Stephen Georg Finally Plays MOTHER 1

Step 1.

Download the GBA version! Music sounds awful, hissy, and poorly emulated? Who cares, this is the unimportant MOTHER game!

Want to a play the official translation of the game that Itoi himself approved of? Haha, how naive of you! You see, a certain professional translator decided that another professional translated changed too many things during localization, unlike in EarthBound where *nothing* was ever changed at all, and certainly not for the better, oh no..

Step 2.

Equip the Easy Ring and neuter the game of it’s difficulty!

Step 3. Beat the game within three days and pat yourself on the back for being a “real” MOTHER fan.

I LOVE BED

@SpitefulCrow

Point 1 is moot since the GBA version of the first game sounds fine regardless. The second game is what mostly has issues.

The translation in the original release was dry and had it’s own issues, despite being official. It was good for the time. Nobody has ever said you have to not play the original release either. It’s another take on the translation.

Point 2 is moot as well since the first mother wasn’t difficult regardless. Tedium is not difficulty, and the easy ring mostly cuts down on the tedium.

Point 3 is also useless since I beat the NES version in 3 days regardless.

Congrats on being contrarian and argumentative. Nevermind that you’re probably baiting.

The story’s the best part of EarthBound Zero anyway, though I wish someone would make a music restoration patch, a la FF6. The GBA has sweet musical capabilities, as we know from Mother 3, but the M1+2 music *is* poorly emulated. Those drums…argh!

Mato, I can only imagine your excitement. Besides, it’s not every day that somoeone chooses to LP the far-better fan translation instead of the hellishly hard, 4-Kids-esque, “official” version.

@game4brains: The NES EarthBound is “hellishly hard” because the Famicom Mother was “hellishly hard”.

And the translation is hardly 4Kids-esque beyond the usual censorship of the era, just dry… EarthBound got edited down a bit too, remember?

@SpitefulCrow

Who died and made you the one to decide who is and who isn’t a real fan?

The point is to play all the games, we don’t care if you play the 1+2 remake or the original.
Japanese folks might as well call you a fake fan for not playing MOTHER and MOTHER 3 in the original, untranslated Japanese versions.

kicker is 100% right, it isn’t that bad for a GBA remake (the problem is the MOTHER 2 one)

I must say as well that I really like both original and GBA versions of the music. The problem is MOTHER 2: I STILL don’t know how they could mess so hard with it.
If they could make a good/decent remake of the music from the Super Mario Advance series they could have made a good remake of EB’s music.

I’ve actually been very interested in taking a look into seeing if it’s possible to restore M1’s music.

Now, I’m only beginning ROM hacking, so my knowledge is considerably limited at this time, but I DO know enough to know that M1 uses the GBA’s PSG channels for its music.

From what I understand, there’s two square waves, one customizable wave channel and a white noise channel. The problem is that I think the original MOTHER used triangle waves for its music, I believe, and the triangle wave is less harsh/scratchy sounding than the smooth, almost flute-like triangle wave.

In theory, if one were to edit the GBA’s PSG channels to change them to triangle waves, one would be able to restore the music! Of course, the drums would also need some special hacking, as they’re stored as separate samples it appears.

Now, the issue is: can the PSG channels be edited, or are they hard-coded to be square waves? I have a bad feeling that they pretty much HAVE to be square waves, meaning that some extensive hacking would have to be done to get around this, and even then what said hacking would entice would be beyond even my knowledge.

It doesn’t help that the game appears to be emulated, and on top of that, appears to use a different sound engine from the MOTHER 2 side, which uses the generic “Sappy” sound engine.

I’m hoping there’s a way to change the waves back to their original forms, but I’m not 100% sure it’s possible, and even if it were, I currently have no idea how to go about doing it. But I really do think I have the willpower to do this if it’s possible; I just currently lack the know-how.

As for the MOTHER 2 side… I’ll make a post on my blog about this sometime, but even if the GBA had top-notch sound quality, it still sounds like the raw samples are just off.

For proof, listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX8AlcoGrUw

It’s the Fourside music, but without the GBA’s downsampling.

But listen closely; notice how it still sounds a bit off? The M1+2 soundfont is now available, so I’d like to compare some instrument samples to their EarthBound counterparts and see if this change is caused by the samples themselves, or if the developers mistakenly changed the key or something.