"Why making mother 4 is a bad idea"
"Im making mother 4."

The duality of man

I feel like a big part of unfinished fan games is showing them off to the public way too early. They either get taken down or the pressure starts to build on the developers

Game development is fuckin HARD...

making a mother 4 is the equivalent to cursing yourself and the entire dev team with a hex

At this point CogDis is more an Mother 4 then an Mother 1.5

i remember when mother 4 (now known as oddity) was announced i was in middle school then, when the other mother 4 came out (i remember clear as day) it was quite literally my high school graduation day, i stopped everything to watch the trailer, it just goes to show how long of a ride this has been

Hey please don't say that it still hasn't come out.

We're patiently waiting for Winter 2014

I agree with you. I suspect that the mother 4 attempts never bear fruit because the teams vastly underestimate the amount of work that goes into making a game, and the fangames/mods/remakes don't suffer from this as badly because they are built on the backbone of an already completed game. Here's hoping you can break the curse of mother 4

Oddity's biggest mistake was refusing to charge for the game now that it was legally distinct from Mother, or even open a Kickstarter to fund it's development. Then after a single trailer it stagnated and vanished into nothing lol.

Itoi wanting the players to make they own M🌎THER 4 game, so Itoi can play it and it feels like everytime someone mades a M🌎THER game, there always misfortune when someone makes it

It's like half-life 2 episode 3 mods like the EXACT SAME PROBLEM

At least we have a bunch of good rom hacks, and CogDis

This is a hot take I don't think I've ever heard before...

I think there’s something to be said about the difficulty of managing the development of Mother games, specifically. Mothers 2 and 3 languished in development hell for 8 and 12 years, respectively, and that was with teams of professionals working on them.

Great video and it's definitely something that a lot of people don't consider when they take on the task of creating a fan game.

Personally I think the reason why most Mother fan games don't get completed these days is that most people would rather make an original game that they can sell. There's no money in fan games and these days indie titles are more popular than ever. Dreamed away, Dreamtone and Oddventure are all examples of games that clearly look like Earthbound but are just different enough to be their own thing.

Of course there will always be people that want to support the Mother series directly with projects related to it like Encore but even developers from that game are working on Dreamtone.

Tldr: People wanna get paid, and honestly they deserve it!

What an "Oddity"

You can’t make another Mother game without Itoi.
Plus the series doesn’t need another game

Yall remember Saturn Valley online?

I believe MOTHER fangames are still possible to be made, but I feel many of them fall under upon stepping on two specific traps:
1. They want to reach the same level or imitating the writing of Shigesato Itoi. In my personal opinion, one of MOTHER’s big identity factors IS Itoi’s writing. And unless you’re completely familiarized with his other works (especially non-MOTHER works) or know the man…. It will honestly feel like something is missing. To the point that you’re not really writing for yourself but rather, try to live the expectations of another man’s writing, which is extra stressful for something that’s supposed to be your own passion project.
2. Letting your own ambition overtake your realistic expectations. In this case like Oddity’s case, I feel their own ambition and obsessive belief that just good ideas can help you have attention is what makes them fall apart. It honestly feels like a horrible idea to just prematurely announce your passion project if you don’t have anything substantial to show for it. People will put eyes on you and you basically get to delay more of your development to please others or attract attention or to prove something.

I have a personal project of mine, and I almost fall in the trap of wanting people to see me, when my purpose is to write the story I want, and I want to share it when I know its good enough to be known.

I mean I think we got 'Mother 4' in plenty of different ways honestly. Even if the games aren't called mother 4, things like deltarune, omori, lisa ect kind of carry the spirit. Even if it isn't directly related or the same. As others have said, Mother isn't really mother without ito. And Hot take, but oddities issues wasn't really its rebranding, I think it was smarter to do that things got too massive for the team.

People tend to REALLY overestimate the scope of the mother games. Honestly, only mother 2/Earthbound could be considered a 'large' game. Both Mother 1 and Mother 3 are rather small in condensed in terms of RPGs. But people often try to make a mother 4 into a epic like chrono trigger or final fantasy.