All of EarthBound's best songs are Mother 1 re-arrangements, IMHO. Like you said, every game in the series has terrific music, but I think Mother 2's strength is in it's battle themes (and re-arrangements from Mother 1). The town themes aren't the greatest.
Mother 3 is the opposite. IT's battle themes are a step down from Mother 1 and Mother 2 (even though they're still decent and does have some of its own highlights) but it's walking around music and event music are stand outs.
I feel like if they had better sound tech on the NES, Mother 1 would've had as interesting/experimental music as Mother 2 did, but because you're essentially limited to a three track melody, they made the most of that instead. It has incredibly strong melodies, just as Mother 2 has incredibly strong ambiance. I agree that the best music from Mother 2 are Mother 1 rearrangements.
I think the best merger of the two styles is the
Sanctuary Guardian theme, which sounds like something Daft Punk would make!
I've been hearing for years about how brutally unintuitive and Nintendo-hard Duncan Factory is. My girlfriend and I just played through it for the first time, and it wasn't easy, but I don't see what all the fuss is about, either.
How is it any worse that most other of the more mazelike dungeons in NES/SNES-era Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy and their knock-offs with repeating backgrounds? There are something like five or six fairly narrow floors, and if you take the wrong path to the exit, you get treasure (which you should be doing).
The enemies there felt tough, but Mother 1 is always a grindy/difficult RPG. I'm not sure that we even ever died there, and if we did, it was once or twice, tops. Took maybe 30-40 minutes?
Wasn't anything more achingly tedious than Deep Darkness or a couple of the other dungeons in Earthbound/M2.
Duncan's factory is worse than most Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest dungeons because of the wide empty spaces and lack of different room shapes to help you tell which areas are which.
For example,
here's the cave to Rhone from DQ2, known as one of the most grueling dungeons in early Dragon Quests.
Here's the enormous final dungeon from FF1. And
here's Duncan's factory.
All of those maps are actual pixel size. The Rhone map is 1740x2018, the FF1 map is 2559x1516, and Duncan is a whopping 4520x2448...AND its map leaves out all the identical small rooms that have chests or are empty! The FF and DQ maps also waste a lot of space by comparison to Duncan, because they show multiple floors with blank space separating them. In terms of tiles you actually have to walk in-game, there's no comparison.
Notice how much more dense the FF and DQ maps are. Much easier to see where you are on screen in relation to other rooms. They fit more valuable information about where you are and where you're going within the NES's small resolution, providing a better frame of reference. I think Mother 1 falls into a rookie mistake of map design, where the designer has a bird's eye view of how they want the area to look, and then in practice the maps are just WAY too big and wide open. Tons of first attempt RPG Maker maps are like this, and most Mother 1 maps feel this way.
I suppose one thing that can be said for Duncan is that you never have to go up and then back down in order to progress to your goal...it's not that much of a real maze, it's just big. If you ever go upward and it's a dead end, you just go back down and look for another path upward. However, you don't really have any indication that your goal lies at the top either, it could be left, right or down for all you know.
If you'd like to see a dungeon with a similar design to Duncan's factory, and almost equally as hated, check out
Air's Rock from Golden Sun The Lost Age. Something about that particular type of layout that just drives people mad.
