MOTHER: Roots is a remake of the original MOTHER that was in development during the early 2020s before being cancelled. Below is a download for what files are left of the project along with messages from the developers.

Messages from the Developers

meowvi_

ROOTS is a project that i’ll always hold dear to my heart. It was the first major project I ever had the chance to work on. I was maybe 16 or 17 at the time and in way, WAY over my head. It was kind of dizzying, being surrounded by some of the best and brightest in the community, but it was so, so inspiring.

One particularly fond memory I have of the project was on a road trip to Nevada. I realized I had the flu about halfway through the drive and it was 110 degrees outside, but It was also the day of the second MOTHER Direct! I was handling all of the community stuff at the time, answering every comment and DM to the best of my ability, and then I found out we were mentioned by name in a Kotaku article. How!? We didn’t even have a game! We had a lot of pretty artwork though, and I suppose that was enough!

…But I’m 20 now, all of my friends grew up, and we all have projects of our own. Even if ROOTS was just an overly ambitious shot at something more, it was still a shot that we daringly took, and we took it as a team. I hope that in some way, even if small, ROOTS has inspired people to work on games of their own.

Always keep creating,

-@meowvi_

Pkdotts

I joined the team when I was 15. It was shortly after Benichi revealed the project with hopes of getting more creative control on the game compared to what I could do for Encore. Once I became the director for Encore, that didn’t really matter that much though. I think the most memorable thing I did for Roots was spending the entirety of summer 2021 to finish all of the enemy battle sprites for the game. I’m proud how some of them turned out, though I never bothered to actually post them all even after the game was cancelled…
After a while, I got demotivated to work after seeing that not many other people were contributing to the project as much as I was. In the end, I ended up using Roots’s code and modified it to port Encore to Godot. So I guess in a way, Roots still lives on in Encore (and Dreamtone too I guess since that also reuses code from Encore).

In terms of my thoughts on the project, I thought Roots was a pretty interesting idea at first, but after working on it for a while I felt like it was kind of redundant to work on it and Encore at the same time. Roots advertised itself to be more of a “faithful remake” than Encore, but in some ways it was a kind of less faithful. A particular aspect I saw as less faithful was the decision to have certain enemies use different poses compared to the original. Personally I was against the idea since it struck to me as being less faithful, but the other devs really wanted it, so I just went along. There were also aspects such as wanting to include rolling HP in battles, but that idea was eventually decided against. In hindsight, I feel like the idea of a more “faithful” remake was kind of pointless because at that point, why not just play the original? If you’re not playing the game with incredibly high random encounter rates and weird map layouts, then are you really playing Mother 1?

Well, I guess for most people, they just want a more accessible version of MOTHER 1 and not have to deal with that kind of stuff, which is fair I guess. But honestly, the thought of a “faithful” remake just makes it sound to me like it’s a “definitive” version of the game, with any changes done being seen as “fixes” to the original. When phrased like that, it kind of just sounds pretentious to me, especially coming from fans. I feel like the biggest issue with it being called a “faithful” remake was that there wasn’t much direction on how faithful the game was going to be other than it being more faithful than Encore, which is kind of vague. I guess the line between a faithful and unfaithful remake varies between everyone.

In the end, Roots was just a passion project. Once that passion ran out, it kind of just faded into a memory only a few people will remember.

Snakeshroom

i think mother roots was a great idea on paper, to have a more faithful attempt at a MOTHER remake than encore which seems to outright dislike the original game at some points. the issue was there’s already a faithful remake being done on snes, and there were many other projects that everyone on the team are working on, fun while it lasted, i suppose

copperthejackal

I was asked to do music for this but I think I did only like a demo or two of some early game songs like Pollyanna before just forgetting the project. I was working on Encore and HYPERSOMNIA (@HYPERSOMNIAGame) at the same time, so it was a bit of too much extra work that I ended up dropping it. I left Mother Squared and EarthBound Recast for the same reason. (Also just because I don’t really have interest in a MOTHER 2 remake, it doesn’t need one IMO.)

I agree with PK on what he said about MOTHER: Roots. If I wanted to play MOTHER faithfully, I would’ve just played MOTHER or some hack that makes the gameplay more balanced, Roots served kind of a niche which I think made it feel a little redundant to Encore. Not to disrespect the idea or anything though, it’s an interesting idea and it would’ve been cool to see it fully realized, which I guess is kinda what DREAMTONE has become now.

I also was interested in the game originally being developed in RPG Maker.
Benichi stated that this kinda game wouldn’t be possible in RPG Maker but I feel with the right version and set up it absolutely could be, especially since RPG Maker maps and movement are tile-based, which the original MOTHER also had. I’ve jumped through all these hoops to make HYPERSOMNIA play like MOTHER 2 and 3, so I think Roots could’ve absolutely been done in RPG Maker. Though the switch to Godot was for the better.

Though I was there for an incredibly short time, I enjoyed my time on Roots and I’m glad most people on the team went on to make other things.

play my game or ill eat your fuse box
-@copperthejackal

Trupo

Best MOTHER remake. Rest in peace

Clipbrick

My very first project and an amazing entrance to a life-changing experience. Something about it as a faithful experience was making me hooked considering the rough history of Mother 1. I remember being very optimistic about Roots as an artist, having done some tileset for Magicant and a dog battle sprite.
However moving up in the world to Mother Encore and other known Earthbound fangames as well as the promising DREAMTONE after some time led me to slowly lose focus on Roots. That fangame still holds a special place to heart, it’s where I met wonderful people like benichi and PKdotts. It’s something I’ll forever be grateful for seriously. I hope people get to appreciate all the efforts done by the team. Hope it can inspire people in some ways. The visuals were truly remarkable to me

Quak

Mother Roots is awesome (ran out of things to say)

Retsu

MOTHER: Roots was a really interesting project to work on for the short time I had with it, and we were definitely doing some things MOTHER Fangames hadn’t really tried before, which was sticking to, funnily enough, the roots of the series and building off the visuals MOTHER 1 had. I ended up using a lot of that early inspiration for a project of mine, MUSO, but I feel like DREAMTONE is the game that sparks the charm roots had a bit more than what I’m making.

Pedro Braga

Nothing you see here was really because of me. I did some minor programming work, I had offered working on a map editor which would make creating a large interconnected world easier; it didn’t work out. To be honest, when I learned about the project I mostly wanted to spectate. I had already been a game developer (and a programmer) for a good while… so what really fascinated me about it is how so many kids came together to make something they weren’t really sure would work. Getting together under an idea, getting so many people to care about it, that’s a difficult thing to do. And where I come from, people that age are picking their noses or playing Hunger Games on Minecraft.

Alas, it didn’t work out in the end. But I don’t see anyone really sad about it. Most people went on to do their own stuff and the project faded away. But I know lots of people have a special place in their hearts for this project. They known how much they’ve grown from it, or they’re grateful for getting a taste of what’s like to work on something cool with other cool people. Heck, even my own will-it-ever-come-out game, Inner Voices, has a bit of √🌏 inspiration if you look at it right. So I don’t blame you for imagining a sunset and a slow piano version of the “main theme” as the credits roll and tearing up. It was “no crying until the end” and we’ve reached it.

But then there’s so much more to find out now.
So you can’t be sad for too long, right?

benichi

MOTHER: Roots initially started as an idea 14 year old me had, which i shared with my friend meowvi_.
it somehow gained a LOT of attention after we posted the announcement tweet, which i think was 1 day after i shared my idea with her. looking back, im surprised we even got this far in development with next to no planning.
plan your games kids!

In retrospect though, i had fun working on this passion project, and im thankful that i got the opportunity to work with people who were, and still are much more talented than me, that im glad to call my friends. it’s wild to think that a group of teenagers believed in my ambitious idea, even when some were probably very sure that this would end up meeting the same fate as every other MOTHER fangame.

man, the things id do to go back to being a 14 year old teenager just to experience this all over again.

i think not many people realize the impact Roots had on all of us. like, now that i think about it, i feel like i owe everything ive done since then to Roots. for me, it helped me improve my art skills, and it got me into programming. we started making Roots using RPGMaker, but after we realized that “oh, this type of game is just not possible in RPGMaker” we switched to Godot. that made me start learning how to code, and overtime i’d get better by working on it. in the end, i made a simple RPG engine (which lacked battles at that point). it just so happened that around the same time as that, that MOTHER: Encore (which at the time used RPGMaker VX Ace), was facing difficulties in the engine side of things. if my memory serves me right- diagonal collisions didnt work properly, text rendering was kinda broken, and more. so i decided to offer them my simple engine.

now that i think about it, if it werent for that offer, i doubt we would have even got a demo finished in the first place! even if we somehow did, it definitely wouldnt be as high quality as the demo we got. hell, i feel like the game overall would be lower in quality and polish too.

shortly after the engine switch, attention shifted from Roots to Encore. and at the time, the Roots team consisted of mostly Encore devs, so it made sense that contributions to Roots would slow down drastically. it slowed down to the point where activity in the dev server was just unusual. and soon after, the project was moreso abandoned than cancelled from my point of view. i was fine with that, really.

i was ready to move on from a dead project instead of actively try to salvage it. i pretty much learnt to just let things go after their effects on me were over. i think the words of Shigesato Itoi-san describes this better than i did.

“Usually when I’m done with something, I’m done with it for good.
You can’t give up on projects you’re in the middle of,
but when you put an end to something, it’s best to just leave it alone.”

and i think another important thing that contributes to Roots’ abandonment is the fact that many of us grew up. and naturally, as part of growing up, we get less and less free time. i bet that most of us are less willing to commit to something like Roots, or any new fangame/free game for that matter because of that same reason. we’re no longer teenagers living in the aftermath of a pandemic, with enough free time to express our love towards a game series through fangames anymore. some of us have to worry about work and their futures now, and some of us dedicate their time to their hobbies and their own passion projects instead.

a year after its cancellation, i began working on DREAMTONE. and honestly, alot of the visual aspects of Roots influenced DREAMTONE’s overall look. if i recall correctly, the trees were originally ripped from Roots for example! i feel like in a way, im somewhat honoring what my 14 year old self tried to accomplish in the form of DREAMTONE. it kinda feels great knowing that my time at Roots wasnt for nothing.

despite the fact we didnt get far, ill always look back at my time working on roots fondly.

Fun Facts from the Developers

• originally, the game was gonna feature mr saturn cameos. however, this idea was shot down early on.
• while the game was advertised as a “faithful remake”, it wasnt faithful at all. it was moreso a “definitive edition” with the qol changes, and additions. like diagonal directions for sprites, cars in the overworld, the encounter rate being reduced, the rebalancing of the game, and addition of battle backgrounds. there were plans on adding the rolling HP mechanic from Earthbound, but we decided against it.
• The entire soundtrack was finished, but due to some internal complications, the composer, ActualNK358, decided to back out and take their soundtrack with them. they later uploaded their soundtrack to youtube under a new name. you can listen to it here -> https://youtu.be/c_h6sOOqx1c
• engine wise, the game lacked a proper cutscene system, a battle system, and an inventory system.
• it’s possible to recreate roots and finish it as 80% of the assets were finished. you’d need a proper engine and to draw the missing assets though. it should be note mentioning that anyone is free to do that. if someone ends up doing that, they’d just need to credit the MOTHER Roots team.
• the game was gonna use Tomato’s translation of MOTHER 1 for the text, however the game got abandoned before we could ask for permission to use it, as this was a late decision.
• this game was originally going to be featured in the MOTHER Direct in 2022. The trailer was going to be filmed in real life, and styled after NES game commercials. Ian Noah was gonna be in charge of recording the footage, as he owned a professional camera at the time. However, the plans fell through as the game was massively unfinished. so we opted out of the MOTHER direct as a result.
• Pkdotts made almost all of the battle sprites in under 3 months, this guy works hard.
• there was a toggleable mode for overworld battles. however, it was moreso like The Legend of Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link where the sprites represented the enemy’s type instead of their design.
• there was going to be an easter egg where if they appeared in the same battle, the Sky Yddet would appear over the Raeb Yddet’s shoulder, kind of like a JoJo stand.
• very late into development, we brought on quak as an artist. i got him on mostly because he made his own take on a MOTHER 1 reskin. i was a huge fan of it, and i wanted to make Roots to look like it. this didnt get very far though.
• throughout 2023 and 2024, some of the team members tried their hands at reviving the projects, these attempts fell short however.
• the game was originally called Root MOTHER. Someone pointed out this feels like a syntax mistake. and since Square Root of MOTHER sounded lame, we went for MOTHER: Roots.
• we got mentioned in a Kotaku article once.
  https://kotaku.com/unofficial-mother-direct-is-all-about-earthbound-1847088556
• this is the only game design related document we have:
  https://docs.google.com/document/d/19FRJJduCwHCxZU3Gdp45B7PFmEV3bTtYcvRyEtoFglQ/edit#heading=h.iivjrxfot9bg
• here’s is a list of problems people had with the original game, and our solutions to the said problems:
  general nes jank: fixed by virtue of being a remake
  badly translated diagloue in the official release – fixed by using Tomato’s script, might tweak it a little
  hard difficulty and grindiness – fixed with better balancing
  boring and repetitive battles – fixed by adding more variety to the enemy types and focusing more on statuses
  obtuse progression – add more npcs to indicate what to do, maybe a hint system
  frustrating and boring samey dungeons – fixed with redesigned areas with new gimmicks
• we originally had a game making tool called Garden, made by Pedro Braga. we were going to use this tool to make the maps, and cutscenes. plans fell through however, and Garden was never finalized.
• it was planned at one point that towns would have different grass colors. this was scrapped though.
• the game was originally made in RPGMaker (can’t remember which version), but we later switched to Godot as recreating MOTHER’s large open map seemed impossible to us. we would’ve provided the source code to Garden, but the source code alongside the executable is lost now.
• only the podunk map is completed. nothing else overworld wise besides some interiors.