The thing about Mother 2 is: there’s no easy way of explaining what it means to anyone in any which way because it refuses to be understood. At the same time we all just get it.
What about the people who don’t? I used to also always look at this game from the sidelines as something I should probably play eventually. There’s endless blog posts about how much the game moved the writer or whatever, but they would really do nothing to motivate me to play the game and it felt like they were written for the benefit of the author instead of for me. I write these articles, sometimes, with my mom in mind--how would I explain this and that subject to her? God knows how many times in high school I would sit in the passenger seat of the car talking about why The Last of Us is a bad video game and Killer7 isn’t, or how Legend of the Galactic Heroes is way more worthy of a title called “Star Wars,” or why Steven Stone is the coolest Pokemon character. I’m sure most of it went through one ear and out the other, but it was more about telling her in a way that makes sense at an emotional level than a logical one. I mostly want her to know I feel strongly about something in a way that’s important to me. It’s a little on the nose, then, that the game I’m writing about here is called Mother 2, which is all about trying to make sense of the world in a way you can explain it to your mom.
I’m someone who is far, far away from his own home. I’m so far away that things are different enough where you kind of have to take things in stride and not think too hard about them. Trying to find a place for myself in the jigsaw puzzle of Japanese society while using a language so wildly different from my native tongue(s) at times feels as absurd as the many absurdities of Mother 2. A meteor smashes into your neighbourhood? No problem. A sentient bee from the future foretells you becoming the saviour of the world? No sweat. A lonely alien entity enlists some jackass with a bowl cut to act as its earthly avatar whose sole mission is to be annoying because he’s jealous of you? I’ve met that guy before, sure.
Every time I call my mom these days I’m explaining some minutia about living in Japan: how I sort my garbage, how much more expensive fruits are than in Canada, the concept of “thank you money” when moving into a new place, how showing up for work “on time” actually means showing up early, and so on. These all have explanations that are as absurd as they are mundane and slowly fade into the background until one day someone back home sends me an Instagram reel about vending machines or whatever to ask if Japan is really just that wacky and wild. It’s precisely because societal order is something that isn’t learned, but adjusted to. The Canadian idea of social order is very different from Japan’s, just as the Turkish idea of social order might be considered a kind of dystopia to the average Japanese citizen. It’s because I’ve had this experience unique to leaving your home and going far away that I felt anything at all about Mother 2, and I bet if I had forced myself to beat the game as a teenager who looked at stories like a Rubik’s Cube it would’ve been nothing more than a tick on some self-perceived checklist of video game “canon” as per the gospel of Super Smash Brothers. Instead I was able to see it for what it was: a game about being far away from your mother.
In English the game is about four children who go around their faux-American continent of Eagleland to find “your sanctuaries,” sacred spots where the protagonist receives energy to eventually defeat an alien called Gigyas. I played this game in Japanese, though, and there’s a slight linguistic difference here that’s worth mentioning: in the original version these “sanctuaries” are called おまえのばしょ (omae no basho), literally “your place,” where おまえ is particularly of note; it’s a way of addressing another person informally--sometimes lovingly from a parent to child, sometimes disparagingly from a boss to a subordinate. Each time the protagonist reaches one of these places he remembers something from his childhood, whether it’s the smell of his favourite food or a vision of his father holding him as an infant. Every single one of these places are somewhere he’s never been before, yet he finds something so deeply affecting, so rooted in the core of his existence that he can’t help but feel something about it.
おまえのばしょ--a place only for you, where “you” is read--at least to me--like a father to a son. You’ve gotta carve your own place in the world; there’s nowhere that’s just for you. In Tokyo I experience new things a lot of the time: cafes, livehouses, bars, people. Immigrating to a new country is as exciting as it is lonely, and it can be hard for the faint of heart to endear themselves to that place no matter how familiar they are with its culture, language, and history. Yet every now and then you find something or someone that feels uniquely familiar. Sometimes it’s another foreigner like yourself also trying their best to find how to place their unique shape into this society without having to carve themselves into its mold, and there’s a kind of instant comfort in that. I’ve met Canadians and I’ve met Turks, but nationality has nothing to do with it--it’s about finding the right people, the right feelings, the right moments that are entirely for you.
It’s in these completely unassuming corners where you’ll find your heart reflected right back at you through traces of things like the smell of your dad’s car, the scent of your mom’s cooking, an ice cream cone that tastes like the truck parked across the street from your elementary school, all inexplicably displaced and refound in Tokyo. A hand on my shoulder by someone older than me can sometimes feel like my dad’s, even if it’s embarrassing to say so. It’s in these subtle gestures and places that I can make out the contours of the cradle called childhood, and that’s when I know I’ve found my own place, my own sanctuary, whether that's in the kind smile of another or the scent of asphalt after rain.
There’s one sanctuary in the game I want to write about, because I haven’t stopped thinking about it in the months since I beat it: Lumine Hall. After defeating the sanctuary boss the party falls down a hole and finds themselves in a hallway where the wall in front of them suddenly lights up. The main character, usually silent, has his inner thoughts reflected on the wall in front of him, and even he’s bewildered by this. He thinks to himself: soon, I’ll be... soon I’ll be... and then he gets a little scared.
These words freak me out too, but why? Soon, I’ll be what? Who will I be? What will I become? Soon, I’ll be the me I’ve always wanted to be. Soon I’ll be different. Soon I’ll be in love. Soon I’ll be someone else. Soon I’ll be changed. Soon I’ll be dead.
My thoughts are being written out on the wall, or are they?, so says Lumine Hall.
The text on the wall is his inner thoughts, but they are also mine. The scanlines of the CRT monitor I’m playing the game on seem to be dancing more than usual, and that special relationship between a cathode tube and someone playing a video game is palpable enough that the room feels heavy. It wasn’t just the protagonist’s thoughts on screen, but mine too--it helps that I’ve given him my own name, just in katakana. As the words scroll by I read them out loud to myself slowly and carefully, each one a message from the game to myself, and at the same time a message unto myself, saying it out loud like I’m saying it to a mirror. That’s exactly what Lumine Hall was like: a mirror of my own heart, so carefully crafted and timed--the penultimate “your place,” the beginning of the end of your journey. Then the player character has a vision of his father holding him as a child. I feel completely and totally at peace for the first time since moving here.
Before I moved here I sold off most of my belongings and packed up the truly important stuff I left behind in these giant military-grade plastic chests like I was stashing the Ark of the Covenant or something. I took down all my posters, I took apart my computer, I made sure the room I lived in was completely and totally unrecognizable to me--I didn’t want that place to exist anymore. It was “my place,” with the exact nuance I read the Japanese with; when we moved into that house in middle school my dad put a hand on my shoulder and said “this is your room,” and if he had said it in Japanese it would sound something like ここはお前の場所だ. Over the course of the decade in change I lived there no matter how many times I rearranged the leftover furniture or bought my own, covered the walls in posters and artwork of things that were important to me, no matter how many friends I entertained, movies I watched, games I played, heartbreaks I went through, it never felt like “my place,” a place I could call definitively my own. There was a kind of release in tearing it apart, in resetting it back to what it was: nothing, just four walls in Toronto, Canada.
And then one day I got on an airplane and simply flew away, just like that.
On the airplane I think about my parents who also one day in 1997 got on an airplane to Canada and left behind a whole lot more than some anime figures and video games in boxes. This airplane is ostensibly carrying me towards the rest of my life, and all I really had to do was send a handful of emails until the Japanese government put a stamp in my passport. How did my parents ever do this, and how could they do it so definitively? In the two years since I’ve found my own special path through Tokyo and Japan in general, and my room here is now covered in things that are uniquely mine. The towels, carpets, table cloths my grandmother gave me in Istanbul, the framed photographs of friends who’ve long since moved away, an illustration I received from a mangaka I like at Comitia, a book someone lent me far too long ago, the plants that grow so fast they seem like they’ll be as tall as me one day soon. Here I am, in my own place, and Lumine Hall reflects the contents of my heart back to me on the screen, the words themselves scrolling across the CRT screen become the last piece of furniture in my apartment, the missing piece to tie together my place that I wanted for so long. Maybe, I think to myself, my parents never had “their place” in Istanbul after all.
They come to visit and tell me in a matter of months the home I lived in for my entire teenage and early adult life will no longer be theirs. The next time I go visit it will be an apartment I’ve never seen, a bed I’ve never slept in. Yes--this is what I wanted; nowhere to go home to, no place for me in the city I grew up in. When I heard even if I did go back that the place I thought of as “home” would be gone, it all suddenly felt so different. I left Canada with the greatest intention to not have anywhere to go home to, and yet now I am suddenly fully and totally committed to the whole project of living in another country.
I remember my mom talking about the fear of it--it’s 1997, in some shitty hotel on the outskirts of Toronto. There’s no apartment, no house, nowhere to call their own. Shouting matches in the parking lot, everyone speaking strange Canadian English. It’s cold, damp, flat--the complete and total opposite of Istanbul, a city always overflowing with warmth, an intersection of culture and history. Can’t call back home because of the exorbitant long distance charges, not to mention the complete and total lack of the internet in any form comparable to the present day. She told me they even thought about calling it all off and going home, and then the deal became to at least stay five years and become a Canadian citizen, then reevaluate the situation. But when I think about it like that--there was no home for them to go back to either. The decision had been made, and the apartments their parents lived in were far removed from the ones they grew up in. Their place was whatever little space between them and nowhere else, and that in turn became the sanctuary for the two pairs of hands and feet that would eventually walk to a computer and write this post.
The walk back from my parents’ hotel to my apartment feels different. There’s a kind of fear there as reality sinks in: this is my place now, whether I like it or not. All its edges and bumps are things I have to find a way to love and make sense of regardless of how different it is from the shape of the place I called home. But home was never really Toronto, Canada, nor is it in Tokyo, Japan. It’s where my mother is, but it’s also the places where I see the shape of myself no matter where in the world I am--in the backseat of my friend’s car in Sapporo, on the balcony of my friend’s apartment in Amsterdam, in the dingy wooden seat of my favourite bar, in the smile of the old lady who hands me my bento across the street from work.
At one point the main character stops being able to perform in battle, and the only thing the game tells you is that he misses his mom. You call your dad to save the game quite often, but there’s no real obvious function to calling your mother until a less pious player like myself inevitably encounters this issue. I was so moved by this I actually called my mom afterward and told her about it, the same way I might have explained Persona 4 to her in the passenger seat of the car in middle school. The conversation drifts on to my life lately and I find myself explaining the usual things, those same absurdities I mentioned earlier that make me so conscious of being Not From Here, but they naturally coalesce into a complete portrait of myself so that my mom might understand my life as clearly as the video game Mother 2. Thinking about the actual contents of the game is a pointless endeavour with no real purpose, because there are no answers to its narrative. At the same time it’s embedded with such complete and total intent and asks very simple questions of the player: Have you ever truly connected to another person? Why do you remember your childhood the way you do? What’s home to you? The answers to these questions are where the real game starts, and the rest of its hallmark silliness is just there to guide you through that thought process.
As for me: soon I’ll be home, but for now I’m still on the way there.
November 4th, 2024