Earthbound Beginnings Brings Original Mother RPG to Wii U

The original 1989 Nintendo JRPG that intertwined American culture and Dragon Quest mechanics, Mother, has hit the Wii U as Earthbound Beginnings.

During the Nintendo World Championships at E3, the House of Mario announced that the first game of the popular Mother JRPG series would finally be getting an official Western port in the form of Earthbound Beginnings for the Nintendo eShop. As you would expect, fans have been rallying to get this port made for quite some time, given that it first launched for the Famicom 26 years ago. Mother tells the story of Ninten (who looks a lot like another famous Earthbound face), who receives a mysterious music box and the journal of his great-grandfather. After experiencing a paranormal event, Ninten investigates his ancestor's study of psychic powers, inadvertently stumbling upon its cause — the invasion of an alien race. Along the way, you can expect all kinds of weird JRPG tropes and quests (like delivering mundance quest items to townspeople for the sake of progression) intertwined with aliens and American culture. Now, we can play the JRPG that started it all.

We have to admit that a Wii U-only release is a little bit of a letdown. We've been pretty vocal about the limited number of choices on the Nintendo 3DS' Virtual Console, especially since the Game Boy Advance was capable of porting 16-bit era games when it debuted 15 year ago. Given that Mother was a Famicom (the original Japanese version of the NES) game, then why isn't Earthbound Offerings available for the 3DS Virtual Console and only the Wii U? While it's great to see that Nintendo is listening to the fans by giving us the other Mother titles, we're still scratching our heads at some of these decisions. The 3DS should be more than capable, especially since other NES/Famicom games are available to play on it. If they're worried about the letterbox format of its screen, just put black borders around them. Meanwhile, millions of people pirate these games onto their smartphones just to play what Nintendo isn't offering on-the-go. Nevertheless, we're still glad to see the first invasion arrive. Now we're just wondering if we'll ever see a Western port of Mother 3. 

Earthbound Beginnings is out now for the Wii U Virtual Console and is priced at $6.99.

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