What is Mother: The Complete Scripts?

Mother: The Complete Scripts, published by Hobonichi in December 2020 as the Hobonichi MOTHER Project's flagship book, collects the complete text of all three games in three slipcased volumes: Mother at 160 pages, Mother 2 at 432, and Mother 3 at 416.

Complete is meant literally. Beyond story dialogue, the set prints dialogue branches and variants, system and menu text, and enemy and item descriptions, including wording that differs between platform versions. It is the games reduced to their writing, the one element everyone agrees is the series' essence, in a form you can shelve.

The price was a signature: ¥8,888 (about $86 at the time), the eights a small Itoi joke in numeral form. Hobonichi's advance sale opened December 14, 2020, with general bookstores following on December 25.

For collectors the set pairs with the games themselves as the text half of the archive, and with the Pollyanna comic volumes as the Hobonichi Project's two great print artifacts: one book of what Itoi wrote, and one of what it meant to everyone else.