Take, for example, the bicycle. The player, alone as Ness, journeys out of his hometown following a meteorite crash. To do this, he has to first convince the police to remove a roadblock. The only way to do this, of course, is to amass enough popularity and local fame to attract the police force's attention. When summoned to speak with the police, of course, they all gang up on and attack you. Defeat them, and they'll remove the roadblock. You're free to travel to Twoson, a town slightly more autumn-like than your homeland of Onett, and with much more autumn-like music, and even an open-air market. The man who owns the bicycle shop, explaining that you look like "a guy who gets around," gives you one of his bicycles for free, thinking it'll be a good advertisement for his shop. You're free to ride that bike all throughout town until you enter the wilderness leading to the small shack where Paula, your second party member, is being held. Rescue her -- from your odd next-door neighbor Pokey, no less -- and you have a traveling companion at last. However, you can no longer ride the bicycle ever again. You've been able to ride it for only an hour or so of the game, and now you can't ride it again. The game tells you, of course, that it's because it's rude to ride a bicycle while you have three friends traveling with you. Why can't you buy three more bicycles, then? No -- the game doesn't work that way.
When the final boss is defeated, Mother 2 riffs on the original Dragon Quest one last, long time. In that game, when you defeated the Dragon Lord, you had to walk all the way back to the first castle. Normally, walking any distance in a Dragon Quest game is a kind of chore. You're going to get into battles, and that's going to deplete your hit points, no matter how strong you are. If you're strong enough, of course, you'll be able to conquer your main goal with no trouble. So the battles on the way to a goal take on a feeling much unlike the battles you fight in order to gain levels. However, at the end of the game, none of this is relevant. On your final walk to the first castle, all of the poison marshes have been replaced with flowers, and all of the enemies are gone. Mother 2 repeats this kind of device in its ending, only it lets you walk literally anywhere in the game world in your journey back to your mother's house, where the credit sequence begins; all of the places you visit provide interesting experiences, and every townsperson says something new. Should you so choose, you can walk all the way from the town of Scaraba and into the Deep Darkness Jungle. Around this time, you might remember that you have a bicycle somewhere. And you might also, finally, realize that your three partners have gone back to their respective homes. You're free to ride the bike. You might have put it away, into storage, so you'll have to call your sister from a payphone. You probably don't have any money, so you have to use your cash card to withdraw some from an ATM before you can call your sister. She'll send the bicycle via the curious courier service she runs out of her bedroom, and you can then ride your bike through the desert and into the waters of the rainforest. The sound of the bike pedaling through the water is eerie. It's something you've never heard in the game before. Not only that, it's something you could have very well played the whole game without ever having heard.
