@m2redshirt

1 year ago

As a Japanese person, I think it would be more accurate to say, "A failed projection of Earthbound as a parody of America". I lived through the original release and played it in Japanese. If you played it in Japanese during the 90's, you would have gotten no indication that "Mother 2" was trying to parody America. Rather, you would have seen it as an attempt to satirize Japanese culture in a story wrapped up in Western aesthetics and settings. Japanese people have this strange attitude where they are very proud and confident of their storytelling and humour, but when it comes to aesthetics they are heavily drawn to a romanticized version of the West. Jojo, Sailor Moon, and many anime follow this pattern. Mother 2 was basically just that, and was meant to appeal primarily to the Japanese domestic audience. This is the case because Mother 1 didn't even get released outside Japan and during this era many titles didn't get released overseas. The Japanese gaming industry was still very domestically minded. Itoi had no assurance that Mother 2 would be released in the USA so the thought of parodying the USA would have been a very low priority. Mother 2 satirizes Japanese culture, from the scary cult, to the absent dad, to the smiley burger shop girl, to the various Japanese dialects that communicate socio-economic status, to the various items and objects that would make no sense to foreigners. So why do Westerners think that Mother 2 was trying to satirize the USA? I think it's due to the localization team's direction. In localizing Mother 2, changes had to be made to make the jokes and other elements make sense. Whenever changes were made for the sake of comprehensibility, the localization team incorporated satirical and parodying elements that Americans would understand. That is why there is enough in Earthbound to cause North Americans to perceive the game as a parody of the USA. But the core themes and elements are still very much Japanese, so what we have is a strange hybrid beast. So to sum it up, it's a failed projection to see Earthbound as a parody of the USA. It was never meant to be, and the minimal extent that it is a parody of the USA was due to localization swapping out the incomprehensible Japanese elements. Earthbound is a remarkable cultural artifact that was produced during the cusp of the Japanese entertainment industry shifting its mind from domestic success to international success. Earthbound unintentionally succeeded in the West (over many decades). Earthbound wasn't trying to do all these things that later critics project onto it. Edit: For a recent example of Japanese story-telling using Westernized characters and settings, check out the anime Spy x Family. The story takes place in a fictional Berlin, East Germany (Berlint, Ostania) and the characters are of European background, but the story satirizes Japanese culture (e.g. the infamous parental interview for school admission, the employer overworking its staff to the point of exhaustion, sister complex, gossipy neighbourhood women, even the central concept of a "family for hire" is a thing in Japan). Not that these issues only happen in Japan, but they are often used in anime as tropes and gags in stories about Japanese culture. There is very surface level representation of Europe in the anime but the point of the story isn't to satirize or depict a realistic Europe. Its European setting is just a vehicle to tell a Japanese story (which seems to resonate with an international audience as well). Saying that Spy x Family is a poor representation of Europe would miss the point just like saying Earthbound is a poor representation of America.

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