appreciate you kicking off a full thread.

I personally maintain that while researching for MOTHER 1, Itoi became deeply immersed in the paranormal. So much so that by the second game, he was so into the occult that he ended up designing the entirety of MOTHER 2 around his obsession with /x/ topics.

For the "Encyclopedia MOTHER", Itoi wrote:
>I bought up books on psychic powers, a world I'd been interested in from the start. I must have gathered a bookcase's worth of materials.

At first, MOTHER 1 was inspired primarily by Spielberg films, like ET and Close Encounters. But after reading up on psychic powers, his fascination with these subjects grew.
The second game goes way beyond the first game's b-movie parody, and was instead designed around showcasing various cryptids, real-life alien encounters, government suppression, religious cults, child sacrifice, humanity gaining psychic powers from aliens, eastern mysticism, psychedellic drug trips, stonehenge/pyramids, alien bases inside the Earth, and scientists adapting alien technology for human use.

Another thing people often overlook is Itoi's friendship with novelist Haruki Murakami, whose books insist on a strange blend of mind-numbing realism, and strange psychic powers. From his writing, Murakami will have you absolutely convinced that psychic powers are real, and perhaps he thinks so himself. That, combined with the fact that Itoi and Murakami once wrote a book together (Let's Meet in a Dream), suggests that Itoi is far more well-read than the average game developer, particularly on the subject of the paranormal.

The MOTHER series caught my eye when I was a little kid, because it seemed to hint at a lot more than its simple presentation. Since then I've found that a lot of other people agree. There's a strange feeling of depth to this game. It's at the centre of a web of a whole host of sources that the author drew upon when writing it, and I've been unwravelling that web for most of my life