[Omniverse Audio Brand]

[90s phone ring and pick up]

CAT
Hey, this is Cat!

JESS
And Jess

CAT
You know, “MOTHER,” She Wrote is free to listen to, but it’s not free to make.


JESS
So please consider supporting our work on Patreon.

CAT
You’ll get early, ad-free episodes of this show and all the storytelling podcasts we create.

JESS
Head to Patreon.com/OmniverseMedia to chip in and join our community of world-saving wunderkind.

CAT
Oh and - heads up: this episode contains violence, gun use, severe injury, burns, and death.

JESS
Please use your best judgment when listening… and take care of yourself.

CAT & JESS
Love youuuu.

[phone disconnect sound]

[Strange low ambience, glittering, and slow running water]

NINTEN
Dear Mom, it was so good to see you and Mimmie and Minnie. Thanks again for rolling out the red carpet for Lloyd and Ana. Being at home, gorging myself on pizza, and sleeping in my own bed meant… everything. We all needed it. Not just because of what we’d been through. Having those good memories fresh in our minds was like armor against what came next. The train bridge to Youngtown was still out, so, with no better option, we decided to cross Yucca Desert. I know you asked us not to but, well, obviously I’m writing to you, so - we’re fine, we’re all in one piece… and in the end we needed to be there. It’s just… Even though we made it… I’m sorry Mom. [he sobs] I thought we could handle anything. I thought I was unstoppable. The truth is. If it hadn’t been for Ana and Lloyd - I wouldn’t be here. In our defense: we thought we were being smart about it. Lloyd took going to the desert really seriously. He said:

NINTEN & LLOYD
If we are to embark on an expedition into a harsh environment, we must be prepared.

[The ambience shifts to an elementary school. A bell rings.]

NINTEN
We’ve got plenty of sunscreen.

ANA
And canteens of water.

NINTEN
And cool shades.

LLOYD
Protection from the elements, yes. But the extraterrestrial presence is growing. It’s clear that their reconnaissance has ended and the true invasion is just on the horizon. Do you honestly think we’re ready?!

[Ninten and Ana say nothing.]

LLOYD
That’s right. We’re not. But we will be.

NINTEN
When we passed through Merrysville, Lloyd had us swing by Twinkle Elementary where he met up with this pale, weird science teacher who was an inventor on the side. He sold us some… equipment. The less said the better but… Lloyd seemed pleased.

[Desolate ambience]

ANA
With our backpacks full, we ventured through the woods, beyond Union Station. The treeline fell away, and before us a vast expanse of sand sprawled into the horizon. It was blinding and intimidating.

NINTEN
Gosh.

LLOYD
…Well…

ANA
I took Ninten and Lloyd’s hands. We didn’t have to say a thing. Together, we took one big step into the wasteland. At first, Yucca Desert seemed truly lifeless. Not even buzzards circled overhead. We saw bones of long-deceased animals; sun bleached where they’d fallen, grinning wryly, and whispering with the wind. It wasn’t long before we tried to fill the nothingness around us.

NINTEN
If…there was Orange Julius…

ANA
Oh gosh!

NINTEN
-in this Dessert Desert, I’d… organize…

ANA
Mm!

NINTEN
Heh… Oozey orangutan organs.

ANA
Ugh. Well… if there was… Pixy Stix in this Dessert Desert, I’d… I don’t know… pickle a puppydog?

NINTEN
Ha ha! Sick!

ANA
I don’t like the dare parts of this.

NINTEN
It’s your game.

ANA
I just wanted to do alphabetical desserts.

LLOYD
[He sigs]
I appreciate that we’re all bored, but this is making me very hungry.

NINTEN
For pickled puppydogs?

LLOYD
[He sigs]
Practically!

NINTEN
Well you’re up next, poindexter.

LLOYD
I forfeit.

ANA
Aw, Lloyd.

LLOYD
If you know a dessert that starts with a Q, please educate me.

[An alien trumpeting sound echoes from the distance.]

ANA
We all heard that, right?
The desert, it turned out, was filled with life - but not all of it was from Earth.

[The creatures sound again and continue]

ANA
Two alien creatures: like leopards with giraffe necks and furry funnels for snouts bounded over the dunes.

[Action music begins]

LLOYD:
We should… try to

ANA:
Communicate with them?

LLOYD:
Ensnare them… with the Slime Generator!

[He cocks a mechanism into place. The aliens short as they run.]

NINTEN:
Here they come!

[The aliens gasp as they get closer]

NINTEN:
The aliens pounced! One dove at Ana and I, but Lloyd aimed his new gizmo at it and took it down. A jet of blue and yellow foam splattered against the alien mid-air. The foam turned into a green slime that hardened like a net and pinned the alien to the ground.

[The machine makes two bursts, it impacts the alien, which screams and the foam makes a grinding noise as it solidifies]

NINTEN
That was cool and all, but Lloyd left himself open - and the other alien came down on him full-force!

LLOYD:
Ah-!

[Lloyd screams, muffled by a sucking alien snout]
 
NINTEN:
It latched onto Lloyd’s face with its weird vacuum mouth…

NINTEN:
I’m comin’ Lloyd! Don’t let it lay an egg in you! Aaaagh! Let! Go! You! Jerk!

[Ninten’s words are punctuated by strikes with his baseball bat. The alien pops off of Lloyd’s face.]

LLOYD:
[Gasping, spitting]

[The alien trumpets in retreat]

NINTEN:
After I beat it back, it retreated into the desert.

ANA:
Lloyd! Are you okay?

LLOYD:
[Gasping, sputtering]
If - there was… Quik.

ANA:
Quik?

LLOYD:
[Sputtering]
Nestle Quik - in this Dessert Desert…

ANA:
Oh Lloyd…

LLOYD:
I’d quash q-Q*Bert… Ugh …Q-quench…?

NINTEN:
It had totally dehydrated him!

ANA:
Oh! Here!

[She unscrews the canteen]

LLOYD:
[Hungrily gulps down water, then gasps]

NINTEN:
But that was the least of our problems.

[A mechanical whirring, like a wind up toy faintly approaches in the background and then stops.]

NINTEN:
Uh… There’s um… A - lady?

NANCY:
[robotic]
Hi! I’m Nancy!

LLOYD:
A… g-gynoid?

NINTEN:
Move! Move! Move!

[A laser blast, followed by stomping feet and ominous bassy music]

NINTEN:
The invaders didn't stop coming, Mom. There were robot women that smiled at us while attacking - bionic scorpions alongside real scorpions. Were they trying to replace us? The desert was overrun. Not like an army - not yet anyway - but like they were gathering. I mean, who’d look here?

[A laser blast]

NINTEN
We hiked the desert all day, running and fighting.

[Something alien and mechanical whizzes by]

NINTEN
We’d try to disappear before reinforcements came but… We weren’t always so lucky.

[More laser blasts and some unusual mechanical noises, bleeping, possibly communication]

ANA:
What’s that boxy robot doing?

LLOYD:
Is it…? It’s repairing the Starman - pumping something into it-

[An explosion and a roar of flame as Ana uses her powers]

ANA:
I’ve got my hands full - somebody stop it!

[Ninten’s bad taps the ground]

NINTEN:
I’ve got it!

[A laser blast whizzes by]

NINTEN
Lloyd! Cover me!

[Lloyd shoots some plasma beams]

NINTEN
Yaaaa!

[Ninten hits the robot with his baseball bat]

LLOYD:
Wait! Ninten! That robot’s a walking power supply!

NINTEN:
So?!

[More hits landed on the robot]

LLOYD:
Stop hitting it! It could expl-

[A massive explosion, all goes quiet. Eventually peaceful music starts]

NINTEN:
I don’t remember much. I just remember that it was… peaceful. Like being underwater…

[strange noises wisp by]

NINTEN
-But dark all around - and warm.

[faint battle noises bubble up from the physical world]

NINTEN
I thought I could hear you somewhere, humming a lullaby.

LLOYD:
[muffled, out in the physical world, not this inner space]
These burns… I’ve never…

ANA:
[muffled, out in the physical world, not this inner space]
Lloyd, his heart’s stopped! Ninten!

NINTEN:
I was so tired. I thought, maybe I can just float here, just for a while… But then there was this bright light…

[a sudden pulse]

NINTEN:
[Gasping]
Ah-!

LLOYD:
Ninten!

ANA:
[Gasps]

NINTEN:
[coughing]

ANA:
[weakly]
You’re back…

NINTEN:
Ugh… Did I g-g-go somewhere?

LLOYD:
You were in a state of cardiac arrest! For over five minutes!

NINTEN:
What?

LLOYD:
Your body was horribly burned!

ANA:
I’ve never been so scared in my life, Momma. We drug Ninten into a grove of cacti that towered over us, keeping us out of sight. I was trying to heal him like I had before. New skin grew over the burns, but his heart wouldn’t start. Then… I saw Ninten’s spirit leaving him. His ghost sat up, right in front of me, while his body stayed on the ground - l-like… like a teddy bear with the stuffing coming out. He looked up into the sky and then… I was so mad at him! I didn’t think - I just slammed his ghost into his body and with every fiber of my being I stitched that reckless, cocky, kindhearted boy’s soul back into place. [She sniffs back tears] In that moment, it was like - I knew him. I knew every blood vessel and bone. How fast his heart should beat. All the baby teeth left in his dumb smile. His body was broken, but when my hands touched his flesh, his flesh spoke to me. Like… Like a tape on rewind I put this humpty dumpty back together again and- [She sigs] And then we were lying on the sand, holding hands, looking up at the universe. The pink blossoms of the cacti shone white in the moonlight.

LLOYD:
Have you sustained brain damage?

NINTEN:
Uh? What? No!

ANA:
Lloyd, come down here and look at the stars.

LLOYD:
You want me to lie on the ground?

ANA:
Just come down here.

LLOYD:
[sighs]
Compliance.

NINTEN:
[Sighs]
Um… Was I… dead?

LLOYD and ANA:
Yes.

NINTEN:
Wow.

ANA:
And don’t you dare do that again.

NINTEN:
[laughs] I’ll, I’ll tr- I’ll try not to.

ANA:
This isn’t funny!

LLOYD:
[whispering]
You could give away our location.

ANA:
Ninten! I don’t know if I can do that again!

NINTEN:
No, no - it’s just that - I’m really happy! I’m- I’m really glad to be here! I mean - Look at this sky! Is that… the Milky Way?

ANA:
I… think so…

[The music changes to echoey calm tones]

NINTEN:
Wow! I love you both so much. So, so much!

ANA:
I love you too.

LLOYD:
I concur.

NINTEN:
Oh wow… Do you hear music?

ANA:
No…

NINTEN:
Are you sure? I mean… Listen… Does that cactus look like it has a face to you?

LLOYD:
You may genuinely have brain damage.

[More echoey notes emerge]

ANA:
Wait… I hear it too!

[The music begins to build]

ANA:
Ninten and I reached out with our minds…

[Organ music starts playing]

ANA
-and the ocean of stars pooled all around us.

ANA and NINTEN:
The cactus sang to us.

[The music becomes a psychedelic jam of melodies, bubbles, and shimmers]

ANA:
We could see the web of life beneath the surface. Endless interconnected spans of spidersilk, wet with phosphorescent dew… around us, within us, and reaching into the beyond….

NINTEN:
Size means nothing! We’re within a galaxy and there’s a galaxy inside us.

[The music swells and continues]

NINTEN
We’re all connected - and the melody?

ANA and NINTEN:
The melody is connected to everything.

[The song continues until it hard cuts to 8-bit, urgent music. There’s the sound of a biplane flying in the distance.]

LLOYD:
Snap out of it!

[He slaps Ninten]

NINTEN:
Ow.

ANA:
[Woozy noises]

LLOYD:
Plane!

ANA:
Huh? Oh my gosh!

NINTEN:
Izzat real?

[Footsteps as they run after it]

LLOYD
Hurry! It’s on a clear descent trajectory!

NINTEN:
I just died!

LLOYD:
No excuses!

ANA:
We charged across the sand, tumbling down dunes, chasing that dark shape against the stars as it got closer and closer to the earth, until-

[The music stops, there’s a sudden splash and yelps from the kids. Ninten starts laughing.]

ANA:
Water?!

NINTEN:
Woo! Ha ha ha!

ANA:
An oasis!? [laughing]

LLOYD:
I can’t swim!

NINTEN:
Dude, just stand up.

LLOYD:
Oh.

PILOT:
Uhh. Hello?

NINTEN:
The pilot was old.He looked like something from a movie - in a leather cap with goggles and a scarf. He had a permanent camp set up at the oasis with a tent, and a fire. There was a worn strip of flat land that he used as the runway for his biplane - and parked next to it? Was-

LLOYD:
A PEABODY TANK!?

[Lloyd’s playful theme starts playing]

PILOT:
Oh. Yeah. They used to run maneuvers out here during the war. Found her all broken down, so I fixed her up!

LLOYD:
IT RUNS!?

PILOT:
Shoots too. Wanna take her for a spin?

LLOYD:
[the noise of Lloyd’s brain breaking]

ANA:
Oh, we’ve lost him.

PILOT:
Haha! You look so happy about that. Yeah, I do air tours of the desert, the ruins... Ten flights gets you a ride in this ol’ hell buggy.

[He knocks on the side of the tank]

NINTEN:
Woah! Let’s go!

PILOT:
You kids’ enthusiasm is enough to grow my hair back. But first things first: a good night’s rest.

LLOYD:
How can I possibly sleep?!

[Lloyd’s theme ends.]

NINTEN:
That night, we slept out under the stars. And the next morning? We took to the skies.

[plane engine noise, adventurous music]

ANA
Hey, look at that!

NINTEN
Woahh!

ANA
[laughs]

NINTEN
Wooo!

PILOT:
[talking loudly, projecting]
Now coming up on your starboard side are the ruins. After the war, a lot of us thought we could make our fortune as treasure hunters. They called us the “Ransackers”.

ANA:
[talking loudly, projecting]
Ruins of what?

PILOT:
[talking loudly, projecting]
No one’s sure! We never found any treasure. A lotta experts have come out, but it’s stumped ‘em all. These days most folks say it musta been built by little green men! Ancient aliens! Ha ha ha!

NINTEN:
[talking loudly, projecting]
Waaaait! I remember this now! “Eagleand’s underground pyramid”!

ANA:
[talking loudly, projecting]
You must have seen the saucers.

PILOT:
[talking loudly, projecting]
Oh yeah! I’ve seen foo fighters ever since the war. More and more’a them lately, but that’s progress for you. Dunno if they’re our boys or the Ruskies, but hooo they sure can fly! Here come the ruins! Hang on! I’m gonna take her low!

NINTEN:
It looked like a crumbling maze - stone walls, two stories tall, half-buried in sand. In the center was a courtyard and a temple. …And then we saw a glint of metal to the West. There was an object as big as the ruin walls.

ANA:
[talking loudly, projecting]
What is that?

PILOT:
[talking loudly, projecting]
I don’t know.

NINTEN:
As the plane zoomed over we could see it: an enormous robot.

[a shining sound illustrates the glint of the robot]

NINTEN
A war machine - And it was guarding the ruins.

[The adventurous music stops and gives way to desert ambience]

LLOYD:
Hmm. Given their increased presence here, it must be an alien base.

ANA:
Maybe, but what about the cloud on Mt. Itoi?

LLOYD:
They can have two bases.

NINTEN:
This temple is thousands of years old. Maybe aliens built it, but maybe not. It- it might not be the same aliens.

ANA:
Well, maybe they’re just hiding out in there.

NINTEN:
…Or maybe they’re looking for something.

ANA:
Maybe they’re guarding something from us.

NINTEN:
Maybe… All I know is when we flew over the temple I felt something.

ANA:
…Maybe we don’t have to go now, we could make a plan…

LLOYD:
Maybe you’re forgetting we have a tank! Armored defenses! 76 millimeters of robot blasting firepower! Piercing and high explosive ammunition!

ANA:
…You’re 11 years old. Ninten just died.

NINTEN:
Wouldn’t have died if I was in a tank though…

PILOT:
Ah, go ahead and take her for a spin. There’s nothing out here you can do any harm to.

LLOYD:
Ha! We’ll see about that.

[He closes the tank door]

LLOYD:
[muffled mischievous laughter from within the tank]

[The tank engine rumbles to life and Lloyd’s theme, rendered in a heavy metal style begins]

NINTEN:
The tank - oh my god, Mom. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend taking one for a spin. It’ll change your life. And save your life, as a matter of fact - because. This robot would’ve killed us. …Again. It was hulking and sleek, like a house-sized hammer made for person-sized nails. Even the tank felt puny looking up at it. When we approached, it just stood there, looming, and it was faster than we figured. It struck first, and hard.

LLOYD:
Brace for evasive maneuvers!

NINTEN and ANA::
[Screams and yelps]

[big metallic thuds]

NINTEN:
It was terrifying. But the tank was more than the robot bargained for. It reeled from its own punch, like it wasn’t made for fighting another machine.

[Rocks rumble]

LLOYD:
Now! Witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle tank! Ninten, Ana, Fire! Fire! [maniacal laughter]

[Guns fire, guitars solo]

NINTEN:
It only took three shots and the robot crashed backwards against the ruins’ ancient stone walls.

[Crashing, crunching, rumbling]

NINTEN
The weird green light inside it flickered off. Unfortunately, that was it for the tank too.

[metal cracking and grinding, crunching]

NINTEN
In a last ditch effort, the robot ripped apart one of the tank treads and we couldn’t go anywhere. I don’t know how to make it up to the pilot, but… maybe he’ll see what we were up against and call it square.

[The music stops, desert ambience]

LLOYD:
I would like to say a few words. …Farewell, noble tank. Being at your controls and within the sweltering confines of your steely embrace… has been… [He chokes back a sob] One of the great privileges of my young life. May you ride again.

ANA
Amen.

[The desert winds give way to a low cave ambience and echoing monkey chittering]

NINTEN:
The temple at the center of the ruins had signs of all the expeditions that had come and gone - most notably, the weird smell and the screeching - but the pilot had warned us about that. Years back, a research team lost their pet monkeys in the temple ruins and now the place is overrun. The monkeys don’t like intruders, but they’re not mean - they just pull pranks and since Ana and I can talk to them… they lie a lot.

ANA:
Another dead end?!

[An explosion of monkey laughter]

ANA:
Come on! We’re really nice! I promise!

[The monkeys continue to laugh]

LLOYD:
The social dynamics of a cave full of monkeys and an elementary school are surprisingly similar…

[A penguin squawks]

ANA:
That’s a penguin. There’s a penguin in the monkey cave... I give up!

NINTEN:
Here’s the thing, Mom: No one has ever figured out how deep the ruins go… but we did. Beneath all the temple corridors is a cave. And in that cave is a shining, swirling stone. And just like that-

[Hard cut to the sound of running water]

NINTEN
-We were in Magicant.

SWIMMING CAT
Are you lost? Oh! Welcome back!

[He splashes]

NINTEN
Right back in the center of town where we always end up. It was a welcome sight! But after everything we’d gone through - across the desert, and deep into an ancient temple - we had to wonder why.

[The bubbly music of Magicant begins to play]

NINTEN
Why was there a portal to Magicant here? What does Magicant have to do with the aliens? But I guess that’s a question I should’ve already been asking myself. The password to Magicant in Great Grandpa’s Diary… it reads: “Where is God's tail? The forgotten one of the ship that sailed the cosmos.” I’d met a forgotten man the first time I was here. I haven’t seen him since. Is that what it meant? Who’s lost a tail?! What could this beautiful, weird, dream place possibly have to do with those things that want to destroy our world? And jeez - are we really going to have to walk across the desert again? More soon, Mom. Love, Ninten.

[The Magicant music swells and continues under the hosts]

JESS
Welcome to “MOTHER,” She Wrote - a travelogue diary through the strangest, most thought-provoking, most heart-rending video games ever made: MOTHER as it’s called in Japan, and EarthBound - as it’s called everywhere else. This is the story of the first game in that series: EarthBound Beginnings.

[The song flourishes and ends]

JESS
I've been through the desert on a tank and a plane. It felt good to get out of Spookane. I’m not a fan of caves, but I do love me some monkey business - I’m Jessica Mudd! And with me is my simply smashing co-host…

CAT
Cat Blackard. You know, Jess… the desert - it can’t be reached by a train. But I met a strange cactus and it sung to my brain. It went la la la la la la-

JESS
It did do that!

[The Mother’s Day Times theme starts]

JESS
But before we get lost in those dusty dunes and catchy tunes, we’ve got to check in on community news in the Mother’s Day Times!


[The theme flourishes and ends]

CAT
The Mother’s Day Times is a newspaper, so we’ll start this installment by printing an erratum. There’s a mistake in this episode, which you’ve already heard, and which we’re going to keep making. A mistake that any botanists or southwesterners out there may have already noticed. Another location was mispronounced, but this time it’s not up for debate.

JESS
Throughout this episode (and in prior episodes) you’ll hear us call the desert the “You-ka” desert. But it’s actually “Yuck-a” desert.

CAT
You’ll even hear us talk about the difference between yuca and yucca in this episode, but while doing so, I thought they were pronounced the same. Another word I’ve been saying wrong my whole life - and it never came up. [she sighs]

JESS
But hey, here’s some good news! In the latest issue of Nintendo Force Magazine, which is basically the modern equivalent of Nintendo Power, there’s a spotlight about this year's Mother Direct.

CAT
In it, they crowned the MOTHER fan community as “the greatest fan community of all the fan communities!” Obviously, we very much agree.

JESS
It’s a wonderful write-up of the event and they even singled out a certain EarthBound podcast as a “SMAAAASHING inclusion.”

CAT
Ooh! Which EarthBound podcast was it?

JESS
You’re adorable. To check out this wonderful send up to the MOTHER fan community, head to NintendoForceMagazine.com and pick up Issue 67: Sidescrolling Showdown - the one with Sonic Superstars and Super Mario Wonder on the cover.

CAT
And now to the mailbag! We’ve got a letter from Ernie - they say: “I’ve been a fan of EarthBound since I watched Chuggaconroy play through it, eventually getting it on the Virtual Console for my 3DS. I played through it from right to left, top to bottom.” In getting older, they say they’ve “become a bit more pessimistic and a tad angsty” but that recently they “watched Chuggaconroy play through it again for old time's sake” and that during a specific part of the game where a character confronts the darkness within themselves, the music really impacted them. They say: “It made me feel so optimistic… That theme really put everything at ease for me.”

JESS
Wowza! The artistry of these games and the connections they bridge, are so powerful they can help soothe even the most tumultuous inner ocean! Thanks for writing in, Ernie!

CAT
If you’d like to share your stories, MOTHER memories, Earth-boundings etc - remember to write in at dearmothershewrote@gmail.com

JESS
Hey! It’s almost Halloween and we’ve got some MOTHER memories of our own to share over on our Tumblr.

CAT
Yeah, way back when, Starmen.net used to run community fan art events - seasonal “Funfests”, and I submitted some art of my own starting way back in 1999, when I was fifteen years old.

JESS
Woahhh.

CAT
So we’re digging up the shambling, zombified EarthBound art of my childhood and putting it on display like a fiji mermaid.

JESS
You can find that at tumblr.com/mothershewrote!

CAT
If you’d like to help share this show and the story of MOTHER with the world - remember the power of recommending it to a friend - or stranger! Post about it on your social platform of choice, or leave us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. It all means a lot and really does help people discover the show.

JESS
With that in mind, shout out to folks like 2-D’s Fun Zone, Shazeka, Cucumber Eater, and row kitty who left ratings and reviews - we see you and we thank you.

CAT
Also get a load of anowlofmanycolors’ comment on our Dimensional Slip episode with Sarah! They said: “As an aspiring theology professor, wow. Just wow. Thank you again for making this podcast and sharing so much joy and asking questions and wow.” Wow!

JESS
Wowza even! Finally, a reminder that Cat will be at North Carolina Comicon in Durham the first weekend of November -  the 4th and 5th.

CAT
So if you’re in the area, we can plan a MOTHER meet-up! Drop us a line at dearmothershewrote@gmail.com For more info about the con, check out nccomicon.com.

JESS
That’s all for now!

CAT & JESS
We’ll see ya next times!

[Mother’s Day Times outro fanfare]

JESS:
It's a big dusty world out there!

CAT:
It sure is Jess! <Laugh> You know, we accidentally found our way to the Yucca Desert when we first got access to Union Station, but uh, it was pretty apparent - immediately we should not be there because it's very dangerous. There's no guarantee that any random player's gonna necessarily do that. Though, the fact that we both did that in our respective playthroughs, even me the first time years ago, suggests maybe that would happen. It is a bit of a roundabout way to get there.

JESS:
Well, the game encourages you to explore, you know, from the very beginning when you're having to like find your way through the woods to find Canary Village or to the zoo, and there's all these different paths and things that are kind of hidden. It encourages you to explore and to do that. So of course we found our way into the desert as soon as it was available to us.

CAT:
Yeah. <laugh> encourages you to explore while also punishing you with... A lot of enemy encounters, especially here... In the desert.

JESS:
Yeeeah.

CAT:
The desert is a survivalist section of the game. You have to go into there prepared. There's a number of clues that suggest that you need to go there, like saying that you need to go to Youngtown. Well, if you bring up your map, your map is useless. It doesn't show you how to get anywhere. But you can see relatively that Youngtown is in a direction that you haven't been before. So if you poke around, you may find your way to the desert. Once you get there, you're gonna learn pretty quickly, as we all did, that it's not... The easiest and there's nowhere to save. There's nowhere to replenish your health. It's a massive, massive region. So Jess what did you do to prepare?

JESS:
So I did lose some of my party members. They got knocked out several times, particularly Ana, because those enemies do hit hard. So yeah, there was some stuff going on there. A comment about the map, though: it does have little dots on it that are sort of in between the major locations of the game. So you can tell when there's something there for you to find. Like, I wanna say that the old man that lives in the mountains, who you find his dentures, I wanna say there's like a little dot that's on the map.

CAT:
There is a little dot.

JESS:
That kind of indicates there's something for you to find there. So the game does give you some feedback in the form of the map that shows you, "oh, there's something there that might be worth exploring."

CAT:
But figuring out your relative position to it and exactly like... How to get from point A to point B or if it's even possible...

JESS:
It's terrible for that.

CAT:
Yeah.

JESS:
So I prepared by buying bread. Lots and lots of bread.

CAT:
A good tactic.

JESS:
-And not much else, honestly. I went up there and started exploring. I left the breadcrumb so I could find my way back and I just kept fighting until somebody was knocked out and then I went back to Marysville and healed them back up and away we went.

CAT:
Well, you know, Jess, I'm gonna say: I'm surprised. Because I know there's something that's been itching at you for a while and this'd have been a great time for you to dip your toe into it. The mysterious professor at Twinkle Elementary, did you happen to throw down some money and get some strange equipment that might be useful here?

JESS:
No, I didn't think to go back there to do that. Is there something good that I should've been picking up?

CAT:
Well, there might be, but... maybe we should save that discussion for another time when we've both done it.

JESS:
Okay. Alright...

CAT:
I found myself in a situation where I had an awful lot of money and knew I was going into a very bad situation, so...

JESS:
Okay.

CAT:
One thing I made sure to bring with me, which we both have had access to, although I don't know for sure if you have it, is the Super Spray, which is an item that's found in Duncan's Factory. It's an industrial strength insecticide.

JESS:
I might have that in storage. I'm not really sure.

CAT:
The desert's probably the best place for it, but it's definitely a useful thing for Lloyd to have on him because it has the same effect as buying insecticide except that this one can't break. If you're in a battle with insectoid enemies, you spray it and they all die.

JESS:
That is a really good piece of advice because I do find myself frequently getting into encounters and not really having much for Lloyd to do, although he does have that ability to "inspect" enemies and sort of give you a rundown of how powerful they are and what they may or may not be weak or strong against. So that's typically what I will do is I'll use that ability first to get an idea of what we're fighting against. But then after that I find myself just using his normal attack. So, having some better gear would probably be the smart thing to do.

CAT:
His normal attack is... Good, but uh, I keep my Lloyd strapped. He's always carrying a plasma beam or three... Or four. So suffice it to say I went out there pretty well stocked.

JESS:
You went out to the desert, loaded for bear, but all you found was a bunch of insects.

[Sci-fi music begins to play underneath the hosts' dialogue]

CAT:
Yeah... And robots and alien creatures that shouldn't be in the desert on Earth. You know, normal stuff.

[Music swells and fades out]

CAT:
Let's talk about the desert. It's called Yucca Desert in EarthBound Beginnings, but it's called Advent Desert in MOTHER. And it's "Yucca" with two "C"s, not "Yuca", with one "C". Yuca with one "C" is a starchy, edible tuber of the cassava plant. While yucca with two "C"s is a broad genus of spiky desert plants. As the Encyclopedia informs us, there used to be a lot of Latter-day Saints in the area. And the story goes that, "because of the desert's harsh climate conditions, once every thousand years, Christ returns again to undergo the trials of resurrection. And on the day of resurrection, Christ shall turn this desert into sacred ground and return again. North of the desert, the sea will open up before you: beneath a precipice with a hundred kilometer drop. Standing on this cliff, you'll see how 'The End of the World' became the nickname of the Advent Desert. Advent Desert may now be the world's last remaining entryway to the Kingdom of God." Which is a lot of weird energy.

JESS:
There is. Especially considering how they remove any references to religion, particularly Christianity, when translating it for the English speaking audiences. I know that you're reading from the Encyclopedia, which was not translated, but that seems to be something that is such a part of the idea behind what the Yucca Desert is... It's surprising that there's not more of that represented in the game itself... Or was there and that it was just removed from the localization?

CAT:
No, there's not. It's one of those chunks of information - they're like, "well that doesn't have anything to do with anything in the game itself..." One thing it does suggest is, though these are not the origins of Mormons being in Utah, but it kind of suggests that this part of Eagleland might be representative of Utah. Though "Eagleland" as a broad idea of America... We'll get into this in a little bit, but this desert in particular has a lot of different flavors and timelines and stuff kind of crashing together that could have been points of inspiration here. I think it's a really interesting bit of backstory. It's interesting to see how... If you walk north of the desert, you do encounter an ocean with no shore. And it's like an easy way to be like, "well, the map ends here folks." As opposed to just like, "here's another forest." It's interesting to see a very vivid description of like, "yeah, it's the ocean and there's a sheer cliff face. So the whole desert is called the 'End of the World' because it's like death and nothingness..." And then boom, you fall your death <laugh> So...

JESS:
Yeah, we mentioned that there's a lot of insects and some alien robots and things like that that are wandering around the desert. But there's also a really interesting creature, that happens to be my smashable enemy for this section of the game: the gabilan. It's sort of looks like a weird leopard print animal with a funnel for a mouth. It spits a sticky substance at you, and if you have Lloyd inspect the creature in a battle, it says "something like this should not exist on Earth."

CAT:
Yeah. That is not a robot that's masquerading as a creature from earth. It is actually an alien creature.

JESS:
And that is the first type of creature like that that we've seen, right? We haven't seen something that wasn't a robot or imitating another creature like... That is an alien!

CAT:
Yes. That is the first biological alien we've seen, though this area also comes with another such alien creature. It's called a "titanees" or "titany" in MOTHER. It looks like it's an insect, but super spray does not work on it. It's like a big weird scorpion, with an upright face, and a strange mouth, and these kind of googly eyes.

JESS:
Yeah, I thought it looked like a mechanical scorpion. I thought that was a robot of some kind.

CAT:
Well, there is a bionic scorpion, which is just basically a scorpion but green - like the other bionic creatures that we encounter.

JESS:
Okay. I made a note that specifically I thought the titanees looked like a mechanical scorpion.

CAT:
It is not. However, it is not a creature that ever existed in any nature. Specifically the Encyclopedia describes it as "a space creature made by the aliens through the use of biotechnology."

JESS:
Maybe they took some inspiration from the scorpions of Earth and tried to make a better version.

CAT:
There's certainly a possibility that they could like, let's say... chimera-ize something in a way that isn't just using machine parts. Both these creatures are difficult in their own ways. Titanees have extremely high defense and use hypnosis, and the gabilan spits the mucus, which it uses to blind you. It also can dehydrate you and has continuous attacks. The Encyclopedia describes the galiban as a thing that looks like a qilin, which is a legendary hooved chimerical creature from Chinese mythology. But they also then say he's plainly a space creature.

JESS:
It kind of reminded me of like a Dr. Seuss character.

CAT:
It's a very goofy-looking creature, especially it's Birdo snout.

JESS:
Birdo! Yeah, that's what it looks like.

CAT:
Yeah. And instead of eggs, it's spitting mucus at you. Fun.

JESS:
Gross.

CAT:
<Laugh> Other enemies in the desert include some normal Earth fauna such as: rattlesnakes, which are like the other snakes, but way worse. They use "last blow", which we've talked about before as essentially like an instadeath attack. Now, a good thing about dying out here is that if Ana is leveled high enough, she probably has a PSI ability called "super healing", which can bring you back from the dead.

JESS:
I do not have that.

CAT:
Well, gosh, it helps <laugh> out in the desert.

JESS:
I bet.

CAT:
Granted, you have to then worry about keeping Ana alive at all costs, which is easier said than done.

JESS:
For sure.

CAT:
There's also scorpions, as we mentioned, and their bionic variant and they can poison you with venom. And the bionic ones can use that "stone origin" technique to petrify people, which is extremely inconvenient. We also see the omega saucers, which are these red saucers that we sort of talked about in the past from the train tunnel. They're described as "a model of the lil' saucer altered for battle."

JESS:
Ahhh...

CAT:
The lil' saucer by comparison is mentioned in the Encyclopedia as being "primarily for reconnaissance." So things are getting very serious now.

JESS:
I wonder how large these saucers are supposed to be. Are these aliens that we're dealing with tiny and they just ride around in like these big robots, so they affect the minds of other creatures and things? Or are they supposed to be like full-size saucers that the kids are encountering?

CAT:
It's a great question. The title screen of EarthBound shows full scale 1950-style sci-fi flying saucers. But that whole image is actually seemingly out of context of the rest of the game - more of like a sensational depiction of things. Whereas these saucers, especially with the first one being called like "lil' saucer," I get the impression that they're small. Especially if they're sentry drones. Like I've been thinking of them like the sentry orbs from Phantasm: small floating things that are very ominous, but tiny. Something you can hit with a baseball bat, you know?

JESS:
Yeah. There's also the energy robot, which looks like a little radioactive box. <laugh>.

CAT:
Yeah, this one shows up in EarthBound as well and is a staple of these games in a large part. It's like, it's a robot that very frustratingly replenishes the energy of the other alien creatures, like the barbots, and the saucers, and the starmen. Also, because it's like a nuclear box... when you beat it, it explodes and deals massive damage.

JESS:
And if you check it with Lloyd, it says that it is a quote: "walking fuel supply."

CAT:
Which is pretty cool. Like, it's a really cool idea if you're grounding the nature of this alien invasion in the game. Yeah,

JESS:
Yeah, it's cool until it blows up Ana for the fifth time and I've gotta hike all the way back to get her resurrected at the hospital!

CAT:
Yeah, I didn't mean "cool" like that. It's terrible like that <laugh>.

JESS:
At least I don't have to wait a thousand years.

CAT:
Yeah. We mentioned Nancy in our prior brief visit to the desert. In Mother, she's called "Jane" for reasons that are, I believe, not known... I'm not sure... All the, the names of, I mean well... I'll just go ahead and spoil: there will be other gynoids, and they all have totally normal Americanized names, but for some reason they're all changed. Maybe the developers, like, girlfriends or something were represented in this change. I'm not sure if you know out there, please, write in: dearmothershewrote@gmail.com. Now, we talked a little bit about her in the past, but since then, Jess, you've seen Metropolis.

JESS:
I did watch Metropolis and I can definitely see how the gynoid from Metropolis served as inspiration for the gynoids in this game and across a lot of different sci-fi media. It's pretty plain when you look at that, that that's what you're seeing. And now I've started noticing it in other places as well, other pieces of media. I've seen feminine leading robots that have that same sort of aesthetic.

CAT:
And last, but definitely not least, the Starmen. Just regular Starmen are regular enemies in an area for the first time in the game. Oh grand.

JESS:
<laugh>

CAT:
These poor kids.

JESS:
Ah, the Starmen are pushovers now. You got your Franklin Badges, you got your PK attacks, you got your leveled up Ninten with his baseball bat. I usually one shot those things.

[Rock music starts playing under the hosts]

CAT:
They're not so bad anymore. Though... they could roll with a posse...

JESS:
A rootin' tootin' Starman of the desert. It's not big enough for the both of us!

CAT:
<Laugh>.

JESS
Now draw.

[Music swells and fades]

CAT:
I wanna give a shout out now to the music in the desert. It is a crazy accurate depiction of Tejano music. That's specifically a Tex-Mex style of music. And the bass is sick. It's just really remarkable how this very specific genre of American music can see such good representation from these Japanese musicians in the format of this game and the limitations relating to the sound that they have to work with. It also offers another True Stories connection because there's quite a bit of Tejano music in True Stories. So, if True Stories turns out to have been a point of inspiration for MOTHER and the depiction of America in MOTHER, then it would be very easy to reach for the Tejano music to be a part of the Yucca Desert.

JESS:
It definitely doesn't sound like anything else in the game, and I really do like the desert theme a lot as well. Was that your memorable melody of this session?

CAT:
It sure was.

JESS:
<laugh>. It was really good. I definitely considered the desert theme to be my memorable melody as well... But it's not.

CAT:
We're also going to hear this music reprised a little bit in EarthBound, but we'll get there eventually. Now, more desert history: "before World War I, the desert was a feared and unexplored territory. But during the war, Air Force pilots flew over the desert and discovered... the ruins. When the war ended, there was a competition amongst veterans to be the first to the ruins. Some came in biplanes, others came in tanks that they made off with. There were even those who tried to prevent further raids by laying landmines in the area around the ruins. That should tell you just how outrageous this competition got. The race to the ruins got the nickname 'Ransackers' Rush'. It didn't last long, and eventually some of the Ranackers, fed up with not discovering anything worth looting, sold the existence of the ruins to the archeological research departments at famous universities around the world. Nowadays, visitors to the desert amount, to the occasional fanciful tourists with dreams of long lost days of gilded adventure."

JESS:
Hmm.

CAT:
Now, this section of the Encyclopedia... And as I sort of mentioned earlier... The idea of like the time and space that this desert exists in relation to real world history... Is kind of strange. The Encyclopedia specifically says "the tanks which saw victory in battle against General Rommel."

JESS:
General Rommel, huh?

CAT:
Rommel. Yeah. Rommel was a general in World War II, not World War I. A German general who commanded the seventh Panzer Division during the 1940 invasion of France. "His leadership of German and Italian forces of the North African campaign established his reputation as one of the great tank commanders of the war and earned him the nickname, 'The Desert Fox'." But then you might ask yourself, "well, hold on a minute. This is America allegedly. So at what point were there biplanes and tanks in America's deserts where no battles relating to World War onr or two happened?" Well, World War II's Desert Training Center, also known as "California, Arizona Maneuver Area" was a simulated theater of operation and the largest military training ground in the history of military maneuvers. It stretched from the outskirts of Pomona, California eastward to within 50 miles of Phoenix, Arizona, southward to the suburbs of Yuma, Arizona, and northward into the southern tip of Nevada in the Mojave Desert and the Sonoran Desert. So... Think about all those states. This space is huge. And we could then surmise, "okay, well maybe it's talking about World War I a whole bunch, but the Encyclopedia and the game itself actually means World War II." But then we have to contend with the use of biplanes, which we'll get to in a moment.

JESS:
Is it possible that there is some sensitivity regarding World War II and the Japanese developers that created this game? And maybe that's why they shied away from that?

CAT:
Maybe. But then why mention Rommel? That's very specific. Needlessly specific. But then, as far as the larger wounds of the Japanese people and what this desert could represent, here's another theory... Now, we've already talked about Utah and the Mormons in relation to how the Mormons settled in Salt Lake City and Mormons, AKA Latter-day Saints have a history with the Advent Desert. It also says, "the Mormons have prevented the development of this land so that the desert shall not be sullied by human hands." Obviously this isn't part of what's said in the Encyclopedia. I don't think it bears any real connection, but they talk about this desert as "the entryway to the Kingdom of God." They talk about "the day of resurrection." "Advent" means "second coming" and that sort of pertains to the book of Revelations and so forth. And... There's a possibility that there's kind of a flavor here of another facet of this desert region of America: which is the Trinity test. The world's first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It took place in the Jornada del Muerto Desert, which is in New Mexico. And the region was named by the conquistadors "Jornada del Muerto" because it means "dead man's journey" - it's very much the middle of nowhere. So... Maybe this is kind of... The Advent Desert is sort of a melange of a bunch of different ideas. Like, of the Trinity Test, and the Mormons, and so forth - a bunch of different religious mashup ideas that come together, with various fragments of world history, to create this sort of suggestion of this. But for all the information that's provided, it doesn't really have a cohesive idea or a cohesive history as far as I can tell.

JESS:
Well, it is a large desert similar to that military training ground and Yucca Desert made me think of "Yuma". So it's possible that that name was inspired by or derived from "Yuma" to make you think about that. Since it's included, it's part of that. So I'd say it's accurately represented and I feel like that's a really good theory that this desert is sort of modeled after that training ground, especially given some of the other things that you find...

CAT:
This might be a huge expanse of nothingness and enemy battles, but scattered throughout, there are some very notable sites and things to interact with.

JESS:
So I just started walking around the perimeter of the desert. I chose one direction and went that way. Since it was so big, I figured I'll try to get an idea of what's around the perimeter and then I'll kind of explore the middle of it. So, as I was going around the perimeter, I saw that there was a bunch of little piles of bones and you could go up and you could talk to them! And I remember that there was that person in Snowman that told us to "find the camel's bones in the desert" and that they knew that camel at one point. So I was keeping my eyes peeled, looking for, you know, the camel's bones. And well, it turns out there's a lot of bone piles in the desert and you can talk to them. One of them says, "I'm just a pile of bones now. I used to be a nice guy before, so don't worry, I won't attack you."

CAT:
Love that.

JESS:
Which is very, you know, kind of that pile of bones. I appreciate that. Thank you for not attacking. And I eventually did find the camel's bones because there was a pile that said, "I'm the bones of the camel. Want to know how to walk when in the desert?" And if you say "yes," it says, "move your left foot before your right foot sinks. Move your right foot before your left foot sinks. It took me a hundred years to figure that out." I don't know what it says if you say "no." I didn't do that one.

CAT:
<Laugh> It does a funny thing, Jess <laugh>. It says, "I'd very much like to tell you, wouldn't you like to know?" And you get a yes or no question again. And it's just a loop. Over and over and over again. You either hear it out or you just... It, it's persistent, like, it has to tell you.

JESS:
Oh... So the camel is intent on telling you its secret of walking in the desert.

CAT:
Yeah. Lest you end up like them.

JESS:
Well, it kind of made me... I started singing a little jaunty tune - I was walking through the desert to the tune of the desert theme. I was just saying like, you know, "left foot right, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot"

CAT:
<laugh>

JESS:
I remembered what the camel told me. I I took that to heart.

CAT:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

JESS:
There's another pile of bones that says, "I could make a good signpost. Don't you think?" <laugh>

CAT:
And who could forget the classic pile of bones? Who says, "conversing with a corpse? What a brave kid!

JESS:
<laugh> I guess one of those great things about having psychic abilities is you can pick up some of the messages that these deceased entities are leaving for you. Their "residual psychic energy".

CAT:
Yeah. You know, there's one final pile of bones that says something rather important, I suppose. They say, "Yucca Desert is the most boring part of this game. But stay on your toes! This desert has been mined." Wonder if maybe that's what killed this particular creature.

JESS:
Ugh.

CAT:
This keeps getting mentioned: that the desert was mined.

JESS:
Yeah! Including the pilot in the desert. Who tells you my "mother, she quote": during the last war I laid mines in this desert. I removed all but one of them. So watch your step!" <Laugh> I was like, "okay, is there a mine somewhere around this huge desert? And if you just happen to walk onto..." I see you're nodding at me. Okay. Tell me about the mine.

CAT:
<laugh>

JESS:
I didn't find it. I'm curious now.

CAT:
It's not hidden... Except for any single point in this entire desert does kind of count as "hidden". A needle in a haystack situation. There's a large patch of weeds in the upper east edge of the desert. And if you walk towards the top most weed... the screen flashes... And then... It says, "Certificate: We acknowledge the fact that you did step on the mine in the Yucca Desert. Keep this place to yourself. Please. Signed Shigesato Itoi."

JESS:
Oh my gosh! Wow!

CAT:
Which is my "mother, she quote" for this installment.

JESS:
That is a great Easter egg! I love that!

CAT:
<Laugh>.

JESS:
Can we get that printed somewhere? <laugh>

CAT:
That'll be the opposite of keeping that place to ourself.

JESS:
Wanna hang it on the wall. Well, it doesn't say where it is. It just says you found it

CAT:
<Laugh> Yeah. Yeah. Just, yeah... You just print out the screen and that's the certificate. The "certificate" part is a weird bit of translation, but sure. Whatever.

JESS:
Yeah. Cool. I love that. <laugh>.

CAT:
Let's talk a little bit more about the landscape of the desert. There's an oasis, a still green oasis, where you meet the pilot, who we'll talk about in a little bit. But there's also a place I'd noticed before, but I didn't know what to make of it, called "the old oasis". If you walk right from the oasis with the pilot, in about what is about the center of the desert... According to the Encyclopedia, "there remain traces of the biggest oasis, which became the Ransacker base of operations. The water there has been long dried up and only the stumps of the trees they felled remained to tell the tale of how merciless these men's dreams were." Now, if you go to the right from the oasis, the existing Oasis, you eventually get to the desert ruins. So leading up to it, I thought that these things that were sticking outta the ground were like Grecian style columns - but in fact they're meant to be petrified tree stumps. Another thing that gets mentioned in the Encyclopedia is that the desert has a bunch of sandstorms. Fortunately that's not a environmental event that takes place in this game though... if someone was doing an update, I assume that might be a thing that could happen... And then we have a very, very, very important thing that you have to find in the desert: the singing cactus.

JESS:
Yeah. So I did not encounter this in the game. I'm really curious to hear what the singing cactus is about.

CAT:
Well, in the northwest corner of the desert, just above the bones that call you a brave kid, there is a cactus that kind of looks like it has a face. It's next to some other cactuses, so you can tell the difference by comparison. And if you check it, it says, "wait, a voice is speaking into Ninten's mind." Use telepathy and the cactus sings.

JESS:
Does it teach you one of the melodies?

CAT:
It sure does.

JESS:
Oh, well I need to find the singing cactus then. Is there anything to clue you in to go and look for that?

CAT:
Well, I don't know because I haven't talked to them lately, but... That mysterious person who uh, no longer exists in your game, that is your quote "assistant," they would probably tell you to look for the cactus in the desert, I would imagine. But you decided to play on hard mode <laugh>.

JESS:
I like a challenge. I wonder how this cactus knows this melody.

[Melodious music begins to play under the hosts]

JESS:
You know, so far it's like, it's come from all these different creatures, things that presumably had a mother. I don't think the cactus had a mother...

CAT:
We have no data on it. The Encyclopedia does not elaborate on it. It's just a thing that you can see... A wonder of the natural world... Which may communicate how this melody is a part of the fabric of life itself. There did seem to be a thread for a while, but now there's not really much of a thread anymore, as to where the melodies come from, other than places and people that somehow have become in tune at one point or another with a song that is very universally powerful.

[Music swells and fades]

JESS:
So you mentioned the pilot that's in the desert. He does have a little encampment set up and there's a plane, a tank, and a little tent. And if you go up and talk to him, he offers to take you on a tour of the desert in his plane. If you say that you do want to take a tour, then there's three different paths for you to choose from. There's like the A course, the B course, and the C course, and they have different prices associated with them. He also tells you to save your ticket stubs because once you collect 10, he'll let you drive the tank.

CAT:
Hey! How about that?

JESS:
How about that? So I chose one of the paths, uh, to, you know, take a ride on the plane and they charge you however much money it was per member of your party. So for me it was Ninen, Lloyd, and Ana. So, you know, whatever the price was times three. So with the 10 tickets, I was thinking to myself, you collect 10 ticket stubs, but each one of those stubs takes up an inventory space and one character I think can only hold up to eight items. So you would have to have at least two characters in your party in order to do this part of the game.

CAT:
Right.

JESS:
So when we were talking about being able to play this game with Ninten alone, I don't think you're actually able to do that because of this particular gate.

CAT:
That depends on whether or not there's anything that stops you from skipping this entire section of the game, which I'm pretty sure there isn't.

JESS:
Okay.

CAT:
You gain a lot from it.

JESS:
Yeah.

CAT:
But it's not necessary to beat the game. You can keep going.

JESS:
I love this mechanic of being able to take a tour of the desert from the plane. There was three different paths you could choose from and I took all of them. And it's so cool being able to just fly around and get this, you know, bird's eye view, I guess, of the entire landscape that's all around you, and it's moving very quickly, and you're seeing everything, you know, flowing past you. But you're also not just constrained to the desert either. The pilot will take you other places around the desert as well, including over Ninten's house. And the music during the plane ride is awesome as well.

CAT:
Yeah, it's a great drum and organ piece. It's really good.

JESS:
Yeah, it's got a really driving beat to it and, if you take the longer plane ride, you get to hear more of it. So that's another reason to shell out that cash for the longer plane ride.

CAT:
Yeah. Not too much to see in the desert, but plenty to hear .

JESS:
For sure. One of the courses takes you over the desert ruins, which is actually how I discovered them.

CAT:
Mm-hmm.

JESS:
I saw them flying around from the airplane and thought, "oh, that looks really cool. I want to go check that out." But not before I got the 10 tickets and could drive the tank around.

CAT:
And then flight plan C shows a mysterious skyscraper to the west of what I could presume would be say... Ellay...

JESS:
Yeah, yeah. You do kind of go up there to the edge of Ellay right?

CAT:
Yeah.

JESS:
So there is an interesting-looking building that's over there.

CAT:
You also see the train station outside of Youngtown. A little hint of what's to come.

JESS:
It's so cool. I love that - the plane ride mechanic and being able to sort of see the map in a very different way.

CAT:
But the inventory problem is... A heck of a problem because survival in the desert could require a lot of items. You gotta sacrifice quite a bit to get out there and to do that.

JESS:
Yeah. I did have to dump some items in order to make space for the 10 ticket stubs.

CAT:
Me too. And if you have three, three characters at this point in time, to get 10 tickets, I mean, you can do the math pretty easy: you'll end up with spare tickets that are still occupying... I mean, you just throw them out of course. But like, it's annoying. <laugh>

JESS:
I had to throw out a life-up cream, which is a really great item. It heals for a lot.

CAT:
Yeah... That's, that's rough. That's real rough.

JESS:
I mean, it wasn't too expensive. It's not that big of a deal. But I definitely stocked up on those before heading out to the desert.

CAT:
The pilot, as described in the Encyclopedia, well, is as such: "you'll be greeted by a worn out biplane and a half-broken tank. Beside these is a tent out of which the figure of an old World War I pilot will come dragging his feet. He is of course one of the surviving ruins Ransackers who didn't know when to quit with an eye toward getting the occasional visitor to his oasis. He invites tourists on a sightseeing flight in his old clunker of a biplane. Rumor has it that he spends all day, every day secretly digging up buried artifacts from the ruins - on an income where he just barely scrapes by. But you can see, by how cheap his tickets are, and the way he's dressed, that the little thing we call 'time' stopped moving for him the moment he set foot in the desert. It's said he gained a number of victories in battle as an Air Force pilot in World War I, and post-war, embracing an unfulfilled, dream became what's now the desert's one and only resident. There's something to marvel at in the superiority of his technical skills, considering he took a broken, abandoned biplane and tank and has maintained them to this very day."

JESS:
And he knows how to fly that plane too.

CAT:
Now I did some math here. So if this guy is a pilot in World War I, he probably would've been in his twenties. So the youngest he could possibly be in the 1980s is in his mid-nineties - which is not impossible. But if this is somebody who has repaired an abandoned biplane, then it still is more likely that he was a World War II pilot that is out here and he is still an old guy.

JESS:
Yeah, but I mean, there's also a 300 year old dude - at least a 300 year old dude - living in the mountains who's never had a cold. So...

CAT:
Yeah, those are just rumors though. We can't confirm that.

JESS:
Mm-hmm.

CAT:
We don't know if it's true. Now, you fly your flights, and you get the tank. But Jess, I'm curious, did you explore the desert? Did you explore the ruins after seeing them from above - before you got the tank?

JESS:
Well, no, I got into that tank and I started blasting around - because the tank music is my memorable melody of this section of the game. It is fast-paced. It has an awesome guitar solo. It has really cool drums in the background. It is a phenomenal piece of music. It reminded me a lot of the music that plays at the very beginning of the game when you're fighting off your lamp. It's kind of similar in that style, but this is even better. It was rad.

CAT:
It's pure metal. Like, this is a metal song rendered to the highest possible quality on the sound card of the NES.

JESS:
Yeah. And so that was really driving me to take that tank all around the desert. 'Cause it moves fast too. It's a fast rolling tank. So I was going around checking out all the places that I was too scared to go before... before I went to the ruins. And no, I did not go to the ruins before picking up the tank. And I'm glad that I didn't because... There's a big robot guarding them. And if you don't have the tank, then I presume that he just blows you away.

CAT:
Yeah. The R-7037. The sprite for this robot is shown from the perspective of a small child looking up at something insurmountably huge. It's in this very cool aesthetic. It's very simple, but it's also very clean, very stylized. It feels like a kind of maybe like astroboy kind of robot-style creature, but relatively featureless. And between its legs, like in its like leg cavity, there's a green glow emanating from its unshielded like... parts and so forth. So the R-7037 is my most smashable enemy. This robot is... Is not nice. It's a cool looking robot. But the thing is, I mean like in the ruins you see there's an open passageway. So you think, "ooh, cool, I wanna go there." The only way through is passing through some relatively unassuming walls to get into there. And there's no onscreen indication that there's a giant, what I could presume is at least three story tall robot waiting for you.. But if you cross through that threshold: boom! You're in a battle as three children that... You just get decimated! Like, if you attack it, the damage is 1. Each hit deals more than a reasonably leveled character could take at whatever time you're probably in the desert. And I assume that going there without the tank is a mistake that the game must assume you will make. Which means that it must assume that at some point you're gonna go out to the desert, your entire party's gonna get killed, and you're gonna have to go all the way back to wherever you last saved.

JESS:
Yeah. And then you'll remember, "oh, there's that dude with the tank that's there. I bet I could blow up that robot if I had a big tank."

CAT:
Yes, it's true. And you can, and you do. The tank battle looks identical to a regular fight, but when you select "fight" with each of your characters, it'll say like, "Ana fired the tank gun."

JESS:
Yeah.

CAT:
And any blows that it deals to you bounce back at it.

JESS:
Yeah. So if the robot attacks you with its beam or whatever it like reflects off of the tank and goes back and hits the robot instead. It was a happy little accident that I just happened to climb into that tank and then go to the ruins. But once you defeat the robot with the tank, the tank breaks and you can't ride around in it anymore.

CAT:
Yeah. It was a mighty battle though.

JESS:
<laugh>.

CAT:
Actually... I'm not so good with the metric system, so I'm not gonna do the math right now, but, the Encyclopedia says that the R-7037 measures more than 7 meters and weighs more than 3.5 tons.

JESS:
Yep. That's a tank.

CAT:
Once everything's destroyed... you can explore the desert ruins.

JESS:
Yeah. And inside there's a entrance to a cave.

CAT:
Let's talk about the exterior first though, and how it might pertain to what we've been establishing as the kind of confusing landscape of the desert in the scope of America. In the Encyclopedia, for all the different things that it's provided photographic reference for, it's not uncommon to show, say a bunch of pictures from very different places to represent one place. But in the case of the desert ruins, it shows three photos of the same place. The ruins of Monte Albán ruins in Oaxaca, Mexico. And it's described as such: "the ruins are enclosed by a maze-like outer wall, about 60 meters in length on each of its four sides. Follow the outer wall and go inside and you'll be confronted with five block divisions separated by terraced stone walls. If you walk along the walls, which are left unrestored and half buried in sand, you'll hit the north block with its beautiful stone paving swept clean by the wind. In the dead center of this paving is a terraced altar, signifying the heart of the ruins. This is it: the entrance to the ruins underground section. Universities organized excavation teams, but there wasn't a single artifact dug out of the ruins. Whether this was due to the pilots having ransack the place or due to ransacks who came before them, or an incident that occurred back when this civilization died out. The debates come to an unresolved end. All they could agree upon was that the ruins were built around AD 1000. Otherwise, the universities all had conflicting half-baked theories like: there was a war between Mayan tribes. One tribe was defeated and escaped to the north, building a kingdom upon this land. Another theory stated that in AD 1000 there had been a faction of Christians who broke off as heretics, and believing that Christ's second coming was going to occur in this desert, migrated here and built up a sacred land for the kingdom that would be..." Which sounds somewhat similar to Mormon mythology. "And finally, these ruins were an earth exploration base for aliens. In recent years, magazines have reported that UFO researchers have heard rumors of mysterious, luminous objects being spotted around the ruins."

JESS:
That's really interesting.

CAT:
I'm not saying it's aliens, but...

JESS:
It's aliens. It's definitely aliens.

CAT:
Yeah. These are ancient ruins by Earth standards. If aliens had something to do with these ruins in the desert, then were they the same aliens? Were they related to whatever conflict these aliens come from, whatever world they come from? Then we have, you know, biological aliens from other worlds in this desert. Are they recent additions or do they have something to do with these ruins?

JESS:
And was Jesus an alien and comes every thousand years and we're about at the time again when the aliens would return?

CAT:
And then you have Prometheus!

JESS:
Yeah. <laugh>.

[Desert adventure music starts]

CAT:
I don't know. This is really interesting. It would be super fun to dig into, but all we have available to us to dig into is the ruins themselves.

JESS:
<laugh>

[The musical transition ends]

JESS:
So if you go down into the cave that is under the ruins, there's a bunch of monkeys down there. And you can talk to them... And the first one that you talk to says, "most monkeys here will lie to you. Beware." It doesn't say "all" though, it says "most." So it leaves it up to you to decide when you're talking to each individual monkey, whether or not they might be telling you the truth.

CAT:
You might suspect going into a temple, in the earth, that you are gonna find yourself in basically a dungeon. Well, you don't. You find yourself in two floors of talking to monkeys and figuring out a relatively simplistic maze-like structure of this underground complex.

JESS:
And there are items that you can pick up, but there's no random encounters in there.

CAT:
And they're great items. You get a bunch of PSI stones.

JESS:
Yeah.

CAT:
Now there is an explanation for the monkeys. "They are said to be the descendants of the beloved pet of Professor Thompkin and his wife, from Oxford's research team. As a way of getting back at people for leaving them in this basement. They have a habit of lying when they see a human."

JESS:
But monkeys aren't the only creature that's down in these ruins. There's what looks like a little penguin.

CAT:
Mm-hmm.

JESS:
And the little penguin, when you talk to it, seems to think that it's made an awful big mistake coming down here <laugh>. In fact, he says as much, he says, "a big mistake. I really shouldn't have come here."

CAT:
The Encyclopedia says, "a lone penguin that got mixed up in this crowd. It seems to be the lost luggage of a penguinist from Asia who came here on a whim." Now, that is a very strange remark, but fortunately there's a simple explanation: the "penguinist from Asia", is likely none other than Shigesato Itoi himself. In 1980, he released a music album with the help of Keichi Suzuki and the Moon Riders called "Penguinism" and he calls himself a "penguinist".

JESS:
Really? So this penguin that is underneath these ruins is like the in-game avatar of Shigesato Itoi?

CAT:
Well, the Encyclopedia suggests that it's like a penguin that belongs to Shigesato Itoi, but maybe! Could be!

JESS:
Hmm.

CAT:
"Go down the decaying wooden ladder into the underground and the first thing you'll probably do is gawk at the enormous space you've entered; crystal clear air that breathes comfortably on your clammy skin. An instant time warp to another world. These were enormous underground ruins, as if the crumbling outer walls back up on the surface have reverted in an instant to how they were in the year 1000, these picturesque stonewall go on forever. What could have been the original purpose in making a giant maze like this underground? The disputes between all the schools' excavation teams had started with such a basic question And yet, by the layered structure, in one theory, they couldn't help but imagine the ruins widening out to a third basement and a fourth, and then on forever in the form of an underground pyramid. Another theory stated that a giant pyramid had been buried by the sand, and that the tip of the iceberg was all that is now exposed above the surface. They continued excavating patiently toward a third and fourth basement floor, but immediately below the second was a giant stone made up of a large rock deposit. And they had no choice but to give up digging any further."

JESS:
Large rock deposit, huh?

CAT:
Yeah, that's a little unclear, but uh, as we get to the bottom of things...

JESS:
It might become more clear <laugh>

CAT:
Yeah.

JESS:
Yeah.

CAT:
Fun fact about the music in the, uh, let's just call 'em the monkey caves. This music is a basis for the music for Saturn Valley in EarthBound.

JESS:
Really?!

CAT:
It doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it's there. If you compare the two, it's very clear that this is the building blocks of that iconic theme from that iconic place in the later game.

JESS:
Yeah. So, I mean, they're not like trying to say that like the monkeys are an analog for Mr. Saturn or anything...

CAT:
No.

JESS:
But it's just the music basis is there. That's cool.

CAT:
Yeah. Doesn't mean a thing, but it's there and shows how the kind of creative process of all this is evolving.

JESS:
Awesome.

CAT:
The monkeys are... A mess, quite frankly. <laugh>.

JESS:
Yeah. They say some really funny stuff though. One of them tells you that, "in the town by the sea you'll meet a new friend."

CAT:
Hmm. Are they lying?

JESS:
Who could that be?

CAT:
Who could it be?

JESS:
Another one asks you how long it took you to get there. Another one asks, ""did you call me up?" Like, what does this monkey like have a telephone or something? Like, you know, it's like, "did you call me up?"

CAT:
Yeah.

JESS:
Am I your dad?

CAT:
<laugh>.

JESS:
No?

CAT:
Well, <laugh> to that end, there's a monkey you talk to that says, "cool down dude, are you so serious? All the time?" And if you say "yes," they say, "well man, it's like you don't know when to quit. Take a rest bud." If you say "no," like, as in like, "are you so serious all the time?" You're like, "no I'm not." They say "good to hear it, it's just a game."

JESS:
Yep.

CAT:
And immediately after that moment my dad called.

JESS:
Really? That did not happen to me.

CAT:
Okay. I was wondering. I was like, "this is a weird coincidence."

JESS:
It is. Yeah.

CAT:
I had been playing for a long time, so... but okay!

JESS:
That would've been a good place to put something like that. But no, I don't think it was, that didn't happen to me... so...

CAT:
There's also another creature down there. It looks like a monkey, but it's probably not a monkey. Do you recall the, the monkey that says, "huh? What do I look like a monkey?"

JESS:
If you say "yes", he says, "I'm really a raccoon pretending to be a monkey." But if you say "no", he says "you have good eyesight. Hats off to you."

CAT:
Yeah. A raccoon, huh? What other raccoons from the NES do you know, Jess?

JESS:
The Super Mario Brothers tanooki...?

CAT:
That's right. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that that's probably a tanooki rather than just a regular quote unquote "raccoon". Of course the tanooki are the shape shifting raccoons of Japanese folklore. There's also some dubious monkeys, like for example, the one that says, "oh, Ana baby hba. Hba what a dish!" <Laugh>. Thanks sexist monkey.

JESS:
Yeah. Yeah. What a... What a jerk. And there's another one that says, "I am a lady, don't talk to me so casually." And if you say "yes", then they say, "the truth is I'm a man." And if you say "no", they say, "hmm."

CAT:
Picking that apart... I'm like, well, okay, so maybe it's not like a "trans people are funny" kind of thing, so much as it is... monkeys are lying to you.

JESS:
Yeah. There's another monkey that says, "I've got a good story to tell. You want to hear it?" And if you say "yes", they say, "well, you should be nice to friends. That's all I've got to say." And if you say "no", they say, "have you no intellectual ambitions?!"

CAT:
Yeah...

JESS:
You should always be asking questions, you know, that's good advice. I'm not sure that's really a story, but it's good advice. "Be nice to your friends."

CAT:
You know, in some ways it's like the monkeys, in their own bizarre way are sort of reflective of the kind of nonsense that comes from Magicant. So I suppose it's no surprise that when you get to the fabled third floor, you find yourself in a cave. And in that cave is spire. A spire just like the one that takes you to Magicant.

[Bouncy, strange music plays underneath the hosts]

CAT:
Fortunately, you don't need your great-grandfather's journal to access it. And then well...

JESS:
You're back in Magicant again!

CAT:
Exactly where you're usually back in Magicant. That's weird.

JESS:
Yeah. That happened to me and I was like, "okay, so I'm just back here again? That's weird. What was the point of going into the cave?" But there is a point.

CAT:
Is there?

JESS:
Yeah. Because when you exit Magicant this time, you come out of a different exit!

CAT:
And we'll talk more about that visit to Magicant and that exit in our next episode.

JESS:
Well, we've been someplace really old and now we're gonna go someplace really young. So...

CAT:
<Laugh>

JESS:
We'll do that next time. Until then, I'm Jess!

CAT:
I'm Cat!

JESS:
And that's all she wrote.

CAT:
Have you no intellectual ambitions?

JESS:
<Laugh>

[The bouncy music ends, upbeat music plays]

Outro
CAT
“MOTHER,” She Wrote is made possible thanks to the generous support of our Patreon Producers:Amber Devereux, Becky Scott Fairley, Bob Hogan, C B, Joe “Tank” Ricciardelli, Josh King, McDibble Deluxe, MjolnirMK86, Patrick Webster, Sean Hutchinson, Sean T. Redd…And our Super-Deluxe Executive Patreon Producers: BigBadShadowMan, Marcus Larsson, and Jaimeson LaLone

JESS
You can join the team at Patreon.com/OmniverseMedia! And if you think “MOTHER,” She Wrote is simply smashing, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser  - and be sure to subscribe via your favorite podcast player.

CAT
This series is recorded and produced in Orlando, Florida and Louisville, Kentucky on lands stolen from their Indigenous people: the Timucua and Seminole, and Shawnee, Cherokee, Osage, Seneca-Iroquois, Miami, Hopewell and Adena.

JESS
Acknowledgement of the first peoples of these lands, and the lasting repercussions of colonization is just the beginning of the restorative work that is necessary. Through awareness, we can prompt allyship, action, and ultimately decolonization.

CAT
For links to aid Indigenous efforts and to learn more about the first nations of the land where you live: visit omniverse.media/landback

JESS
“MOTHER,” She Wrote is written, produced, and performed by me: Jessica Mudd.

CAT
And me: Cat Blackard. Our original score is composed and performed by Jess. The role of Ana is performed by Sarah Rhea Werner, and additional voices are provided by Chrysta Mudd and John Mudd.

JESS
Special thanks to Kenisu for his invaluable work translating the MOTHER Encyclopedia. Find a link to his translation, other media we’ve referenced, and full episode transcripts at mothershewrote.earth

CAT
“MOTHER,” She Wrote is not affiliated with Nintendo, Shigesato Itoi, or any rights holders of the MOTHER and EarthBound intellectual properties. Please play the games' official Nintendo releases.

[Omniverse Audio Brand]