Tonda Gossa! This is Kody NOKOLO back with another Mother Forever Almost Monthly News spanning summer through October! Watch it in video form or read it below.

First, if you haven’t yet, go see the Mother Direct!! It released on July 27th, MOTHER‘s 34th anniversary, and I think it was the best show yet. I’m not sure if it’ll be topped next year, but I’ll try! Speaking of next year, sign ups for the next Mother Direct will begin by December.

Mother Direct 2024 will be celebrating MOTHER‘s 35th anniversary, so I hope to put something together that can really show how far we’ve come as a community, even if the announcements can’t live up to the high bar from this year.

Make sure to get any Direct themed merchandise illustrated by ODDITY artist With a Hint of Lemon and support Child’s Play Charity before you miss your chance! And if you want, there’s a new Mother Forever badge available too, which directly supports hosting costs of the website alongside the site’s new Patreon. Get a badge or back me on Patreon if you’d like to help support the site!

I’ve also been thinking about how we can help even more indie RPG developers in the future outside of the lens of just MOTHER inspirations. Alongside signups in December for Mother Direct 2024, I’ll also be accepting signups for a new Steam event called “RPG Direct 2024,” and it’s open for ALL indie RPGs on Steam like the Motherlike RPG Bash that I released during this year’s Mother Direct. Like I said, this Steam event is open to ANY indie RPG, even if they’re not MOTHER-inspired, so tell all the RPG devs you know! Even if a game is still in development, this will be a great place to have people find and wishlist indie RPGs. Any applicant to Mother Direct 2024 will be able to apply for the Steam event in the same form, and anyone that isn’t planning for the Mother Direct will be able to apply for only the Steam event in a separate form. Both forms will be open in December!

Next, thanks to the research of Biozilla, I found a few more magazines to scan from Famimaga featuring MOTHER art! Here are a few from 1989 featuring the airplane ride, escaping a Mad Truck, and art of Pippi!

I posted a bunch of unlisted videos related to Itoi, Hobonichi, and more stuff related to them and MOTHER. Watch them all through the playlist for them! Some might need you to use automatically translated captions since they’re not all translated, but I found videos like episodes of Itoi’s 80s talk show for young people called YOU, all his old Pocari Sweat commercials, his time as a judge on Iron Chef, and other things you should see!

Have you seen the new Obscure EarthBound Facts account on Twitter too? They’ve shared some great stuff that will help you learn more about even the most niche topics in the series, from Mr. Yottore to the weather vane in Smash Bros’s Onett. Check them out!

In other news related to developers of the games, Chip Tanaka retired from Creatures Inc, but still works there as a Creative Fellow, like the position Shigeru Miyamoto takes at Nintendo nowadays.

After Shogo Sakai’s retirement, he’s been posting about music on his YouTube channel! He even played music from MOTHER 3 in a recent video. Although they’re in Japanese, check out his videos!

A new book about Satoru Iwata called The Impact of Iwata is also being made by the creators of Nintendo Force magazine! As opposed to the one from Hobonichi that compiled quotes said by Iwata himself, this new book will be more biographical and retell his story while reminiscing allowing some other industry voices to reminisce on that legacy. I was invited to give my perspective too!

Although I haven’t been posting here recently after the Direct, I was actually busy in other places! Two podcasts, including one that was featured in the Direct called “MOTHER,” She Wrote, had me on to talk about MOTHER in different capacities, and they were both tons of fun. Find the “MOTHER,” She Wrote podcast episode here and the episode featuring a few community members on the podcast A Gamer Looks at 40.

And I’ve also been streaming on Twitch every Thursday and Saturday! I’ll mostly be streaming indie RPGs, fan-made RPG mods and challenges, or RPG fangames. I’m excited for this Saturday when I’ll be streaming No Delivery, an indie horror RPG from the maker of the Direct-featured Motherlike game Sorry, We’re Open! Follow me on Twitch to watch it!

Oh, and some weird guy wanted me to ask you something. He said… *ahem* 𝚆𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚒𝚜 𝚊 𝙶𝙽𝙾𝙼𝙾𝙽? He told me if you want to know, you can play a free game demo coming out soon called GNOMONIC: 𝙷𝚊𝚕𝚏 𝙿𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝙴𝚐𝚘. I don’t get it, I mean, you can just Google what a gnomon is anyways. Whatever.

On an unrelated note, the reason I’ve been so busy lately is because I’m actually making a video game called GNOMONIC, and you’ll hear a lot more about it when the demo for it, Half Past Ego, comes out soon! If you like MOTHER, maybe you might want to try it. The battles with enemies feature unique, real-time projectile-based combat, most of the graphics are traditionally illustrated on real watercolor paper, and it will feature music by ODDITY composer Shane Mesa with guest tracks by MOTHER: Encore composer McThrillington and composer from around our community and beyond Livvy94. Wishlist the game on Steam so you’ll know when it launches in December!

For our Hobonichi update this month, a MOTHER store has still been travelling around Japan, but just with all the same merchandise you can find on their website. New Techo and covers have been released not too long ago though, and one MOTHER 2 Techo is in English, even when there’s no mention of the title “EarthBound” in the book. It sounds strange to say, but it’s true: this Techo is the only official MOTHER 2 merchandise in English!