The first two games in the MOTHER/EarthBound series share many similarities.

They both feature children as the heroes, take place in modern times, and share the same villain, but otherwise seem completely non-sequitur.

No areas or characters from MOTHER appear in MOTHER 2, despite three of the four heroes from each of the games appearing strikingly similar, featuring a boy a cap and striped shirt, a frying pan wielding psychic girl, and a bespectacled nerd genius adept at technological weaponry.

MOTHER’s story goes as follows...

Prior to MOTHER, a world very similar to our own is being scouted by alien empire with plans to invade earth. In the 19th century, the aliens kidnap George and Maria from America to study humans. Maria is allowed to raise an alien child named Giygas, and sings a lullaby known as the 8 Melodies. The kindness imbued within the song causes Giygas great pain, and the couple are ejected from the ship and sent back to earth, but not before George steals the secret of PSI abilities from the aliens.

Later in 1988, Giygas has become the emperor of the alien empire and initiates the beginning stages of the invasion in America in the same region that George and Maria were kidnapped from.

MOTHER’s hero, Ninten, guided by his Great Grandfather's diary, goes on a quest to realize his PSI powers to stop the invasion from taking place, picking up friends (Lloyd, Teddy, and Ana) along the way who assist him in surviving the hordes of enemies who stand in their way of re-learning the 8 Melodies that Maria once sung to Giygas.

Ninten and his party encounter Giygas as a frail looking alien on his mother ship floating in a machine that could possibly be some kind of life support. This suggests that Giygas’ previous encounter with the song left him seriously crippled.

During the climactic battle, Ninten and his friends sing the 8 Melodies to weaken Giygas, and the alien overlorld is forced to retreat into deep space, halting the invasion and saving Earth, for the moment.

As the mother ship blasts off, Giygas promises Ninten that he will return to take revenge.

This is where MOTHER ends, with MOTHER 2/EarthBound taking place a few years later in the 1990’s, presumably 1994, the year of MOTHER 2’s release.

MOTHER’s world is clearly based on the real world, and explicitly takes place in the United States of America, be it a fictionalized version of it.

MOTHER 2 however, seems to show no sign of the USA even existing, and the geography of MOTHER 2’s world appears totally fictional, with a world map populated with nations such as “Foggyland” and “Eagleland”

My answer to this is that following the ending of MOTHER, Giygas went back in time in an attempt to alter Earth to such a state that his second attempt at an Earth invasion would be successful by eliminating the conditions that lead to his demise at the end of MOTHER.

Perhaps Giygas went back in time to the period that the Egyptian pyramids were being built to alter Earth’s history with an initial attack, or attacks (thusly a history of these was recorded in the Scaraba Pyramid), which included planting devices like the Mani Mani statue, and maybe artificially triggering Earth’s tectonic plates to shift in different directions, leading to the formation of much a much different global situation by the 1990s, with similar, yet unique countries being founded in each hemisphere, for example, Eagleland developing in North America (or at least a part of North America) instead of the USA, and Great Britain becoming Winters, as Winters is the home of Stonehenge in MOTHER 2.

As we know from EarthBound, the invasion Giygas launched in the 90’s was at first, a huge success, and Earth was taken over by Giygas’s troops and became a cesspool of darkness. This is because the specific circumstances that lead to Ninten realizing his psychic powers and questing with the MOTHER party to defeat Giygas never came to pass, and therefore there was no one to challenge Giygas.

However, Giygas’s plan did not eliminate Ninten from the picture in this altered timeline, and the chosen one emerged as a different person, as Ness.

Ness, like Ninten, lives north of town with his mother, sister, and dog, and his father, who is always at work and is accessible only through the phone, seems almost identical to Ninten’s.

Ana was now Paula, and Lloyd, ended up being “reborn” in Winters as Jeff, where he attended a boarding school.

An analog for MOTHER’s Teddy never surfaced in this new incarnation of Earth, and it was somehow foreseen that Ness’s new party would be short a member and need assistance.

So, the prince of Dallam, Poo was trained from the birth to be a powerful warrior to help the chosen one. This would explain why there are special weapons made especially for Poo floating around the world.

What doomed this new version of Earth at first was that unlike Ninten, Ness never received “the calling” to begin his journey, in which case Giygas would have gone unchallenged.
 
Thanks to Buzz Buzz coming back in time to warn Ness at the beginning of EarthBound, this was avoided. Ness was able to recover the new 8 Melodies, which allowed him to absorb the power that was able to defeat Giygas in the past, though this alone was not enough (though it sure helped a bunch), and it took the whole world’s prayers to destroy Giygas once and for all.

This is my interpretation of the connection between MOTHER and MOTHER 2.


<<<< Back to STSH - Video Games