One of Nintendo’s strangest franchises has been its Mother RPG series. Dating back to 1989, the original Famicom game was scheduled for release outside of Japan as Earthbound; however, this release was scrapped, and the series wouldn’t find its way to America until Mother 2‘s localization as Earthbound in 1995 for the Super Nintendo. Today though, Nintendo has finally brought the original game to North America and Europe as Earthbound Beginnings.
Earthbound Beginnings tells the story of a boy named Ninten. With his psychic abilities and his friends, Ninten is tasked with traversing Earth and stopping an alien race from taking over the planet. In terms of gameplay, the game plays very much like a classic RPG, with characters levelling up and learning new abilities to use in combat. What differentiates it from many other games in the genre is its humor and quirkiness, with many “weird” characters and scenes found throughout the game.
Earthbound Beginnings is priced at $6.99 in the US.
Source: Nintendo World Championship 2015
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I kinda like they’re going with “Beginnings” and not the standard fan name of “Zero”.
But, man I wish Nintendo would take an interest in well-made hacks and fan-works. Recently a 25th Anniversary hack of Mother was released with a beautiful makeover of the art and some nice gameplay optimizations.
Instead we get the barebones game the localized but didn’t release way back when 🙁
Sad part is, Mother 3 is the one that everyone wanted. No one really asked for Mother 1. 😛
It’s nice they’re actually acknowledging the series, at least.
They would have to invest in a translation/localization for Mother 3 though. With Mother 1 they already have it completed from their abandoned 1990 release.
That’s all this VC release is. The title screen isn’t even modified to included ‘Beginnings’ in the title – nor the copyright updated, so no text has been changed from that original ‘EarthBound’ NES prototype