To start off our discussion, we wanted to know what inspired you to begin the Boundary Break series. Where did it all start?

I was an avid YouTube watcher, and I loved stuff like James Rolfe, Nostalgia Critic, SomecallmeJohnny, stuff like that. I wanted to start my own YouTube channel, but I always knew that I kind of needed some place that made me fit in with that landscape. Just doing what they were doing was not going to be enough.

One day I was going through a…certain piece of software that a lot of people use to play GameCube and Wii games, and I wanted to find out how to use the IR pointer in Punch Out!! without getting a Wii Remote or a gamepad. I wanted to use my mouse. So I’m fiddling with the options and I see one option for “Free Look”, and I thought that maybe was what I was looking for? When I started testing out that option, it started moving the camera in ways that I had never seen before. As you know, with Punch Out!! it’s a very rigid, very strict camera perspective, so to see the boxing match in a completely different angle was exciting to me — so much so that I looked online to see if anybody else was posting stuff like this, and nobody was.

I just posted a raw clip to my YouTube channel, and somebody from out of my 300 original subscribers shared that to Reddit and it blew up. I didn’t know what that meant, but then it got shared to GoNintendo shortly after — which I am very aware of — and I was really excited by that! So I figured “I could turn that into a YouTube series”, and that’s how it all got started.

EarthBound was the 40th episode in the series, and as you said it’s your favorite game of all time. Why did you cover it considerably late in the Boundary Break series? Perhaps was it a daunting task in comparison to the other games you’ve covered previously?

Well, the thing is that up to that point the tried and true bread and butter had always been doing it with 3D games. It’s very safe and very expected that I’d be able to make an episode out of it. When you talk about a Super Nintendo game there is a risk involved, and there’s a lot of time that goes into a Boundary Break episode…when I finally kind of made that leap it had to be my favorite game of all time, so I had to try it with EarthBound. I started with kind of doing an idea of what would be interesting content to people that had played EarthBound before, and also whether or not it would fit into the landscape that I had kind of with Boundary Break.

And it was a risk! I didn’t know if it was going to play out and do well, but I decided to just do it anyway because I was so passionate about EarthBound. Thankfully there was content that I was satisfied with, and so I felt really good about putting it out to the internet — and thankfully the audience really took to it as well. It was one of the better-performing videos at the time.

Where did your love for the MOTHER series begin, and were you involved with the MOTHER community before you started your YouTube channel?

Yes! It predates Smash Brothers, so I get that clout [laughs]. I had a friend of mine whose brother was really obsessed with video games, so he had this treasure trove of great games. I went over and, you know, one of the big games – I guess in the literal sense — was EarthBound, because of the giant box. But he lent the game to me. At the time I was showing an appreciation for RPGs, so I played Chrono Trigger, I played Final Fantasy III… EarthBound was one of those “golden three” for me, and I got to play through it!

I remember the very earliest memory I have was probably seeing EarthBound being played at my friend’s house, and he was going through I believe one of the caves near Saturn Valley. It just had one of those eerie music tracks, and he crushed a roach with his foot. [laughs] That’s the earliest memory, and then later from that was that he let me borrow the game and I finally played it all the way through. It’s just… it’s timeless. When you’re a child you don’t think about things too much, and even then it has a very surreal, very nice experience for a child with an overactive imagination. Then as a person who just studies things, you know, just kind of picks things apart as just a creative media… It even works on that level as well, and so that’s why it’s become one of my favorites of all time. It just works. Depending on how old you are, no matter what you’ll just appreciate it.

While EarthBound is your favorite game of all time, how do you feel about the other two games in the series? What were your first experiences with MOTHER 1 and 3? Do you feel they are on par with EarthBound in terms of quality and experience?

So with MOTHER, I powered through that one at an earlier age. I did it on a laptop, and at the time it was very hard to work through. As an adult though, I realized that when you go back and play these older games you have to look at them from the perspective of the time that they were made in. When you think about that MOTHER is very innovative, and it’s a really powerful RPG for its time. I played Dragon Quest 1-4 on the NES, I played through Final Fantasy 1 on NES… I played through very prominent NES RPGs, and when you stack MOTHER against those titles I do think it’s a superior title. I think it’s actually the best one of the bunch.

MOTHER 3 is really really good, I can’t deny that. It’s just…there’s something about EarthBound that is unique to its own and MOTHER 3 does nothing to take away from it, I feel. I think that MOTHER 3 is a more story-focused game, and it also has a story that is very unrelated to EarthBound in so many ways. It works great as an RPG experience and it’s one that you can tell was crafted by Shigesato Itoi, but it’s still…to me, it doesn’t quite capture that feeling of adventure and growth that EarthBound does. If that makes sense?

So if I was to rank them, 2 — 1 — 3. That’s not to say that 3 is a bad game by any means, but that’s just how I would probably place them myself.

You’ve done a video on both EarthBound and Mother 3 — are these games structured well compared to other JRPGs that might be using a similar layering system, programming wise?

It works well for Boundary Break, that’s for sure. [laughs] It’s very unconventional! With EarthBound it’s great…because it’s all on one giant map. If you were to just walk outside the boundaries and you were to use the Sound Stone, you can essentially load the tiles for any part of the map and you can walk to any part of the map and it’s great [sic]. I highly recommend that people watch that episode because it’s fascinating.

MOTHER 3 on the other hand…it’s weird, because there’s lots of cut content that’s still in the game! And by that I don’t mean that I have to do data mining — we can walk to these parts of unused content in the game. There’s a part of the game where there’s a series of bathroom stalls, and one of them…I can’t figure out why they wouldn’t allow you to go into this room, but if you go into the room that’s locked to the player there’s a whole bathroom full of toilet paper! Why? I mean again, it makes for a great episode — but in comparison to other 2D games like your question asks, that’s not common. That’s not common at all.

You typically have animated intros for your episodes. A Plus Start did the one for EarthBound, and Fabian did MOTHER 3. Did you approach them to animate these, or did they volunteer? What sort of process do you go through when creating these intros?

So for A Plus Start, he offered. He’s a big YouTuber, he’s still bigger than me to this day. It was never my intention to take away from his time that he needs to take his show to ever do something for me, especially on that scale, but he offered. And I’m just like, “Well I love what I’ve seen from you before, so I mean if you want to sure”. . . I think it turned out great. He’s a perfectionist when it comes to art and it clearly shows.

The other one was Fabien, and he is a phenomenal artist. He actually predates the MOTHER 3 episode with an intro for Shadow of the Colossus and it’s beautiful. It’s stunning. It’s one of my favorite intros of all time, and so I figured, “Hey, let me reach out to him”, because I’ve seen that he’d actually produced content that was MOTHER 3 related in the past. If you go to his YouTube channel, he has something that involves the car-driving frog . . . Thankfully his schedule was freed up and he was able to make that one too, and I think that one came out really good as well.

What tools do you typically use to Boundary Break, do you usually have to contact someone who is a developer or familiar with say what game you’re attempting to Boundary Break? Are there any specific emulators or developed tools you had to make yourself?

So I don’t typically go into too much detail about that, and there’s a good reason actually. I didn’t mention it when the channel was [growing] because I didn’t want larger YouTubers to be informed on how to rip off the channel and then make the channel obsolete before it even had a chance to make a name for itself on Youtube. But as a result of that philosophy, there have been a lot of developers who have been on-board and okay with Boundary Break because I don’t tutorialize how to do it. So they appreciate the content, and they appreciate that it doesn’t explicitly explain how to, you know, do what I do…and so I’ve actually had developers participate on the show before.

To at least answer it in some capacity: There’s certain games, like PC games especially, but most games in general that there’s very talented people like Nekorun and Codename Gamma, SchoolsOut1 and stuff of the like who approach me and say, “Hey, I have the talent and the ability to make this toolset for you, would you like for me to do that”…these days I commission toolmakers to help me produce a toolset that allows me to use a camera — typically on the PC versions of the games. If it’s on PC, it’s the easiest of all, but when it’s on console, it’s a challenge.

At the beginning of the MOTHER 3 episode, you voiced that it may be your favourite in the entire series. What made you confident in this statement? Was it because of the variety of content on display, or Vinny Vinesauce’s guest appearance?

Oh…I think Vinny would love for me to say the latter, but I think it’s more so the former. You know, it’s cool — I wanted Vinny on there because I started watching more of his streams and he was covering MOTHER 3 as an episode, and I was like “This is perfect”. I’ve always wanted him on the show because he’s a good guy, we’ve had pizza together. But when I said that, it was for the wealth of content for sure. It was just like unreal, I didn’t… I thought that EarthBound was a fluke, and then I tried MOTHER 3 and I was really shocked at what sort of stuff I found. It was insane, and so it became one of my favorites because of how absurd the cut content was when you went outside the boundaries. It was nothing I had ever seen before in a 2D game to be sure.

Vinny Vinesauce had finished his MOTHER 3 Livestream around the time the video was released. How far in advance did you two plan the collaboration? What was it like working with him?

I remember it was I think TooManyGames that year (that’s the convention), and I believe it was then that I was talking with Vinny. We were kind of sitting at a bar talking to each other and stuff. It just got to a point where I had just said “Yeah, and you should guest on a Boundary Break episode” and you know, he was like “That sounds great”. And so then I was like “Oh great, he’s on board!” because I don’t know with Vinny. You never know, he’s a very mysterious man!

But the fact that he was interested was the signoff, so I eventually had to look into a MOTHER 3 episode legitimately… I kind of invited him on for it before even looking into it. Thankfully there was a lot of good content there.

A lot of new discoveries were made during the process of Boundary Breaking MOTHER 3, including the discovery of new dialogue from Flint in the Murasaki Forest area, where he encourages Lucas to return to Tazmily. How did you feel discovering this significant new piece of dialogue? Would you have liked Flint to have a bigger role in the game?

So I will say right away — unless you’re confirming it right now here with me, I can’t say for sure whether or not I was the one that broke those discoveries.

But for the follow-up question, do I wish that Flint had a larger role in the game? Yeah, I do. There’s very small complaints with that game, very very small and minor, and I guess you kind of touched upon one that I would actually express. Flint seems very important at the start, and then he very quickly becomes background scenery for Lucas to become the more prominent protagonist. And it’s a shame, because it does seem like it’s in part Flint’s story as well…I feel like Kumatora didn’t need to be in the game as much as Flint should have been as one of the main four? Or certainly Boney. Boney could have been swapped out for Flint and Flint could’ve provided more for the story. Boney had a lot of slapstick and fun, but it was already an intimate and emotional story. I felt like they should’ve gone further in with it with Flint having a deeper role.

What is the most difficult game you’ve covered in an episode of the series? Is there any game you believe you could’ve dug even deeper into breaking?

The most difficult, that’s…that’s difficult to answer! [laughs] I think it’s always the game that has the hardest-to-use camera, and I do remember the camera for Sonic Generations being particularly difficult. But I think the game that I would like to re-explore with better camera controls is probably Dark Souls? That would be a good one, because that episode was made by turning the character invisible and having him noclip and walk on air. You’d have to disable controls so that he would drop, but not die, but drop onto another plane that’s also not there. So you can imagine how that wouldn’t allow for very great exploration of the game’s maps, and certainly when cutscenes would play out (though few in that game for sure) you couldn’t do anything about it.

You previously voiced on your Twitter that you would love to see more of MOTHER 3’s canceled Nintendo 64 iteration. What are your feelings on this version of the game in comparison to the final product? If it ever surfaced, would you perhaps Boundary Break it in an episode?

Oh, 100% I would, are you kidding me? Any day of the week. But as far as, “Do I wish that EarthBound 64 came out over MOTHER 3”?, no. I think that MOTHER 3 is a good place for the third iteration to have landed on. It should’ve been 2D, it should’ve had sprites, and so I think that it kind of ended up with the best-case scenario by being on GameBoy Advance. I will admit that outright, because the game itself is already so disenfranchised from EarthBound when you look at it from a story level that including a completely different art style that the N64 game was…it wouldn’t have felt remotely anything like EarthBound in any capacity.

So I will say that how it ended up in the final product is better than what it was supposed to be. But with that said, things like EarthBound 64 are very, very important to the history of video games in general. So to keep it coveted, to keep it under wraps and to keep it out of the eyes of the public for all of us to understand what it could have been shares no value to the world, and I think Nintendo needs to kind of reevaluate how it handles cut and cancelled projects. I think it should. So long as you have full confidence that you’re not going to implement anything about the gameplay into a future title, I think it’s very important that you make that sort of information public.

What are your favorite moments in the MOTHER series? Do you have any favorite characters that you emotionally connect with?

There are key moments that really touched me emotionally. For example, going through Magicant, when you finally defeat the statue and you get the flashback of Ness as a baby and you hear the conversation of the mother and father about what to name him and stuff. It’s just kind of…it’s just so weird! Like it really connects with me, very much so. And it’s tough to kind of put into words, but it makes me emotional. And it’s very powerful for a game of that era to do that, especially if it’s a Nintendo game.

So that scene in particular I really love; another that I always appreciate is the Mu Training? If you have an imagination, that scene messes with you hard. I love that, and I love that you fail your training if you are a coward. I love that. It’s clearly a scene where the game is picking on the player almost, you know? And it puts you in an uncomfortable spot, like you have to go through that to get on with the game.

While you have covered both MOTHER 2 and 3, will you ever perhaps consider covering MOTHER 1 in an episode? Is there any difficulties in approaching an NES game when compared to something from the Super Nintendo era?

You know I’d love to, but I don’t think that it would be possible…I didn’t try, but I should try just to be sure. There are two problems: One, I worry that the audience wouldn’t take to it. They barely took to MOTHER 3, to be honest, so…I was a little bit surprised about that, because there was a large response to it on Twitter. Once it got onto the YouTube platform it didn’t really translate very well.

And I know that MOTHER 3 has a better following than MOTHER, so to put all the time into making a MOTHER video might feel a little foolhardy? And on top of that the game obviously has less to see with layers and stuff.

Thank you very much for your time, Shesez. Where can people reach you if they would like to ask any questions or voice their support for your show? Do you have any closing statements you’d like the MOTHER community to hear?

Okay, well if you ever have any questions for me, Twitter is the best place for that. I’m @BoundaryBreak, you can probably type in “Shesez” as well and it’ll pop up. I tend to answer any questions there…if you want to voice your support for the show, you can always just share my videos with friends and stuff like that.

And any closing statements for the MOTHER community: I would say “Guys, we need a main home console remake of Earthbound.” And it needs to be in the clay art aesthetic that we’ve seen in the Player’s Guide.