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here_inmyheadBeta version of Mother 2!
There's been a huge update regarding Japanese magazine articles there. :o Stuff like interviews, behind-the-scenes of Mother 2, etc.
Puri copy-pastes fun bits!
This issue has a very in-depth interview with series creator Shigesato Itoi. We don't have a translation of the interview yet, but right off the bat he answers some big questions we fans have had for years. If only we had found this stuff earlier!
Here are the main important things he says in the beginning of the interview.
* The subtitle of MOTHER 2, "Giegue/Gyiyg/Giygas Strikes Back", is meant to make it obvious what to expect as the final boss of the game.
* Giegue/Gyiyg/Giygas didn't die at the end of the first game, and because of the subtitle of this game, it's obvious he's at the end of this game too.
* The player names the main character of MOTHER 2, so it's entirely up to the player to decide if he's the same person as MOTHER 1's main character. If you want them to be the same, then they're the same. If you don't want them to be the same, they don't have to. His suggestion seems to be to think of them as the same, though.
How would Ninten lose his asthma though? And who are Ana & Loid, chopped liver? XDD;;;
First up is a 3-page interview with Shigesato Itoi concerning MOTHER 2. There's a lot of interesting info in here. Until we get a translation of it, here are some of the more interesting points:
* The game took 5 years, way longer than expected, and at many times, Itoi felt like the project was doomed.
* Even random kids would bug him and ask him when MOTHER 2 is finally going to come out. That's how long it took, and how anticipated the game was.
* MOTHER 1 took 3 megabits of space, and the plan was for MOTHER 2 to be 8 megabits. Then it moved to 12 megabits. Eventually, it was pushed to 24 megabits, which was a huge amount at the time.
* One of the toughest things was making the diagonal map stuff work and look nice. It required a LOT of craftsmanship and a lot of time.
* The music guys went crazy and made so much music that before long, just the music itself took up 8 megabits of space! Itoi says it would've been about 2 CDs worth of music. But he's really proud of the music, and doesn't want anyone to complain about it now that so much has been put into it.
* Itoi refers to the battle backgrounds jokingly as a "video drug". This is noteworthy because the dummied-out Video Relaxant item in EarthBound was originally known as "Video Drug" in MOTHER 2, even though the item was dummied out in that game, too. So apparently that's what "Video Relaxant" refers to: the battle backgrounds.
* The battle backgrounds were all made by one guy, who Itoi says was a real background graphics geek. The guy spent two years doing nothing but working on the backgrounds! He says he thinks there are about 200 different ones.
* Itoi mentions that after finishing MOTHER 1, he wanted part of MOTHER 2 to be so that you travel between stars/planets, not just between places on one planet. But that would've made the story more cliche-like, he admits. He decided against it after only 3 or 4 months of mulling it over.
* His favorite town was Summers for a long while, but now it's Threek/Threed, as it's full of memories.
* Itoi doesn't like the idea of having overworld maps with icons for towns. He wanted his games to have no distinction between the towns and the outside world, so he tried hard to make things unique inside each town.
* Itoi's original idea for the HP boxes was to have them be like pachinko balls, and each time you get hit, a bunch of the balls drop off the screen. It sounds like they even had that system implemented for a while. But the idea wouldn't work so well when a character gets really high HP, so he eventually hit upon the idea of the rolling counter, like the ones you see in cars. He had decided to use the rolling meter thing 4 years before this interview.
* The game is mostly written in kana because that's closest to how people talk.
* The bicycle had "tank controls" at first, but Itoi had a hard time controlling it, so they eventually fixed it to have the controls we're used to now.
* Itoi asked his staff to come up with MOTHER 2 default names, but in the end, nothing really good was suggested, so he made most of them up himself.
* Itoi mentions that the player's name also appears in MOTHER 2, and that it also plays a bigger role in the game than you might think.
* Itoi feels that games are straying away from people, particularly girls (hence the game's slogan), so he wanted to try to make a game that would convince them to come back. He doesn't want people to go overboard with games though, so he also hopes kids will go out and experience new things too.
* The interviewer asks about MOTHER 3. Itoi says it'll probably take about two years, and that it could possibly be on the next generation system.
* Shigeru Miyamoto was very happy with MOTHER 2, and it was the first RPG he ever completed.
* Itoi mentions that many of the characters in the game are based on people in real life, though he refused to give any specifics. At the very least, the miners in the desert are based off of some Japanese construction company executives (TOMATO NOTE: I'm guessing these guys accompanied Itoi on his gold mine adventure).
Tee hee. Video Relaxant. :)
The highlight here is a two-page interview with APE programmer Kouji Malta and HAL programmer Satoru Iwata, both of whom were the main programmers for MOTHER 2. The main things mentioned in this interview are:
* APE had more people working on MOTHER 2 than HAL. It sounds like HAL mostly handled the overall programming, while APE handled the data aspect of things, such as working on maps and text.
* Every other week, people from APE would go to HAL and do "work retreats" to get lots of work done on the game. It was to the point that the meeting room in HAL's building almost seemed like a branch office of APE. Also, you can see Mt. Fuji from HAL's building, and from that room.
* It was nice working in such a pretty environment, though working out there made day-to-day life a little more inconvenient.
* Itoi would often go to visit the guys at HAL, and people in restaurants in the area would be shocked to see him nonchalantly dining there with them.
* The game had been fully finished four months before the interview. They used that extra time to add in extra little things, such as the slot machine brothers. Everyone on the staff played through the game and suggested little things that would make the game better.
* Making the bicycle work was REALLY hard, but they did it anyway. Despite the fact that you barely get a chance to use it in the game. In such situations, most programmers would say, "Forget it!" but Iwata says that the programmers at APE would always answer such big requests with, "We can do that!"
* One of the most difficult programming issues was the delivery man system. Malta explains how they needed to have the delivery man find a path to the character, as having the delivery man walk through obstacles wasn't very good. Years later, PK Hackers would be awed by how this works. See here.
* But after the delivery guy delivers the stuff, he runs off at full speed without care for any obstacles. They found that funny.
Oh god, the pizza experiment. XDD
First is a full-page interview with MOTHER and MOTHER 2 composer Keiichi Suzuki. These are the main points made in the interview.
* A MOTHER 2 CD is planned for release in November.
* The biggest difference between working on MOTHER 1 and MOTHER 2 was that the Super Famicom gave him much more freedom to make what he wanted. In MOTHER 1, they were limited to three notes at any one time, and he couldn't use the sounds he wanted. With MOTHER 2, he could have 8 notes at any time, and the sound quality was much better. So for MOTHER 2, writing music wasn't much different from how he writes normal music.
* He would write music on a synthesizer, then sit down with programmers and work with them until it worked in-game.
* Suzuki says he wrote the music that plays when you're walking around. Also, including all the music that was left out of the game, he thinks he composed 100 different music pieces in all for MOTHER 2.
* His favorite tune is the bicycle music. He had actually composed it long before MOTHER 2, but it fit so well that he used it.
* The key word the musicians used as the theme for their music was "John Lennon", because he sung about love a lot, and that same feeling of love is in MOTHER 2's story.
* Aside from the music, Suzuki also offered his suggestions for the game's story, but he doesn't remember what all he said, as the entire game took five years to make. Also, Suzuki's voice is in the game somewhere, and he asks readers to try to find it.
♥♥♥♥♥
Comics to share~! ♥
Paula's a brat in this. XD Poor Ness! The art/expressions are adorable though.
The style reminds me of Peanuts; guess who's Lucy. God, I feel bad for Ness holding these pails. T_T
Look at that! Someone drew Paula & Ness to advertise Mother 2. :o
A girl dresses as a Retro-Age Hippie
Mr. Saturns dressing up as Ness, Paula and Jeff. Dear god this is precious! *______*
More Saturn!Ness & Gang Misadventures! This time with a frog. XD
Police Detective Saturn! Hee hee, here's your chance to see Mr. Saturn in a trench coat~ ♥
Which ends in tears and karaoke.
Yay for temporary amusement! :o
There's been a huge update regarding Japanese magazine articles there. :o Stuff like interviews, behind-the-scenes of Mother 2, etc.
Puri copy-pastes fun bits!
This issue has a very in-depth interview with series creator Shigesato Itoi. We don't have a translation of the interview yet, but right off the bat he answers some big questions we fans have had for years. If only we had found this stuff earlier!
Here are the main important things he says in the beginning of the interview.
* The subtitle of MOTHER 2, "Giegue/Gyiyg/Giygas Strikes Back", is meant to make it obvious what to expect as the final boss of the game.
* Giegue/Gyiyg/Giygas didn't die at the end of the first game, and because of the subtitle of this game, it's obvious he's at the end of this game too.
* The player names the main character of MOTHER 2, so it's entirely up to the player to decide if he's the same person as MOTHER 1's main character. If you want them to be the same, then they're the same. If you don't want them to be the same, they don't have to. His suggestion seems to be to think of them as the same, though.
How would Ninten lose his asthma though? And who are Ana & Loid, chopped liver? XDD;;;
First up is a 3-page interview with Shigesato Itoi concerning MOTHER 2. There's a lot of interesting info in here. Until we get a translation of it, here are some of the more interesting points:
* The game took 5 years, way longer than expected, and at many times, Itoi felt like the project was doomed.
* Even random kids would bug him and ask him when MOTHER 2 is finally going to come out. That's how long it took, and how anticipated the game was.
* MOTHER 1 took 3 megabits of space, and the plan was for MOTHER 2 to be 8 megabits. Then it moved to 12 megabits. Eventually, it was pushed to 24 megabits, which was a huge amount at the time.
* One of the toughest things was making the diagonal map stuff work and look nice. It required a LOT of craftsmanship and a lot of time.
* The music guys went crazy and made so much music that before long, just the music itself took up 8 megabits of space! Itoi says it would've been about 2 CDs worth of music. But he's really proud of the music, and doesn't want anyone to complain about it now that so much has been put into it.
* Itoi refers to the battle backgrounds jokingly as a "video drug". This is noteworthy because the dummied-out Video Relaxant item in EarthBound was originally known as "Video Drug" in MOTHER 2, even though the item was dummied out in that game, too. So apparently that's what "Video Relaxant" refers to: the battle backgrounds.
* The battle backgrounds were all made by one guy, who Itoi says was a real background graphics geek. The guy spent two years doing nothing but working on the backgrounds! He says he thinks there are about 200 different ones.
* Itoi mentions that after finishing MOTHER 1, he wanted part of MOTHER 2 to be so that you travel between stars/planets, not just between places on one planet. But that would've made the story more cliche-like, he admits. He decided against it after only 3 or 4 months of mulling it over.
* His favorite town was Summers for a long while, but now it's Threek/Threed, as it's full of memories.
* Itoi doesn't like the idea of having overworld maps with icons for towns. He wanted his games to have no distinction between the towns and the outside world, so he tried hard to make things unique inside each town.
* Itoi's original idea for the HP boxes was to have them be like pachinko balls, and each time you get hit, a bunch of the balls drop off the screen. It sounds like they even had that system implemented for a while. But the idea wouldn't work so well when a character gets really high HP, so he eventually hit upon the idea of the rolling counter, like the ones you see in cars. He had decided to use the rolling meter thing 4 years before this interview.
* The game is mostly written in kana because that's closest to how people talk.
* The bicycle had "tank controls" at first, but Itoi had a hard time controlling it, so they eventually fixed it to have the controls we're used to now.
* Itoi asked his staff to come up with MOTHER 2 default names, but in the end, nothing really good was suggested, so he made most of them up himself.
* Itoi mentions that the player's name also appears in MOTHER 2, and that it also plays a bigger role in the game than you might think.
* Itoi feels that games are straying away from people, particularly girls (hence the game's slogan), so he wanted to try to make a game that would convince them to come back. He doesn't want people to go overboard with games though, so he also hopes kids will go out and experience new things too.
* The interviewer asks about MOTHER 3. Itoi says it'll probably take about two years, and that it could possibly be on the next generation system.
* Shigeru Miyamoto was very happy with MOTHER 2, and it was the first RPG he ever completed.
* Itoi mentions that many of the characters in the game are based on people in real life, though he refused to give any specifics. At the very least, the miners in the desert are based off of some Japanese construction company executives (TOMATO NOTE: I'm guessing these guys accompanied Itoi on his gold mine adventure).
Tee hee. Video Relaxant. :)
The highlight here is a two-page interview with APE programmer Kouji Malta and HAL programmer Satoru Iwata, both of whom were the main programmers for MOTHER 2. The main things mentioned in this interview are:
* APE had more people working on MOTHER 2 than HAL. It sounds like HAL mostly handled the overall programming, while APE handled the data aspect of things, such as working on maps and text.
* Every other week, people from APE would go to HAL and do "work retreats" to get lots of work done on the game. It was to the point that the meeting room in HAL's building almost seemed like a branch office of APE. Also, you can see Mt. Fuji from HAL's building, and from that room.
* It was nice working in such a pretty environment, though working out there made day-to-day life a little more inconvenient.
* Itoi would often go to visit the guys at HAL, and people in restaurants in the area would be shocked to see him nonchalantly dining there with them.
* The game had been fully finished four months before the interview. They used that extra time to add in extra little things, such as the slot machine brothers. Everyone on the staff played through the game and suggested little things that would make the game better.
* Making the bicycle work was REALLY hard, but they did it anyway. Despite the fact that you barely get a chance to use it in the game. In such situations, most programmers would say, "Forget it!" but Iwata says that the programmers at APE would always answer such big requests with, "We can do that!"
* One of the most difficult programming issues was the delivery man system. Malta explains how they needed to have the delivery man find a path to the character, as having the delivery man walk through obstacles wasn't very good. Years later, PK Hackers would be awed by how this works. See here.
* But after the delivery guy delivers the stuff, he runs off at full speed without care for any obstacles. They found that funny.
Oh god, the pizza experiment. XDD
First is a full-page interview with MOTHER and MOTHER 2 composer Keiichi Suzuki. These are the main points made in the interview.
* A MOTHER 2 CD is planned for release in November.
* The biggest difference between working on MOTHER 1 and MOTHER 2 was that the Super Famicom gave him much more freedom to make what he wanted. In MOTHER 1, they were limited to three notes at any one time, and he couldn't use the sounds he wanted. With MOTHER 2, he could have 8 notes at any time, and the sound quality was much better. So for MOTHER 2, writing music wasn't much different from how he writes normal music.
* He would write music on a synthesizer, then sit down with programmers and work with them until it worked in-game.
* Suzuki says he wrote the music that plays when you're walking around. Also, including all the music that was left out of the game, he thinks he composed 100 different music pieces in all for MOTHER 2.
* His favorite tune is the bicycle music. He had actually composed it long before MOTHER 2, but it fit so well that he used it.
* The key word the musicians used as the theme for their music was "John Lennon", because he sung about love a lot, and that same feeling of love is in MOTHER 2's story.
* Aside from the music, Suzuki also offered his suggestions for the game's story, but he doesn't remember what all he said, as the entire game took five years to make. Also, Suzuki's voice is in the game somewhere, and he asks readers to try to find it.
♥♥♥♥♥
Comics to share~! ♥
Paula's a brat in this. XD Poor Ness! The art/expressions are adorable though.
The style reminds me of Peanuts; guess who's Lucy. God, I feel bad for Ness holding these pails. T_T
Look at that! Someone drew Paula & Ness to advertise Mother 2. :o
A girl dresses as a Retro-Age Hippie
Mr. Saturns dressing up as Ness, Paula and Jeff. Dear god this is precious! *______*
More Saturn!Ness & Gang Misadventures! This time with a frog. XD
Police Detective Saturn! Hee hee, here's your chance to see Mr. Saturn in a trench coat~ ♥
Which ends in tears and karaoke.
Yay for temporary amusement! :o
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![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-01-13 03:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-13 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-13 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-13 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-13 08:08 am (UTC)I love how much work went into the bicycle bit, considering how little it appears in the game. It's the attention to detail in EarthBound that floors me every time.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-13 09:38 pm (UTC)The makers of Earthbound understand it's the little things we treasure. Like the strange little sound you make when you bike in Deep Darkness. :3
no subject
Date: 2008-01-14 09:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-15 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-15 06:48 am (UTC)LOL IS IT THE OK DESU KA!?