Mother

Despite this game being incredibly short it took me 2 months to finish. Not for any fault of its own, but rather lack of time that I spent on other things. At the basic level it's a Dragon Quest clone, which means it inherits a lot of the good design decisions such as "debuffs and status ailments are useful in combat" and "party AI is somewhat intelligent". These things make the experience of the incredibly high encounter rate way easier. You can set single enemy encounters on auto and easily breeze through it. Encounters with more than one enemy are changed from "deadly" to "manageable" by smartly using status ailments such as sleep or paralysis. Because of this, you rarely if ever have to grind. Which is a huge plus cause a lot of people believe NES games have forced grinding, this one doesn't if you play smartly.

However, Ana dies from 1 or 2 hits from most enemies, even when fully equipped, and Lloyd is a useless party member!! Ana being super squishy is annoying when she's the only party member with a revive spell, but she at least works as a healer and spellcaster, but Lloyd just sucks at everything. It ramps up when you get Teddy but then you lose him and get Lloyd again and it's back to dragging 2 dead weights around.

As for the actual pacing of the game, the exploration is really nice. It makes you feel like you're in a very open world when in reality it's incredibly linear. It provides you enough choice to make it seem like you're discovering things when you progress the story. And this feeling of discovery is something I LOVE from older games. Just wandering around and happening to come upon what you need to progress the game. Very nice!

The music is really really beautiful, and the multiple battle themes really give the game a lot of personality. I know EarthBound cranks this up by a lot, so I wish to give it another shot in the future. The experience of this game is just, genuinely heartwarming. All the little details really bring it together. The minimal plot there is, made me very emotional. It is perhaps the most emotional an NES game has made me. The subtle buildup to the end reveals was really cool. The little romance the main character and Ana have is really cute. The whole Magicant thing was really well done. In general I think it's very much worth a play. I enjoyed my time with this game.