Dear Reader:
Iwata and Itoi discuss the Mother/Animal Crossing connection
A portion of an interview with Satoru Iwata and Shigesato Itoi…
Iwata: (laugh) Do you remember way back when we were extremely busy working on MOTHER 2 and you said, “I came up with an incredible idea for MOTHER 3.”?
Itoi: Yeah (laugh)
Iwata: The reason I bring that up is because I think many of your ideas for MOTHER 3 then share things in common with Animal Crossing.
Itoi: Now that you mention it, you might be right. When we were working on MOTHER 2, RPGs were all basically “road movies”. The main character would set out on a journey and go from town to town. By laying this out in a spiraling fashion, an RPG’s structure would start to resemble a simple board game.
Iwata: Yes.
Itoi: But I felt that there was a limit to this road movie/board game style of moving from one spot to the next. Kind of like, “Okay, I made it this far, but what’s happened to the people in the last town?”