Everything we've seen of this game is so painfully "Nintendo 64" that it makes me instantly nostalgic despite not being aware of it as a kid. As cool as it would have been to see this version of Mother 3 completed, I'm weirdly happy it wasn't - there's something about these lonely, abandoned concepts that lets the mind go wild with "what if" and "if only". The screenshots and videos are little portals into a bygone era, and help us recapture some of that feeling of excitement towards the seemingly limitless promise and potential video games had back then.

That dog haunts my godsdamned dreams, though

I fear no man… but that thing…

The fact that we will never see this game again

It scares me.

I’ve played the first chapter, and honestly I see no positives to it. The graphics are horrendous; I know graphics don’t “matter” or whatever, but I mean come on. I can hardly tell what my character is supposed to look like from this mess of polygons. The music is worse than the GBA soundfont, and loops so quickly I had to mute my N64 to prevent myself from going insane. Each character so far gets, like, one line of dialogue, and I have no idea what these characters even are. The gameplay is just the absolute worst. It takes forever to reach from place to place, even in the goddamn prologue. The enemy variety is literally just snakes and crows, and the area design is atrocious. People say Mother 1’s design was bad, but this...this is just special levels of bad. It’s literally just plains with some trees or cliffs sprinkled throughout. 90% of my time was walking one step and triggering a random encounter, and I had to prevent Lucas from fucking stealing exp since he is already so good (what the hell, since when do protags start out good)? And I don’t know if this is my fault or if it’s unlocked later, but my units can’t even trade with one another. I can’t bring myself to believe this is an actual gameplay feature; who the fuck would leave trading out? Not only is Lucas also the exp stealing difficulty invalidating party member, all the other units are trash as well. Flint can’t even do a third of damage to this snakes (who have like 40 hp at level one, wtf?), while Boney does jack shit for damage since all he had is no PSI and low strength and he’s really bad. Kumatora I actually know from YouTube, but here she’s just garbage. Not only is her portrait a fucking mess, but she can’t do shit. It takes forever for her attacks to hit, and even when they do hit, they barely do any damage. I mean, I can’t name a single positive in this mess of a game. While you can argue that Persona 5 has a mediocre story, it is objective fact that it has the best gameplay, the best characters, the best social sim aspects, the best gameplay, and the best music in the entire RPG genre. Earthbound 64 has NONE of that. People just like Lucas since he was in Melee and he's a “well written" now just because you guys watched one multi-hour long video essay or whatever. Whatever. I bet I can’t get through the thick skulls of Mother fans, so my words are just waves crashing against a beach. But if some of you more enlightened fellows could give me literally any reason to continue playing this heap of rubbish, than it will be gladly accepted (I probably won’t, though).