches zero. Also introduced in the second game, a character may survive mortal damage depending on their “Guts” stat.
Outside of battle, players also spend a lot of time in menus. While neither game provides a decent menu experience by today’s standards, there is a huge gap between the two games; Mother 1 is very clunky in that area, not to mention some actions are impossible to perform. Want to remove an equipment? You have to equip something else in its place. Want to figure out if an equipment from the shop is better than what you have? You’ll need to open the shop, check the item, close the shop, check your equipped item and then make a decision. Oh, and you also need to figure out who can use that item. The experience in Mother 2 is more streamlined: when an item is selected in the shop, the game highlights which characters can use them, and it flashes the characters for which that item would be an upgrade. If you buy it, the vendor asks if you want to equip it right away and offers to buy the old item. There are still major annoyances; for example, to figure out the special effects of an item, like extra resistance to an element, you still need to inspect the item. If your inventory is full and you want to buy an upgrade for an item, you can’t: you first have to free some space, even if you intend to sell the old item immediately.
Neither game has a real tutorial but, while you’re left to your own devices in Mother 1, the sequel adds many NPCs to explain the game mechanics, including an NPC in every major city that sells “hints”, that is, a clue on where to go next in case you’re stuck with the story. No such freebie in Mother 1.
While the second instalment mostly adds on top of the first, one key component was absent from that game: the world map. Mother 1 relies heavily on a world map to show key points of interest, a crucial component given how massive the world is and how long traveling can take. Mother 2, on the other hand, scales down the world map such that most traveling is either straightforward or done through buses, and cities get their own elaborate maps with major buildings highlighted for convenience. Neither game provides assistance navigating dungeons, but that is never an issue with Mother 2; however, some dungeons in the first game are huge and can be a real pain to navigate.
Unsurprisingly, the technical limitations of the hardware are more pronounced in the older game. For example, most buildings are identical on the inside, even buildings in different cities. For similar reasons, you can’t enter all buildings in the game. The same is true in Mother 2, but there you get unique dialog when knocking on those doors. And those that can be entered have unique layouts and features.
Random encounters are a big component of Mother 1, annoyingly so at first. In fact, the recommended way to play the game nowadays is to download a mod that tweaks the random encounter frequency (and experience gain). Mother 2 changes this substantially: enemies can be seen like regular characters and you’re given the chance to avoid them by not getting into their line of sight. You can even exploit the way the game is coded by walking away until enemies are no longer visible; if you’re lucky, when you walk back they will not have randomly spawned in the same place as before. The frequency of encounters in the second game is also generally lower, with the exception of the final few dungeons, where the game attempts to drain your resources before boss battles by throwing many dangerous enemies your way.
I can’t speak much about the difficulty of the first game, as I used a patch that made Mother 1 less annoying by today’s standards, and the patch includes balances to the speed in which characters level up. With those changes, the battles were fairly trivial. The second, on the other hand, places a lot of emphasis on “can you finish this dungeon before you run out of resources?”, and “resources” almost always equals MP. This is particularly true on the final segment of the game, which is a long sequence of very tough random encounters, followed by a lengthy boss battle. On my first attempt, my party reached the final boss in a pretty weak state, forcing me to load a save prior to starting this final segment, stock up on regeneration items and do some farming.
The party composition is almost identical between games: a protagonist boy who focuses in physical attacks and healing, a girl that focuses on magical abilities and healing, and one boy who specializes in items; the second game also brings a fourth character, a boy who is able to employ all kinds of spells and do decent physical damage.
In both games, the girl in your group contacts you through telepathy long before you form a party, and everyone in the city where you eventually meet acknowledge and encourage this future encounter. This telepathic communication, as well as the opening sequence of both games, where you’re awoken in the middle of the night by supernatural events around your house, have all the telltale signs of the call to adventure, in the Hero’s Journey sense of the expression. The games employ these tropes from start to end, but I’d like to highlight “the apotheosis” sequences in each of them.
For Mother 1, you eventually descend into an underwater laboratory, where you learn the truth about your grandfather and get blessed with one of his powerful creations: a strong robot to protect you in the final stages of your quest. This is arguably an “Atonement with the Father” moment. With his blessing, you start your ascent up a mountain — note the descent/ascent metaphor — to find the final piece of the melody you’ve been trying to recover. Once you do, you are mysteriously transported to the magical city where the queen responsible for this quest lives, and the full melody is played for her. She is then revealed to be your grandmother, who reveals that your grandparents fostered the alien that now threatens the world; the entire city is revealed to have been an illusion created by her, and you are sent back to the final dungeon of the game, now armed with knowledge to defeat your foe: a lullaby from your grandmother. You’ve reached the “Apotheosis” stage of the journey.
In Mother 2, the main character has no strong connection to the main villain — you’re related by a prophecy, rather than through family ties — which arguably makes the plot weaker than that of the previous game. That said, the sequel has very similar plot beats to its predecessor. Your party eventually descends into this “Lost Underworld”, a place where dinosaurs still exist, in what feels a lot like a trip to the past. There, you also collect the final piece of a melody. Once you do, you’re also transported to a magical place, but this time you’re placed inside your own conscience and have to confront — through dialog or battle — friends and foes. Your final enemy in this sequence is a statue that has all the abilities you have, in other words, you face yourself. In “The hero with a thousand faces”, Campbell talks a lot about this need for the hero to “kill himself” and “be reborn” in order to complete their quest; indeed, once you do, you are given many levels of experience, a new powerful teleportation ability, and you’re sent back to the “regular” world to confront your enemy. Apotheosis once again
The final element I’d like to highlight is how the games break the fourth wall, which is done in two ways. NPCs in both games acknowledge real world elements, like mentioning other games, comments on how game development works, or real world events. More interestingly though, both games have a moment where they are talking directly to you, the player. They ask for your name, which is used later, and they tell you to take good care of the main character.
I was recommended these games in a conversation about Undetale, and playing them felt a lot like playing an ancient version of Undertale, from how the games break the fourth wall, to how characters dance and do unexpected things, to the unusual combat options, to the awesome soundtrack. In general, the games are never boring because of how unexpected the story developments are. Playing both in sequence also felt like reliving the evolution of game design over the years, and anyone with an interest in this area would enjoy the experience.