In closing, Mother 2's graphics, at first jeered by critics worldwide as anti-progressive (at the same time, Final Fantasy VI was making strides toward photo-realistic backgrounds, for example), have at last begun to endear. Everything looks exactly as Itoi intended it. Itoi's lack of satisfaction with Mother 3 stems from the fact that the Nintendo 64 was strong enough for him to make the game look fancy, and that he wasn't sure he was making it look fancy enough. Mother 2, as a product of someone aware of the medium's limitations, looks perfect. As someone remarked to me quite recently, perhaps the pinnacle of the game's graphical perfection lies in that no character has more than one frame of animation. In Dragon Quest, the hero carries a sword in his right hand, so when his feet move in a walking animation, that sword has to move up and down as well. Ness, Mother 2's protagonist, wears a baseball cap tilted to one side. One of his hands is up. One of his feet is not touching the ground. When he walks, or even walks in place, all his sprite is doing is flipping back and forth. My friend and I thought about this for a couple of minutes. Was this a subtle parody of the Dragon Quest mystery ailment that forces all characters to walk in place constantly? Or was it something else?
Shigesato Itoi's other game, by the way, is Shigesato Itoi's Number-one Bass Fishing, for Super Famicom, Nintendo 64, and Gameboy Color. The game, a bass-fishing game, stars Shigesato Itoi as a photorealistic bass-fisherman who fishes for bass. I know a place where you can buy it for 36 yen for each system.
--tim rogers played your mother, too, last night
