Iwata and Itoi Discuss the Relationship Between Animal Crossing and Mother 3

As many of us already know, the chances of seeing an official domestic release of titles from the Earthbound/Mother series seems to be somewhere between “slim” and “ha ha ha ha ha, oh my God, you’re really not kidding, are you? Ahahaha.” Regretfully.

Nonetheless, a recent Japanese interview with Nintendo Co. Ltd. President Satoru Iwata and Mother creator Shigesato Itoi has been dug up by Earthbound Central, in which the two reminisce about the development of Earthbound and some resemblances between it and another big Nintendo title, Animal Crossing.

Here’s an excerpt:

Iwata: (laugh) Do you remember way back when we were extremely busy working on MOTHER 2 and you said, “I came up with an incredible idea for MOTHER 3.”?

Itoi: Yeah (laugh)

Iwata: The reason I bring that up is because I think many of your ideas for MOTHER 3 then share things in common with Animal Crossing.

Itoi: Now that you mention it, you might be right. When we were working on MOTHER 2, RPGs were all basically “road movies”. The main character would set out on a journey and go from town to town. By laying this out in a spiraling fashion, an RPG’s structure would start to resemble a simple board game.

Iwata: Yes.

Itoi: But I felt that there was a limit to this road movie/board game style of moving from one spot to the next. Kind of like, “Okay, I made it this far, but what’s happened to the people in the last town?”

For the rest of this part of the interview, check out Earthbound Central’s translation. In addition, Itoi shows some of his “inner Porky” with a tour of his Animal Crossing town, which you can find here.