Feelings of MOTHER 3

So the parts of the game that would act as the “vessel” were about 70 to 80 percent done by the end of spring last year. That’s when you joined the overnight sessions to pour all the text into MOTHER 3.

Itoi

It took so long! I was bouncing between Kichioji, Shibuya, and Itoi Jimusho [Hobonichi].

Yeah. So first of all, the game now includes your scenarios from the original game, and the script that came up over the course of two years’ meetings. There’s an enormous Excel sheet with all that text in it. It was a Herculean task for you to rewrite all of that text, including the things I’d written in the past.

Itoi

That’s true. There was some content that felt usable as-is, but I think we re-wrote about 90%... Nah, we redid all of it, didn’t we?

Oh, all of it. I’m sure we read through 100% of the old content, and then rewrote 100% of it.

Itoi

There was no way that was happening in a month. (Laughs)

As someone who was there, I can say that the team would usually gather at the hotel room around 10 AM and get to work, with some breaks and meals in between, until around 2 AM. A shift like that would span about two nights and three days.

Itoi

That was definitely the physical limit. Including time spent resting, we were holed up in the same place for about 15 hours straight. And with all the same people, too.

One team member was the Progress Supervisor, Kazuyuki Gofuku from Nintendo.
He’d bring up the necessary files, pull up the script from the Excel sheet, and denote which section the team would work on for the day. You would make the script by reading out each line individually. Then Akihito Toda (who worked on the MOTHER 2 scenario as an assistant) would check the script, and we’d nod, and laugh, and approve the script as we went. Gofuku would write that down to finalize the script into a new Excel sheet.

Itoi

It’s not a very common way to write a script. (Laughs)

For MOTHER 2, too, you recited the script out loud, and staff would write down what you were saying. But it was set up a little differently for MOTHER 3.

Itoi

It was. For MOTHER 2, it was just me talking and one other person writing it down. With just the two of us, he was in a position for it to be harder to potentially push back against me. That’s certainly easier for me, but it also makes it harder to rein me in if I go off the rails. If that happens, things will fall apart and we’d lose the ability to make rational decisions. So this time, I finally had an audience. There was a group for me to run things by first, so that we had a little rehearsal.

Ah, I see.

Itoi

For example, when the comedian Sanma recorded his show “Sanma no Manma”, he didn’t have a studio audience, but he did have a crew of about 26 people watching him. You know how sometimes he’ll jab at one of the spectators? The show would feel different without that.

There’s a hint of a third-party perspective in the mix.

Itoi

The key there is the “hint” of it. I hope this doesn’t come across rudely, but it’s like just wanting a body there to offer a reaction.

Yeah. (Laughs)

Itoi

I don’t know if they’d be considered advisors, or observers, or even rubberneckers, but the point is that there aren’t many people in Japan who get to do that. I’ll have an audience of people I can trust while I concentrate really hard and come up with lines as I read the reactions of the people around me. I’ll see if they laugh, or if their heart rate goes up, and I’ll get excited as I go. You can get a lot done in a short time in an environment like that. Speaking the lines aloud, reading the response of the room, making adjustments based on that, moving on to the next lines… We really covered a lot of ground in a short time, with the editing and everything.

Yeah.

Itoi

When the important parts came up, it was like we flipped a railroad switch to guide the train onto a different track. The discussion would get much deeper for those. Sometimes we’d stop to go back and change something again, and Gofuku would write all of that out. That made it easy to reference other parts of the script, and to go back and make an edit right there.

Yes, that’s a good explanation of when we stayed overnight.

Itoi

Sometimes I would run ahead and others would stop me, and sometimes I was actually the one doing the stopping.

Changing one part would sometimes necessitate going back to fix any corresponding parts. But other times we could add a single phrase that would neatly clear up three different problems.

Itoi

It was all about balance, and the intensity of the work. It was so intense that it became more than just work. I was sad when it was done.

Yeah.

Itoi

That’s definitely a once-in-a-lifetime chance. There’s no other work out there that you create like that.

I was there, and I agree.

Itoi

It would be nice if I could do more projects at that pace, though.

It was through those overnight stays that the script came together. And since I was able to see that, I’d like to point out how fascinating it was to watch your words get input into the game. We were truly seeing it transform into a MOTHER game in real time.

Itoi

Just as Iwata said would happen. (Laughs)

Absolutely.