Retro gaming and its fandoms have been around for quite some time. So long, in fact, that in the year 2024, we are at the point where the retro appreciation projects of past eras are now, themselves, retro in their own right. Such is the case of Mother: Cognitive Dissonance. With the original project having come out in 2009, the fan-made interquel to Mother 1 and Mother 2, or Earthbound Beginnings and Earthbound as we call them in English, is closer to the original commercial release of Earthbound than it is to the present day. Even the updated 2014 version manages to hit the ten-year threshold that often seems to define the chronological definition of retro games, although what makes a game feel retro is more its aesthetic than its timestamp.
Mother: Cognitive Dissonance is no different. Indeed, despite the initial version coming out in 2009, the game itself feels far more archaic than that, having been designed in RPG Maker 2003, and using most of that engine’s default programming. So no eight directional movement. The mook Alivinar, Colonel Saturn, the starman Larice, and the UFO Zarbol are limited to four directional movement and a real-time battle system, rather than the turn-based one of the actual Mother games. A word of warning on that- by Chapter 7, the game will become quite unplayable if you’ve been skipping battles due to their tediousness and not seeming all that necessary. Much like penultimate stage of Chrono Trigger, the sidequests in this part of the game aren’t really optional, but unlike Chrono Trigger, there isn’t really any room to cheese the battle system if you’re unwilling to do some grinding.
Technical limitations which may have seemed infuriating back then, however, feel almost quaint today, and add a whole new layer to the archaic setting of the Mother games, which themselves were nostalgic throwbacks to largely forgotten eras. While Mother 1 and Mother 2 took place in a vaguely Americanesque setting with zombies and space aliens, Mother: Cognitive Dissonance reframes the universe from the alien point of view. The premise of the game is explaining what happened to Giygas, the antagonist of both games who undergoes a radical transformation between the two. In Mother 1, Giygas is an alien determined to invade Earth, who abandons his plan following an emotional assault reminding him of the past kindness he had received at the hands of humans. In Mother 2, however, Giygas has transformed into an incomprehensible force of destruction represented on-screen by visual distortions that mark an escalation off of the game’s previously trippy backgrounds and music.
Mother: Cognitive Dissonance posits that between games, over the course of Giygas making his retreat, that he resorted to an ultimately tragic means to overcome his own ironic sense of humanity. Mooks, Starmen, and UFOs are recontextualized not just as soldiers in the army of Giygas, but communities of people in their own right and even musicians. The game’s heroes are tasked with the recovery of the Apple of Enlightenment, an object that can foretell the future that will lead to horrific consequences if Giygas is able to use its powers. Mother: Cognitive Dissonance resigns itself to this inevitability, since obviously Mother 2 can’t happen if the heroes of Mother: Cognitive Dissonance actually manage to succeed.
Mother: Cognitive Dissonance makes the most of these incomprehensibilities in time and space, as the Applechasers ride around the solar system in a spaceship and witness cryptic scenes which tie into Mother 1, Mother 2, and Mother 3. But surprisingly enough, not in a way that can ever really be called spoilery. As a fan project, Mother: Cognitive Dissonance was made by people with a huge appreciation for the lore, but only really in the sense of the background that lore implies. Pokey, or Porky, or whatever you want to call him, is important here not for his connection to the core games but because of the way his distorted sense of nostalgia is slowly melting down his brain in a parallel manner to what’s happening to Giygas.
Mother: Cognitive Dissonance’s hybrid team of aliens and robots have suffered their own misfortunes in life, but don’t let that define them, and enjoy as much of their adventure as they can despite the bleak undertones. As avatars for the player they’re exceptional, embodying the best of how the Mother games are simultaneously quirky and disturbing, like campfire stories told by a weird uncle that you didn’t really understand when you were a kid and understand even less now as an adult, the passage of time itself a distortion of memory. So too, does Mother: Cognitive Dissonance remain an artifact of the Mother fandom of ten to fifteen years ago, on a very difficult platform to port ever farther removed from the context that created it. If you’d like to see it in action, here you can see the official trailer, and here you can see the official website, which appropriately enough, is itself an archaic example of web page design.
William Schwartz is a media writer who specializes in South Korean media, but also writes about a wide variety of popular culture subjects- including retro video games.
