G: Yes. And after going through the history as well as the plots, I think the key to understanding Mother is that it is less a conventional trilogy than three increasingly ambitious attempts by Shigesato Itoi to explore the same basic idea.

There is literal continuity—much more than I initially expected—but Nintendo wasn't saying, "People need Chapter 2 because Chapter 1 ended on a cliffhanger." Mother was successful enough and conceptually unusual enough that Itoi got to make a bigger, better version of the idea. Then Mother 2 was successful enough in Japan that Nintendo essentially said, "Of course we're making Mother 3." Miyamoto later described that decision quite candidly as a commercial one. citeturn1search57turn0search1

And the progression is unusually clean:

Mother: childhood adventure invaded by something alien.
Mother 2 / EarthBound: childhood adventure versus cosmic evil.
Mother 3: childhood and community being destroyed by the world that came after them.

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There are going to be complete spoilers for all three games below.

1. Mother (1989): the prototype

The first game begins with a mystery from generations earlier.

In the early 1900s, an American couple, George and Maria, mysteriously disappear. George returns two years later and begins obsessively studying psychic powers—PSI—but Maria never comes home. Decades later, their great-grandson Ninten begins encountering poltergeists and other bizarre phenomena. His father tells him about George's research, and Ninten sets off to investigate. citeturn2search58

Already, this is one of the things that made Mother peculiar in 1989. It's structurally a Dragon Quest-style JRPG, except instead of knights, castles, swords and medieval fantasy, you've got an American kid wandering around a warped version of contemporary America. Baseball bats are weapons. You visit department stores and hospitals. Telephones matter. Ordinary animals and household objects become enemies.

Itoi was deliberately playing with RPG conventions rather than simply reproducing them. Contemporary assessments praised exactly that quality, although the game's punishing difficulty and balancing were criticized. citeturn1search57

Ninten eventually reaches a strange psychic realm called Magicant, ruled by Queen Mary. She has forgotten something terribly important and asks Ninten to recover the pieces of a song—the game's Eight Melodies.

Ninten eventually travels with Ana, another psychic child, and Lloyd, a technologically gifted boy.

And then the apparently whimsical adventure reveals what it's actually about.

Queen Mary is Maria, Ninten's great-grandmother.

George and Maria had been abducted by aliens. While captive, they cared for an alien infant named Giegue—the character later localized as Giygas. Maria essentially became his mother. George, meanwhile, learned the aliens' PSI abilities and escaped back to Earth with that knowledge. citeturn2search4

Eventually Giegue comes to Earth as the leader of the alien threat.

And here's where Mother stops behaving like an ordinary NES RPG.

You don't really defeat Giegue by beating him up.

Giegue actually remembers Ninten's family. His feelings toward Maria remain buried inside him. Ninten and his friends sing Maria's completed Eight Melodies—the lullaby associated with his childhood.

He cannot emotionally withstand it.

The song gradually breaks his resolve, and he retreats. citeturn2search54

So the ultimate weapon in this 1989 RPG is essentially an alien invader's memory of being loved by his human mother.

That gives you a pretty good early indication of why people became attached to these games.

2. Why did Mother deserve a sequel?

This part has a surprisingly mundane answer alongside the artistic one.

It was successful.

Mother was Japan's sixth-best-selling game of 1989 and sold roughly 400,000 copies. That's substantial for an original Famicom RPG. citeturn1search57

More importantly, it had found something distinctive.

Shigesato Itoi wasn't primarily a game designer. He was already a famous Japanese copywriter/writer/media personality, and his sensibility produced something Nintendo didn't already have: an RPG constructed around recognizable everyday life, jokes, mundane observations, childhood psychology and emotional memory, with fantasy intruding into that environment. citeturn1search10

So Mother 2 wasn't really "we must find out what happens next."

It was:

There is clearly something in this idea. Now let's actually make the game it can become.

And they nearly failed.

Development lasted about five years. Four years in, they had lots of art, writing, music and design—but the thing wasn't coming together as a functioning game. Satoru Iwata and HAL were brought in.

Iwata examined it and essentially offered two choices: preserve the existing program and spend roughly two years fixing it, or let him rebuild the underlying system and get it functioning vastly sooner.

They rebuilt.

Within roughly six months the whole game was playable; another six months went into refinement. Itoi and Iwata later stressed that the preceding four years weren't wasted—the accumulation of strange ideas during those years is precisely part of what made Mother 2 so idiosyncratic. citeturn1search8turn1search3

That game became:

3. Mother 2 / EarthBound (1994)

This time the protagonist is Ness, living in the American parody-country of Eagleland.

A meteor crashes near his house.

Ness and his obnoxious neighbor Pokey/Porky Minch investigate it. From the meteor comes Buzz Buzz, a tiny time traveler from ten years in the future.

And he brings very bad news.

In that future, Giygas has won.

He has become vastly more powerful than the comparatively comprehensible alien being Ninten encountered in Mother. His influence corrupts humans, animals and even inanimate objects. Buzz Buzz tells Ness that he and three other children can prevent this future. citeturn2search53

Those children are:

Ness — psychic protagonist
Paula — psychic girl
Jeff — scientific/technological genius
Poo — psychic martial artist/prince

That echoes the party structure of the original without literally reusing its protagonists.

And once again Ness has to visit eight important locations and collect melodies.

That's not accidental. Mother 2 is constantly rhyming with Mother 1.

But it turns the scope way up.

You encounter a cult obsessed with the color blue, zombies, aliens, gangsters, hippies, sentient piles of vomit, dinosaurs, a corrupt department store, a town where everyone speaks backward, a civilization of Mr. Saturns, and dozens of things that sound as though Itoi asked, "Wouldn't it be funny if…?" and nobody managed to stop him.

Underneath all the absurdity, though, Giygas is gradually poisoning the world.

And Pokey becomes important.

At first he's merely Ness's selfish, cowardly, spoiled neighbor.

Then he keeps showing up around powerful or evil people.

Then he becomes an active servant of Giygas.

That turns out to be enormously important to the trilogy.

What happened to Giygas?

This is the direct payoff from Mother 1.

The Giygas encountered by Ness is no longer psychologically recognizable as the alien child Maria once loved.

His psychic power has become so enormous that it has destroyed his own mind. Pokey explains that Giygas can no longer control his power. citeturn2search54

Worse, Giygas isn't actually located where the children initially think.

He's attacking from the distant past.

So Dr. Andonuts—Jeff's father—constructs a time machine, but organic beings cannot survive the trip. Ness and his friends therefore have their consciousnesses transferred into robotic bodies and travel backward in time to confront Giygas.

And EarthBound suddenly stops being cute.

Giygas is barely a person anymore. He's essentially an incomprehensible psychic/cosmic catastrophe.

You can't defeat him conventionally.

And this is the second major rhyme with Mother.

In Game 1, Ninten sings.

In Game 2, Paula prays.

She begins praying to everyone the party has met during its journey. People scattered around the world somehow hear her and pray for the children.

Eventually her prayer reaches one final person:

you—the player.

The game uses the player's own entered name.

And your prayer contributes to Giygas's destruction. citeturn2search54

So both games ultimately reject the normal RPG fantasy of "get sufficiently powerful and kill God."

Their final answer is human connection.

That, I think, is one of the big pieces you're looking for when asking why EarthBound acquired the reputation it did. Its weirdness isn't merely comedy pasted onto an RPG. The silliness makes you form attachments to an enormous collection of ridiculous people and places—and then the climax reveals that those attachments were mechanically relevant all along.

The game literally weaponizes your accumulated affection for its world.

4. Then why make Mother 3?

Here we have an unusually explicit answer from Miyamoto:

“The whole reason for making the game was simply because MOTHER 2 sold well, and that it seemed only natural for Nintendo to make a MOTHER 3.”

He called it a commercial decision. citeturn0search1

But Itoi immediately had a much stranger artistic idea.

He wanted to go beyond what they'd experimented with in Mother 2: changing protagonists and letting you experience portions of the story through different characters.

For Mother 3, he wanted the protagonist to change by chapter, while the chapters gradually reveal that all these apparently separate stories are one story. He also wanted something more unusual:

a location that changes over time.

His earliest conception was almost a detective story in which the city itself would be the protagonist. citeturn0search1

So the improvement over EarthBound wasn't intended simply to be:

bigger world + better graphics + more enemies.

It was:

What if instead of traveling through a gigantic strange world, we stay somewhere long enough to watch the world change?

That is exactly what the finished Mother 3 ultimately does.

And that's why its story is considerably darker.

5. Mother 3: the destruction of an ordinary world

The game takes place on the Nowhere Islands, particularly the tiny village of Tazmily.

At first Tazmily is almost absurdly idyllic.

There isn't even really a conventional economy. Everybody knows everybody. People cooperate.

The central family consists of father Flint, mother Hinawa, twin boys Lucas and Claus, and their dog Boney.

Then strange soldiers called the Pigmask Army arrive.

They begin combining animals with machinery, creating grotesque chimeras.

And very early in the game, one of those altered animals kills Hinawa.

This isn't an RPG mother who conveniently died years before the story.

You meet her.

You spend time with the family.

Then the game kills her.

Claus becomes obsessed with revenge, runs off to kill the creature responsible—and disappears.

Lucas, initially the timid twin, is devastated.

Then the game jumps forward several years.

And Tazmily has changed.

6. This is what Mother 3 adds to the formula

The Pigmask Army hasn't simply conquered the village militarily.

It introduces modern consumer society.

Money.

Television.

Status.

New houses.

Technology.

Entertainment.

Debt.

The villagers who were once an unusually communal society gradually become consumers.

And presiding over all of it is a mysterious ruler.

Eventually you learn who it is.

Pokey.

The annoying kid from EarthBound.

Except Pokey has been abusing time travel since disappearing after the battle with Giygas. He's now an impossibly ancient, physically ruined creature who has wandered through history until he reached the Nowhere Islands.

He calls himself Porky in the standard Mother 3 fan translation/modern naming.

And he treats civilizations as toys. citeturn2search55

That makes Pokey/Porky the strongest piece of literal connective tissue between Games 2 and 3.

Giygas connects 1 → 2.

Pokey connects 2 → 3.

So there actually is a chain.

Maria → Giygas → Ness → Pokey → Lucas.

Not one continuous hero's journey, but a causal sequence.

7. Then Mother 3 reveals something enormous

Under the Nowhere Islands sleeps the Dark Dragon.

Seven enormous Needles keep it asleep. The mysterious Magypsies guard those Needles.

Only particular people capable of using PK Love can pull them.

And here's the important part:

The Dragon absorbs the heart of whoever pulls the majority of the Needles.

When awakened, it can remake the world accordingly. citeturn2search5turn2search52

Lucas can pull them.

But someone else can too.

A mysterious cybernetic Masked Man working for Porky.

So the latter portion of the game becomes a race between Lucas and the Masked Man to pull the seven Needles.

And eventually another revelation occurs.

8. Tazmily itself is a lie

The villagers aren't actually members of some ancient isolated culture.

They're the survivors of the end of the world.

Human civilization already destroyed itself.

A small group escaped aboard a ship and reached the Nowhere Islands, which survived because of the Dragon.

The survivors concluded that merely rebuilding their previous civilization would eventually recreate the same disaster.

So they did something extraordinary.

They erased their own memories.

They invented new identities and histories and constructed Tazmily as a deliberately innocent society.

The idyllic beginning of Mother 3 therefore wasn't nostalgia for an earlier civilization.

It was an artificial attempt to start humanity over without its baggage. citeturn2search3turn2search52

And Porky comes along and systematically reintroduces the old world's appetites.

Technology.

Consumption.

Status.

Greed.

Exploitation.

Authoritarianism.

Spectacle.

Tazmily proceeds to become something resembling our civilization again.

That is considerably more ambitious thematically than EarthBound.

9. And the Masked Man is Claus

This is the final cruelty.

Lucas's missing twin didn't die when he ran away.

Porky's forces found him.

They rebuilt him as a cybernetic weapon, erased his personality and turned him into the Masked Man.

So the final contest for the fate of humanity is literally:

Lucas versus his brother.

Lucas has pulled three Needles.

Claus has pulled three.

Whoever pulls the seventh determines which heart dominates the awakened Dragon. citeturn2search52

Before that confrontation, Porky fights the heroes and eventually retreats into something called the Absolutely Safe Capsule.

It's perfect Itoi black comedy.

The capsule really is absolutely safe.

Nothing outside can ever hurt Porky.

But once he's inside, he can never get out.

Porky finally gets what he wants: absolute immunity from everyone and everything, forever.

Which is indistinguishable from eternal imprisonment. citeturn2search55

Then Lucas confronts Claus.

And once again, the final battle of a Mother game ultimately isn't won through violence.

Their dead mother Hinawa speaks to her children.

Claus gradually remembers who he is.

He finally attacks Lucas with lightning, knowing Lucas's Franklin Badge will reflect it.

Claus effectively kills himself.

He dies in Lucas's arms. citeturn2search10

Lucas pulls the seventh Needle.

The Dragon awakens.

The world appears to end.

And then…

the screen goes black.

Characters begin talking directly to you.

They reassure you that they're alive.

The game ends without showing you what the remade world looks like.

Which is about as Mother an ending as humanly possible.

So what actually connects the trilogy?

This is where I think it becomes much more coherent than "three quirky Nintendo RPGs."

There are three different kinds of continuity operating simultaneously.

Literal continuity

Mother 1 → Mother 2: Giegue/Giygas.

The emotionally conflicted alien child raised by Maria becomes the incomprehensibly powerful cosmic horror Ness must eventually confront.

Mother 2 → Mother 3: Pokey/Porky.

The selfish child who attaches himself to Giygas survives, travels through time, and eventually becomes the ancient tyrant destroying Lucas's world.

Interestingly, that means evil changes form across the trilogy.

Giygas begins as an alien invader who still possesses love and memory.

Eventually he becomes pure destructive power without meaningful personality.

But Porky moves the opposite direction: he's completely human, and his evil increasingly becomes deliberate.

Structural continuity

All three games are obsessed with children encountering adult-scale horrors without ceasing to be children.

They don't become Conan.

They remain kids with baseball bats, yo-yos, dogs, friends, parents, homesickness and memories.

The bizarre mundanity is part of the point.

Emotional continuity

And here's the really striking progression.

Mother 1:
The ultimate evil remembers being loved.

Mother 2:
The ultimate evil is defeated because people remember and care about one another.

Mother 3:
The ultimate struggle is over whether humanity can preserve love and community while civilization changes—and ultimately whether one brother can remember that he loves another.

So the word Mother isn't incidental.

Each climax circles back toward family, memory, nurture and human connection.

And why is the series so highly regarded?

I think describing EarthBound merely as "a really good SNES RPG" actually undersells what happened.

It became influential because Itoi realized that an RPG could be about ordinary lived experience rather than fantasy mythology.

A hotel can matter.

Calling your dad can matter.

Being homesick can matter.

A stupid joke from an NPC can matter.

A song can matter.

Your mother can matter.

The game can directly acknowledge you sitting outside the game playing it without merely making a fourth-wall-breaking gag.

And it can swing from utter stupidity to genuine grief without announcing, "NOW THE SERIOUS PART BEGINS."

That's an aesthetic you can see echoes of later in games like Undertale, Omori, Lisa, and a huge chunk of the modern indie-RPG tradition.

The retrospective reputation reflects that: critics and player polls eventually elevated EarthBound into "greatest games" territory, while commentary on the series repeatedly singles out its ability to provoke emotions beyond the normal excitement/fear repertoire of games. citeturn2search53turn1search58

And Mother 3 was explicitly conceived as an attempt to push farther rather than merely repeat EarthBound. During the famously troubled N64 development, Itoi, Iwata and Miyamoto described changing protagonists, watching one place evolve over time, breaking normal RPG progression, and even deliberately betraying players' expectations of what a Mother game should be. citeturn0search1

That project became absurdly ambitious, migrated from Super Famicom to 64DD/N64, consumed six years, and was cancelled in 2000. It was eventually resurrected in much more manageable 2D form for Game Boy Advance and released in Japan in 2006. citeturn0search0

So I'd summarize the creative evolution this way:

Mother: Can a Dragon Quest-like RPG take place in our world and be funny, personal and emotionally sincere?

Mother 2 / EarthBound: Yes. So how far can we push that idea?

Mother 3: What happens if we stop touring the funny world and instead make you love one little piece of it—and then force you to watch time, technology, death and human weakness change it?

And that last distinction explains something that had always puzzled me about the series too: Mother 3 isn't really trying to be "EarthBound, but better." Itoi had already made EarthBound. His proposed improvement was to exploit something games are uniquely capable of doing: let you inhabit a community before and after its transformation.

That makes the trilogy's overall movement almost:

adventure → connection → loss.

Or perhaps even more neatly:

Mother 1 is about remembering love.
Mother 2 is about sharing love.
Mother 3 is about what remains of love after everything changes.

And given the plots, the title MOTHER suddenly makes considerably more sense than it does if your only exposure was the American box labeled EarthBound.