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Thank God, I was just about ready to give up. The Mother Restored romhack was almost perfect, but I just couldn't get over the holiday-named towns. I needed Podunk and Ellay back, but now that I'm shamelessly save-scumming I also needed the original feature mentioned in another review where you could reset the RNG associated with level up gains if the game pauses and waits for you to press A when it gets to the "You leveled up!" message before scrolling through the numbers. Which this one did! So I'm finally good to go.

I wouldn't call this perfect, because truthfully I wanted to go with the Mother1+2 GBA version purely for the fact that walking is precise by pixel instead of by tile like in the NES, and I also liked having a run button that doesn't speed up time everywhere. But the sound was off. A truly perfect NES Mother romhack will have those GBA features, and I hope finally someone does it.

But I understand that these hacks are all available free and I'm in the wrong to make a fuss. But still I must.

Anyway thanks, 'Q,' for finally providing those first two oddly specific prerequisites I needed. 25th Anniversary's a letdown for that unnecessary level-up change and also for removing the pointer when you draw up that beautifully redone map to let you know where the heck you are. What a waste. But this'll do.

If you want to have an enjoyable experience playing the original NES English translation for Mother 1/Earthbound Zero/Earthbound Beginnings/whatevs but you don't want all the added bells and whistles that came with Dragon DePlatino's 25th Anniversary hack, then this is probably the hack for you.

The graphics are mostly unchanged outside of decensoring it back to Mother 1 for Famicom, and the translation is still the original one by Phil Sandhop. This hack's main focus is rebalancing the enemy spawn rate so it's not nearly as brutal as the original game. You can now walk more than two steps without encountering an enemy! Most of the time, anyways.

This also means experience/money was tweaked to accommodate the lower encounter rate.

So if you're looking for a no-frills experience playing the original EarthBound on your NES - but also don't want to do QUITE so much grinding - this is the hack for you.