Mother 3 - A Gaming Diary

For those who are reading this blog post, first off, thank you.  Second of all, my normal structure is, of course, to do a big paragraph with a spoiler-free review, and I will still do that, but just so that we don't mince words here: I will, through this diary, be spoiling Mother 3.  It is legitimately impossible to talk about Mother 3 without spoiling Mother 3, to be honest with you.  So even more than normal, if you care at all about spoilers and have yet to play Mother 3, do not proceed to the diary portion.  I not only have written spoilers but I'm doing screenshots for the first time because it's really convenient for me to and I know they're going to, like, look good (rip En Garde!, I wanted to do it there but the screenshots just didn't come out like I wanted), and I'm just always going to pick the most relevant screen grab for what the paragraph is talking about, so I do literally just show off important scenes.  You've been warned.

Review

Mother 3 is, without exaggeration, one of the greatest video games I've ever played.  It tells an incredibly beautiful and tragic story about greed, oneness with nature, loss of self, moving on from the past, along with numerous other things.  And it does so while being incredibly hilarious throughout as well.  Not only is the story brilliant, but it really adds a lot to the gameplay of the Mother series, introducing adjustments like "a dash" or "a more robust and meaningful element and status system", as well as including a surprisingly deep combo system that, while not necessary at all, is really fun to tinker around with.  The music is also wonderful, Mother 3 has an all timer soundtrack, one of the greatest in the medium.  It's the kind of game that changes you for playing it, a true masterwork of video gaming, and I am glad everyday that I have played it.  And on top of that, it has an abundance of frogs!  And who doesn't love that.  10/10

Diary

 5/10/25 - Start of Chapter 1

I am already in love with Mother 3.  I actually have played the first chapter of the game in the past, MANY years ago I got into Earthbound and the fan culture surrounding it and I started playing Mother 3 as a result.  I never got super far in it though, I got to around the middle of Chapter 2 and then kind of bounced off it.  This time though, it's like immediate, I have clicked with this game so hard, I don't know why I had so much trouble with it in the past.  Shigesato Itoi don't miss.

Y'all.  We got another cozy JRPG.  So excited about cozy JRPGs, you don't even know.  For those who don't know what I'm talking about, I basically have this kind of obsession with like SNES, early PS1, GBA, that sort of style of JRPGs.  I talked about it in my previous gaming diary on Wild ARMs quite a bit.  It's this sort of JRPG with a very specific visual style, sort of 16 bit though it really just has to invoke those vibes, with a really fun but not super involved battle system where you can just vibe to the gameplay loop because while you obviously need strategy, you aren't having to actively block or dodge and, most importantly, you aren't having to do inputs to power up attacks.  Mario RPGs aren't cozy by this definition, which feels, you know, wrong when they're supposed to be MARIO RPGs.  I digress.  Mother 3 is like peak cozy for me, it takes an RPG I already find super cozy, Earthbound, and then zooms it in to this GBA resolution with these adorable sprites and this very homey feel, taking place in this small rural town in a forest.  Love it.

That being said, I do also enjoy that Mother 3 has a little bit extra to the combat if I do want to learn it.  I'm real bad at the extra hits system, mind, like just horrible at it.  But it is really cool that it has this whole "hit on the beat of the song for extra damage" system in place.  The music in the Mother series has always been very central and it's super interesting to see that become an important part of the gameplay as well.  That being said, the best I've been able to do so far is 2 hits, I doubt I'm ever going to get there with it, lol.

I was really worried that the quirky sense of humor from the previous game(s) was going to be absent in Mother 3, tbh.  Like I have a vague idea of what happens in Mother 3, I've seen a Let's Play, I know it is a far more serious game than its predecessors and was just a bit worried that the eccentric sense of humor would be downplayed.  And maybe it still will be, I am 90 minutes in at the time of writing this entry, but the sense of humor is strong so far.  Lots of slapstick, lots of witty dialogue, a couple great pop culture references.  It's Mother through and through.

It is incredibly exciting how many frogs are in this game.  The Mother 3 frogs might genuinely be the best save points in gaming history, it's just a perfect idea.  A little serotonin boost throughout the game.  I know I'm always happy when I see a frog!  And they are doing so many different things too, having their own little frog adventures!  Love it, love the frogs.

5/11/25 - End of Chapter 1, Start of Chapter 2

Well.  Damn y'all.  You know, like I said previously, I've played through Chapter 1 before so I knew everything was going to go south right quick but man.  It hit me hard this time.  I was actually tearing up.  It's kind of amazing how much emotion they're able to get out of these relatively simple GBA sprites, tbh.  Flint lashing out at all his friends when he finds out his wife died is an amazing scene, tbh.  Like I said, even as someone who knew it was coming, I was still hit pretty hard.  I didn't know Hinawa for very long but it still hit me.  And then the second hit of Claus going missing, presumed dead!?  I forgot that happens immediately after, I thought that was much later on.  Just damn.

Everything I want to talk about is going to feel weird after that because, like.  Emotion.  But something I've been really enjoying in Mother 3 is the audio design.  It has the classic Earthbound feel of trippy battle backgrounds and themes, though currently it has a distinctive Classical influence to it as opposed to the more psychedelic themes I'm used to.  It's an interesting way to communicate the key difference in the world of the Nowhere Islands vs. Eagleland, imo, the music is less modern because the civilization is less modern, it's a agrarian farming society that functions on quid pro quo trade.  But something I really love is that every attack adds something to the music.  Like Flint's hits are indicated by electric guitar sounds, Boney the second party member that does anything in battle you can recruit has dog barks, the third party member you encounter, Duster, adds bass to the music.  And this goes for the enemies too, they all hit with musical beats and something I really enjoy is that whereas the party's musical beats are out of place, the enemies always hit to the song, it blends in.  It's a neat auditory way to communicate battling, the party is fighting against the song as much as they are the enemies.

I love the transition between chapters 1 and 2.  Seeing a previous cutscene from a different perspective as you hand off control from one character to another is such a neat touch, and it was great seeing Flint, a silent protagonist throughout the first Chapter, speak for the first time, indicating that we're no longer in control of him.  And now we have Duster, the socially awkward thief with a minor leg disability!  His gameplay is so much more unique than Flint's, Flint was kind of a bruiser, his whole thing was hitting for big damage, but Duster has a whole inventory of tricks to inflict status conditions on enemies, it's so much more interesting playing as him.  Though, did I almost lose to the first fight AND get my first game over playing as him?  You betcha!

Using this moment to introduce zombies was also great.  Zombies are a staple of the Mother series, they've played major roles in all three games, but I love how Mother 3 uses them especially.  Throughout chapter 1 there's been this developing wrongness in the world.  The people of Tazmily used to live in harmony with nature but now nature and them are at odds.  Hinawa's death is, potentially, the first murder to ever occur in the history of the village, and from a creature that despite its impressive size and monstrous appearance has, historically, been a friend.  There is something wrong in the world, something unnatural, and many NPCs are noticing it too, believing the forest fire in the first chapter to be the start of a change in the world.  And the zombies are a very effective way of communicating to the player just how screwed up this world has become, the natural order is so shifted that the dead are literally coming back to haunt us.

I'm honestly just absolutely floored by how much I've been loving Mother 3 so far.  Like, I'm vaguely familiar with Mother 3, I saw a Let's Play of it a million years ago and played the first part a bunch of times, but like.  I'm in, I'm so in now, I've been thinking about it constantly.  Itoi really cooked, I want to see how this story and these characters grow and develop so much.  Like for a long time I was sure that even if I liked Mother 3, I wouldn't love it as much as Earthbound, and don't get me wrong Earthbound is probably the more "special" game for me just because of the history but I'm already like "man, do I like Mother 3 more?"  We'll see, I guess, I'm only like 3 hours in and we still got, like, 22-27 hours left of game.

5/12/25 - Chapter 2 Finale and Chapter 3 Start

Finally got a PSI user!!!  All things considered, Kumatora does not show up too late, I feel like all told she shows up earlier than Paula does in the previous game, but it felt a lot longer for sure.  I think it's really just because we had spent the entire chapter as Duster, who is a really cool party member don't get me wrong, but he also immediately struggles if there's more than one enemy in a battle due to his relatively low damage and reliance on his traps which don't always work.  But yeah, Kumatora, sick.  She's so cool.  It's nice to have a character who can just screen nuke and/or deal a ton of concentrated damage after all this time.  Now we're really cooking.

The way you learn new PSI in this game is super interesting.  Like rather than learning it via level up, your character will randomly, presumably after hitting some sort of level threshold, start to feel feverish.  This is a disease that cannot be cured and leaves the party more vulnerable to enemy attacks as they cannot run while this effect is being applied.  But, after a short time, a new power will awaken within them.  This is such a unique way of doing characters learning skills, it's effectively the same result I realize and I can imagine it being incredibly inconvenient later on, but I really enjoy it.  It makes it feel like the RPG mechanics are not just "a battle and progression system" but an actual part of the world that has an impact.

This section saw us having our first proper interaction with the villain faction of this game, the Pigmask army.  They had been appearing throughout the game previously, they've been behind many of the events we've encountered thus far like the fire that burned down the forest and indirectly the death of Hinawa.  But this is our first time encountering them properly.  They're an excellent villain faction, they are shown as this really oppressive military force equipped with powerful weapons far beyond the reach of the locals.  They're very clearly modeled after the Stormtroopers in Star Wars and Itoi does draw the direct parallel between them and the Third Reich.  But both to fit the relatively light tone of the game and also to sort of diminish their power, they're depicted as incompetent, somewhat lazy, and incredibly childish.  They are as much messing with nature, turning the animals into cyborgs and weird hybrids, and destroying the lives of the people of Tazmily for personal pleasure as they are for their own grander goals.  They are always intimidating, that's a line Itoi makes sure to never cross, but they are also made to be laughed at.  It reminds me a lot of Jojo Rabbit in that regard, the Pigmasks are scary when they need to be and also funny when they need to be.

No disrespect to the Mother 3 fan localization team, their work is excellent, but uh.  I can absolutely tell this is a fan project, lol.  Like, this truly is a masterpiece of fan translation, I adore it.  It captures the spirit of the Mother series better than I even think Nintendo would've in an official localization, while also trying to keep the original work as intact in possible, again in a way I don't think Nintendo would've in an official localization.  But I just got to say it, each time characters swear in this thing, it takes me out of it.  It's not like serious swears, they don't fall into the fansub trap of using the f word every other sentence, but like.  Kumatora has a habit of saying things like "ass", "damn", and "bastard" and I'm just like "I'm not sure this is the vibe", you know, it feels weird for the kind of game Mother 3 is.

I've mentioned previously that I've long believed that I would like Earthbound more than Mother 3 and how that opinion is changing now that I'm really getting into the trenches with Mother 3.  A big reason for that is how thematically compelling Mother 3 is.  Like, Itoi's previous work has a lot of the themes featured in Mother 3 in them, he's very critical of capitalism and how it can cause one to lose one's sense of self and their sense of empathy.  Like one of the main recurring villains of Earthbound is literally a gold statue that makes people crazy.  But in Mother 3 these themes are explicit, this is a game about the evils of capitalism first and foremost.  It honestly makes me wonder if, among the many other reasons why it didn't make sense to localize Mother 3, they secretly didn't localize it because of how explicitly political it is.  Like I could not imagine this Japanese game telling you that capitalism is evil going over well in the uber-patriotism of Bush's America, let me tell ya.

To that end, I like that we get a chapter that's kind of from the perspective of the villains.  In Chapter 3 you play as Salsa, a monkey who is being forced to work for the Pigmask Army as they kidnapped his girlfriend.  Salsa is accompanied by Fassad, an apparently high ranking member of the Pigmask Army who intends to use the monkey as a sidekick for his own plans.  Fassad, you see, is something of a public relations guy for the Pigmasks.  He goes into villages like Tazmily and begins sowing the seeds of their long term social goals.  He introduces money into places that had previously never used it and, by extension, the concept of ownership that money brings.  He sells the locals on the idea that they can achieve true happiness through the technology he brings and begins inundating the area with television.  He then would go around spreading distrust among the villagers by infringing on their newly found sense of ownership and framing others for it.  It's an incredibly effective evil plan that both builds dependency on the Pigmasks, because they are the source of money and technology, while immediately destroying the previous status quo.

It's also really interesting that they did what is effectively a combat light chapter.  Salsa fights a lot of enemies, don't get me wrong, but the focus in this chapter is moreso around minigames, Salsa's dancing is very important for progression and later on in the chapter there's kind of a race you have to accomplish.  It makes a lot of sense though as Salsa is pretty poor in combat.  He is the only party member so far that starts at level 1 and even as he levels up his offensive capabilities do not evolve that much.  By the end of the chapter, Salsa is likely to barely be doing double digits.  His one big trick though, is that he can mimic.  If Salsa gets hit by a move, he can mimic the same move back at the opponent to deal comparable damage.  It's of course not an ideal strategy by any means, Salsa is too fragile to do this long term, but it's something!

I really enjoy how many events in the timeline of the first three chapters are lining up.  I mentioned before about the handing off from chapter 1 to chapter 2 and in the same vein that we see events from chapter 1 from the alternate perspective of Duster, we are also getting to see the events of Chapter 2 from Salsa's perspective.  There are so many scenes that are given a new context due to the shifting perspectives, a scene where Duster encounters Salsa which in Duster's story just seemed to be "look at the cute monkey" now is very tragic when you realize the monkey was looking for aid.  Seeing the castle that Duster breaks into from a new perspective also rules, Osohe Castle seems like such a major dungeon when Duster goes through but now it's free because the Pigmasks have set up in it.  You even get to talk to the Pigmasks as normal NPCs and they talk about Duster and Kumatora as if they were boogiemen.  It's also, you know, just an effective way to reuse assets because you're making this on a GBA cart and don't have a lot of space for entirely new story sections.

I really do love the visual style of this game so far, I want to make that clear before I continue.  It's a very gorgeous little game, it's amazing how much visually it gets out of the GBA, a console that, let's face it, is not exactly known for exceptionally pretty games.  That being said I do feel like the designs so far are kind of lacking.  One of the things I associate most with the Mother series is just how weird enemies are/can be.  Like Earthbound is just full of some absolute weirdos who have such a unique, distinctive visual style, and idk.  So far it's felt like Mother 3 is just a bit too cutesy.  It still looks great of course, I can't say that enough, I just feel like it's missing something the previous two games had on lock.

5/17/25 - Chapter 3 Finale and Chapter 4

So, I wasn't able to play Mother 3 for like three days, oops.  I was so sad, y'all, I just kept getting busy and having to do things that cut into my usual game time and allergies have just been kicking my ass so I've been really tired all the time.  I've been thinking about Mother 3 nonstop, though, when I'm not playing it I'm like "I wish I could be playing Mother 3 right now".  God this game is so good, like, it has infected me it feels like.  A few of these games come along every year, mind, like already this year I've done Ender Lilies and Gravity Rush 2 and both of those games had similar... I guess the kids call it "brainrot".  Hate that term, tbh, but it kinda does apply here, lol.

So I've finished both Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.  I was like almost done with Chapter 3, it turns out, when I stopped a few days ago I had like maybe 20 minutes left of the chapter, really could've just closed it out there I guess.  I find it really interesting how this game is not only separated into chapters but also kind of Acts.  Like Chapter 1-3 are all the same "Act", telling the story of the Tazmily before and showing its corruption firsthand through multiple angles, while Chapter 4 and, presumably, the rest of the game is something of an "Act II", picking up many years later as Tazmily has modernized.  I knew a timeskip happened eventually, mind, like I said I'm vaguely familiar with Mother 3 from back in the day, but it's so much more interesting seeing how and why the game handles it for myself, you know?

Fassad is such a great villain, y'all.  Like his absolute cruelty and ruthlessness is put on display during the Salsa chapter, obviously, dude is willing to shock this poor innocent monkey at the drop of a hat.  But the way he communicates to the public is very devious.  The way he adopts this kind and friendly demeanor while weaving in his own desires is frighteningly familiar, he is very effective at pushing forward his agenda while making it seem like he's doing it for the betterment of the common man.  Like, at one point he talks about how the people of Tazmily need to obtain Happy Boxes, the televisions that the Pig Mask army is trying to seed into the village, in order to stop the village from becoming a den of villainy.  When there is no "other" to villainize, he creates one, the people of Tazmily all used to trust each other but now there is this threat of their town becoming a "hive of evildoers", their fear will do the work for him, even if said fear is entirely unfounded.  And it works, in three short years the people of Tazmily are a more selfish, untrustworthy society who believes in things like "it's okay people's homes are mysteriously destroyed en masse because they won't adopt to the right way of living".

The end of Chapter 3 is also such a great note to end off on pre-time jump.  Like, it really shows the full power of the Pigmask Army, that despite their seeming incompetence they have both the numbers, technology, and lack of common decency to literally go to war with a monkey.  We have this moment where all of our heroes from Act I come together to battle Fassad and his men, a moment of triumph uniting the three stories seen thus far.  And then we have the other shoe dropping, that as nice as it would be to go on the offensive and take down Fassad while he's licking his wounds, they don't have the resources necessary.  Duster is missing, and with him the treasure that they need to save the world.  Salsa needs to find and rescue his girlfriend who is still being held somewhere by the Pigmask Army.  And Lucas, soon to be the protagonist of this story in Act II, is just too young, he needs to grow up more before he can even think about going to war.  So our group has no choice, they have to let Fassad go and just hope that if Lucas and Flint stay in town, they can hope to undo the damage he is doing.  With a promise that when the time is right, they will once again come together, we move on to Act II.

Y'all.  I don't think Shigesato Itoi likes cops.  Chapter 4 of Mother 3 places it firmly more in line with its predecessors, which I'm pretty happy about.  Like, I enjoyed the setup to Mother 3, seeing this small community being corrupted in real time by capitalism, but the thing I have always honed in onto the Mother series is how they are effectively Dragon Quest-style RPGs about modernity.  As expected, because this game is so heavily critical of modern society, particularly satirizing the US, the game does not hold back.  Like on rip we have corrupt cops who treat the citizens like trash to enhance their own authority, the town's male population all working at a factory where they do brain numbing tasks for little money which they are then encouraged to spend on things they can't afford, citizens who embrace consumerism and conformity and actively look down upon people who want to do things a different way, healthcare and retirement facilities that are underfunded and not upkept, leaving the sick and elderly to spend the last years of their lives rotting away.  It's legitimately kinda crazy to see how relentless Mother 3 is.

That inherent "wrongness" that was in the earlier parts is also still present in full swing.  Like, obviously the whole point is that the Pigmask Army's control over the populace has changed the world, made it wrong, but they don't act like the new world has its place for a second.  Not only has the town been turned into this populace urban city, but if you walk out into nature you quickly find there is nothing natural anymore.  The animals of the forest have been morphed into bizarre hybrids, snakes with the heads of chickens, rats with propellers on their necks, cyborg moles with the components of industrial drills.  The only animals that seem to have been left alone are those that live in other people's homes, mice, spiders and bats.  The town has no more farmland, literally, the large farm on the east side of Tazmily has been purchased and turned into the Pigmask's local training base.  The worst thing though is how many people are now either homeless or have large chunks of their homes being destroyed by mysterious lightning storms that now plague the land, bizarrely targeting only those who oppose the Pigmask's ideology.  It's a familiar world, and also an unfamiliar one, a bizarre mirror held up to our own modern society.  It's really effective.

A lot of Chapter 4 also explores this very depressing loop that the now modernized citizens have gotten themselves into.  The key place in the chapter is "Club Titiboo", a nightclub on top of a mountain near the factory much of the citizens work at.  Lucas and Boney head off in that direction because someone in the village raised a question about the bass player at the club, a mysterious man who looks a great deal like Duster, and while there they reunite with Kumatora.  Anyways, the factory workers spend a lot of their free time at Club Titiboo, heading there after shifts to see the band, buy drinks, and flirt with the waitresses.  The reason for this is that at the end of shift, along with their somewhat meager pay, the Pigmasks give them tickets to the Club, encouraging them to head up there.  The obvious implication here being that the employees get their money from the Pigmasks and then immediately return it to them at the top of the mountain, buying drinks and food.  It is an effective practice too, while Lucas is there we see one of the villagers, Thomas, formerly the dim witted, good natured town firefighter, walk in, order a round of drinks for himself, Lucas, and Boney, stay for a song and then immediately go "I think I'm going to pick up an overtime shift", having spent his paycheck for the day.

I really appreciate how much Mother 3 encourages you to use your resources.  Like, it's not a difficult game by any means, most of the Game Overs I've received are due to my own playing and not because the game is hard, but it is a damage heavy one.  Enemies on your level typically do considerable damage still and the game consistently throws enemies at you that are a bit above your paygrade to see if you can take on the challenge.  And because of that, you're constantly cycling through healing items to stay alive.  This is probably a nightmare for the kind of gamer who hoards items until the end and never uses them but like.  The Mother series is like THE series that'll teach you use your items.  Item space is limited, items are cheap, items are expendable.  As an aside, like, isn't it weird how people just will not use items at any point.  Like legitimately people will add like 20 hours additional to a playthrough of an RPG just to never use a single potion, it's crazy to me.  You don't need to grind more, you have resources, use them!

Almost as if the game can hear me and get mad at me for talking smack, now that we are into Chapter 4 the "weirdos" I was talking about previously, feeling like they were kind of missing from the game, are now in full swing.  Now, keep in mind, I still kinda feel like this game's sprite work makes everything a little too cutesy, y'know.  But having all these crazy hybrids as we go along is really doing wonders for the weirdness factor.  It feels way more like the vibe I'm expecting, with its weird cattlesnakes and Pigtunias and rats with propellers, seriously, those weirdos are all over the place now, it's insane.

5/18.25 - Chapter 5

The party is finally altogether!  It genuinely feels like such a power trip to have a full party for once.  Being able to finally implement a gameplan because I both have my trap user to stun opponents and my offensive magic user to take advantage of their weaknesses is so nice.  The combat in this game has always been fun, mind, it scratches my traditional turn-based RPG itches very effectively and trying to figure out enemy timing is a neat mechanic (even though I absolutely suck at it even with the helper guides).  But now it feels like I'm really cooking in combat, especially now that the game is finally adopting multiple enemy types in a single battle more frequently.  The earlier game it felt like that was just a thing they were avoiding doing but now it happens almost every enemy encounter.

Speaking of which, I want to go back to the audio design because I feel like it's really interesting here.  As stated earlier on, both enemies and your party have instrumental cues when they attack, and often the opponent's instruments naturally belong to their song.  It becomes even more interesting, then, when you get these multiple enemy type battles where you have these mixing instruments and motifs on the opponent's side.  I have to wonder if this was done intentionally, tying the enemy attacks to their own song to make it feel wrong when they collaborate with other enemies.  Like a major theme of this game is obviously "wrongness", I've talked that point to death by now, and this really does a lot to enhance the uncanniness.

Also interesting is how your party members' attacks play into the audio design.  I feel like I'm mostly just rehashing old points, I'm sorry, but it's just something I've been thinking about in this section.  So, at first, it can seem like your party's instruments are sort of battling with the songs in question.  They have very modern rock-esque instruments to represent their attacks which not only conflict with the song's literal notes but also with the song stylistically.  Mother 3's soundtrack is very heavily influenced by classic and jazz, older music.  But, the combo system does something really fascinating, it blends your instruments into the song seamlessly as you start racking up hits.  The once discordant attacks becoming part of the battle, a neat little audio cue to reward you for getting good at the battles.  It's really impressive how dynamic this game's music becomes as a result of the attack cues, I love it.

The soundtrack to Mother 3 is just amazing too.  I feel like I've been doing a disservice not talking about it but it kept feeling like one of those things where because I hadn't started talking about it, I had so much to catch up on AND more kept piling on that it never felt like there was a "good time" to talk about it.  This soundtrack is brilliant, I almost can't say enough good about it.  Like I was gonna do the thing I did in a previous diary where I just linked a bunch of my favorite tracks but my favorite tracks keep piling up and if I did that this entire paragraph would just be links to Mother 3 songs.  So instead, I'm just going to link the entire soundtrack playlist and a few of my favorite tracks so far: "Fun Naming", "Mom's Hometown", "Fight With Mecha-Drago", "Unfounded Revenge", "Monkey's Love Song", "Monkey's Delivery Service", "A Railway in Our Village", "Big Shot's Theme", "Girl's Room", "Intense Guys", "Bon Voyage, Amigo", and "Aria of Unease".  Every song is excellent, mind, but those are like the biggest standouts for me.

That being said.  Look, I hate that I'm doing this, I hate that I'm comparing Mother 3 so much to Earthbound because I earnestly believe that each piece of art should stand on its own.  But like, we're already here so.  Something I do feel Mother 3 does miss out on that made its predecessors so special is the unique vibe they had in their soundtracks.  The Earthbound soundtrack is pretty fresh in my mind right now due to a big playlist project I'm doing, and something I really adore about that soundtrack is how unconventional it is.  RPGs are defined by a specific soundtrack structure, you typically have low key town themes and high key battle themes.  One of the things I adore about Earthbound, though, is how it balks tradition, most of the battle themes are very chill and very low key, creating a more wacky and uncanny soundtrack especially for its genre.  Mother 3, as good as its soundtrack is, and it is fantastic, is way more traditional in comparison.  The battle themes are largely very intense and high energy and while they are great themes, I feel like the vibe is missing, y'know?

If any chapter in the game is close to being "filler", it's chapter 5.  Like, chapter 5 is fine, it's fun.  You go on a road trip.  Help a mouse mother find her mice children.  Get mistaken for the leader of the Pigmask army.  Die a million times trying to steal a yo-yo only to give up after realizing it's likely not worth it.  But it feels like this chapter is kind of just designed to acquaint you with the full party combat, so it's relatively light narratively and thematically.  I'm happy about it, mind, it gave me the opportunity to talk about things I haven't gotten to talk about before.  But the only real things of note that happen in the chapter are that we find the treasure that went missing with Duster many years ago, we take down the Thunder Tower that had previously been used to destroy the lives of those who do not conform, and we meet the true leader of the Pigmask army, a mysterious man in an iron mask.

I am only halfway through the game.  I realized this last night.  The HLTB for this game is 25 hours main story, I am at 12 and a half, there are three chapters left.  I knew that a lot of the game was in Chapter 7, that's when you get to the meat and potatoes of the Mother story structure, but man, experiencing it for myself is crazy.  I'm curious if these diary entries will become more or less frequent from here on out.  Hopefully, regardless, they'll get shorter, I do not mean to ramble on for as long as I do but there's just so much to talk about in this game.  It's truly something special.  This might be a lock for GOTY for me.

5/19/25 - Chapter 6, Return to Tazmily, the First Needle, the Chimera Lab, the Second Needle, and Snowcap Mountain 

Chapter 6 is so good, y'all.  Like just a nice, quiet, beautiful moment that not only serves as a quick breather from the action as you transition from Act II to Act III, but also reminds us of a very important thing about Lucas.  That being, Lucas is just a child.  And not only is he a child, he's a child whose entire family was torn apart when he was still very young.  Chapter 6, without any words, effectively communicates Lucas' past, his struggles, and why he keeps fighting in spite of all of that.  It's just amazing honestly, I felt myself getting emotional over it.  This game is truly magical.

We had a tiny little stealth/horror section in this part!  I was obviously familiar with the Ultimate Chimera before this point, it's like THE THING people probably know about Mother 3 besides Lucas because of Smash, but honestly I don't think Smash does it justice?  Like it seems so small and unproblematic in Smash, sure it's an instant death if you get hit by it but New Pork is a massive stage, how are you getting hit by it?  But in this game, nah fam.  You have to face this thing down in enclosed spaces and not only is the atmosphere on point, cutting out the song to instead hear only the distant roars of the beast and the screams of the people who ended up in its path, but you also have to make it chase you to get around.  It's a very good scene, and I would've never guessed who shows up in the midst of it.

Chapter 7 finally gets us into traditional Mother story structure of "going on an adventure to find the 8 special places".  I guess it's 7 in this game, actually, not 8, I digress.  I find it really interesting how this game explores the idea of immortals confronting mortality, as the immortal guardians of the Nowhere Islands see their role in life being fulfilled and themselves disappearing as a result.  It's really fascinating seeing how they confront their own nonexistence as not only a necessary inevitability but as a new adventure, almost being joyful that after thousands of years of life they can experience something new.  But, they're also kind of sad about it, when they appeared in an earlier chapter they seemed very stuck up, as if the world's problems are beneath them, and yet now in their final moments they are asking questions about what will happen to their homes and their friends when they're gone.  It's legitimately kind of powerful.

I keep saying I'm bad at the combat, but like.  That's not really true, actually.  While indeed I am bad at the combo system, Mother combat is something that just makes sense to me.  Like I found out recently when checking through a walkthrough to see how far I am in the game that enemies have assigned levels.  And I am VERY underleveled, like, Kumatora is 10 levels under the enemies I'm facing right now.  But like I don't feel it, like the game is a little harder than the earlier chapters I guess but I haven't felt like I've hit a wall where I need to level up more?  I've felt like if I die, I get it on the runback anyways with a new strategy pretty regularly.  Maybe that'll change soon, the difference between level 30 and level 40 and the difference between level 40 and level 50 in an RPG is drastic, but right now, you know, work smarter not harder.

Before I really started getting into Chapter 7, I did a runthrough of Tazmily to see what has changed and it's a pretty interesting place now.  Like, a lot of the populace has moved out of the village to make a place in the big city of New Pork, and you really see how that's impacted the behavior in the village.  As the workers and businesses and police move out, the town effectively becoming deurbanized, people are just like.  Nicer to each other now.  The small town feel of the earlier chapters is being restored somewhat, and I find that really interesting.  The train station attendant who used to be mean to Lucas now gladly accepts his business, the woman on the beach who used to curse the other patrons now is just chilled out and kind of misses the company, a lot of the villagers are returning to their behavior from before the Pig Masks moved in now that the factory is shut down.  The wounds that capitalism have left in the village may never be undone, but they are starting to heal.

Also it's just good that I did this because man this game is hilarious.  I feel bad I haven't been talking about how hilarious it is but I also don't want to screencap literally every joke to reference them later.  I'm not going to act like every joke lands and I'm certainly not going to act like every joke has aged well.  But like, there are so many great bits in this game.  Last night though had a really great stand out moment though that I really wanted to highlight where Kumatora has to introduce the party to someone and it only occurs to her now that despite adventuring together this whole time, she doesn't know Boney's name.  That got a real good chuckle out of me.  I really wish I had been screenshotting more of the jokes now, tbh, because there's definitely a lot that have gotten a smile or a chuckle out of me that I just will never remember now because they've long since passed, but such is the way of things.

5/23/25 - Chapter 7: The Third Needle, Saturn Valley, and the Fourth Needle

I've met the Mr. Saturns!!!  Fun fact, back in the old Ed days, probably like 2010, shortly after I deleted my original YouTube channel, I used to do written reviews over on the original Nostalgia Critic site, thatguywiththeglasses, and Mr. Saturn was kind of my mascot.  I even downloaded the Mr. Saturn font and had every review end with "Mr. Saturn approves this message, boing".  Good times, cringe times, I used to think I hated High School Musical.  Wild.  Anyways, Mother 3.

So I'm not going to say I NEEDED to grind, because I didn't tbh.  Like I am fully of the opinion that right now where I am in the game, even if there is a level disparity between myself and the enemies, I play smart enough to where I can make up for that fact.  But, just to be safe, I did do a bit of grinding just to get Kumatora more of her Beta PSI, as well as when Duster joins the party and he's now like 10 levels behind everyone else.  And like, I just adore this battle system.  It does a great job of making the party feel individually pretty average but as a unit unstoppable, which really plays into the themes of friendship and adventure that are often explored in the Mother series.  It can be really punishing but the rolling HP system always insures you can recover from any hit that would kill you.  It rewards you for quick thinking while also having the kind of relaxing flowstate that you get from strictly turn-based RPGs, it's just wonderful.

Fassad's not doing so hot, y'all.  So at the end of Chapter 5, shortly before the introduction of a new villain, Fassad falls off a massive tower seemingly to his demise.  Shockingly, he managed to survive, or at the very least was resuscitated if they did find him dead, and the Pigmask army rebuilt him into this weird trumpet cyborg monstrosity.  The way he puts it, the incident has made him "more beautiful".  I think there's something very poignant in the fact that for the Pigmask Army, even in death there is no end, they will find your beaten, bloodied corpse and revive you into a weapon for their own gains.  Also he now talks through smooth jazz and has to have an overly polite interpreter robot talk for him, which is such a great Earthbound bit.  Though the song he plays is incredibly familiar.

I think this chapter is the first time an NPC has directly made a correlation between the islands where the game takes place and our final objective, awakening the Dark Dragon.  Like, several NPCs have talked about a dragon being sealed away underneath the island, but I think this is the first point where anyone says "no, the islands ARE the dragon".  This is not a shocking revelation, there are many points throughout the game where we see a full map of the islands and like, yeah, it's a dragon.  But it's interesting to see a character just come out and be like "yeah, the island is the dragon, the distant island to the south is its head and the mountains to the north are built upon its wings".  It's a nice bit of worldbuilding that I really like, but again I feel like it fits more with Mother 3's more "traditional" RPG philosophy.

I adore Mr. Saturns.  Always a grand time when the Mr. Saturns are on screen, let me tell ya.  Like, Mr. Saturns kind of fill the role of the Slime or the Moogle in other JRPG series, the weird little guy that's such a distinctive hallmark of the series in question.  But I kind of feel like Mr. Saturns in particular are so distinctly Mother, like, they are a perfect microcosm of what is so magical about the series.  They're incredibly wacky and super out there, being these weird little head dudes with short stubby legs and an odd manner of speech.  But they're also just so inherently wholesome and sincere.  Their special font, and important part of their charm, is modeled after how a child writes, and their manner of speech matches with it.  Mr. Saturns at times seem as though they're toddlers themselves, having very simple wants and needs and just a desire to have fun.  And at others they're incredibly insightful, wise, and intelligent, giving the party great advice, a moment to reflect on their journey, and building all manner of ingenious devices with which to aid the group.  I love them.

I'm a little surprised at how well paced Chapter 7 actually is.  When I went into this chapter, knowing that the HLTB for this game is almost double the length of where I was at when I finished Chapter 5, I figured Chapter 7 was just going to feel like an entirely separate game.  But not only is Chapter 7 surprisingly short, it's very fast paced.  You're getting through this entire quest in rapid fire, your adventure taking you all sorts of places in as quick a time as possible.  It really shows how high stakes the current battle is, the needle pulling is a proper race between good and evil.  They match each other blow for blow, Lucas will pull a needle only to be just a second too late to pulling the next one.  At my current place in the story, the score is two all, and even though logistically there is no proper time limit and I could take however long I want on going to the final two needles, it's such a high stakes quest at this point that I find myself getting taken into it.  This game is so good, it's hard to even imagine sometimes I swear.

5/25/25 - Chapter 7: The ocean, Tanetane Island, and the Fifth Needle

Man, what a satisfying number.  I'm kind of glad now that Mother 3 has been taking as long as it has because the game I'm playing after it probably won't get a gaming diary.  So I would just complete miss posting an entry on the 25th and I wouldn't be able to appreciate how good this number is!  Anyways, this isn't relevant at all, I just was super excited about the number, onto Mother 3.

Okay.  So the ocean kinda sucks, actually.  Honestly, I'm just very impressed it took this long for the game to have an annoying bit to it?  Basically, you have to traverse the ocean floor with a very limited oxygen meter and every so often you have to stop in at these Oxygen Refilling Machines to restore your oxygen or else you'll drown and wash up on the Cerulean Beach at Tazmily.  The movement has to be so precise sometimes to get places, especially if you're trying for the various optional treasures.  You just run out of oxygen so fast, it's wild!  I'm also not sure if I've mentioned this before this point, but the totally legitimate GBA I'm playing this on kind of stops taking the inputs from my controller after a few seconds, so this section was rough.  Thankfully, like all sections in this game, traversing the ocean was shockingly short.  And I got to fight the Fish Roe Man, the most Mother enemy in all of history.

Tanetane Island was such a good part of the game though that it was worth it.  After fighting the boss of the ocean area, our protagonists end up stranded on Tanetane Island with 1HP, 0 PP and all of their items gone, save for the ones directly equipped to them at the time.  Having no way of healing themselves, our party is forced to forage for food and quickly finds a patch of mushrooms to restore their strength.  What follows is an insanely trippy look into our characters' psyches, as the mushrooms cause them to hallucinate that the various enemies on the island are people from their life preying on their insecurities and hopes.  A version of Flint telling Lucas to come home because he can't do this, a hallucination of Claus who asks to join Lucas on their journey, Duster's father telling Duster that he's proud of his son, NPCs telling Kumatora that she's not a real princess and she let them all down, a manifestation of Kumatora's alter ego who tries to seduce the crew.  It's not just good because it's this trippy, low resource situation going on but it also is, in itself very sad.  It reminds us that these characters are just kids, and that fate has thrust responsibility on them that they are struggling to handle.

Speaking of being sad, hoo boy.  Returning to Tazmily after Tanetane Island is quite the emotional experience.  Throughout Chapter 7 we have seen people deciding to pack up their lives and move to the big city.  It's really been going on since the beginning of Chapter 4 but as time has gone on, each time you go through Tazmily there are less and less people there.  When you return from Tanetane Island, though?  The town has been deserted.  Only a handful of people remain, those that either would not or could not go to the big city.  You run through empty streets, knocking on the doors of houses where friends used to be and no longer are.  All the while, the saddest song possible is playing.  I really like that the player gets the opportunity to go through Tazmily earlier in the chapter when it's only half empty, and you start seeing people be like.  Nice to each other again.  It gives you a bit of hope that the town can recover from the damage the Pigmasks have brought to them, only to take it away from you in the end.  Of all the moments in this game where I've gotten emotional, this was, for some reason, the biggest one I actually cried.

I hit what I'd probably say is the first like "hard" fight of the playthrough last night.  The Barrier Trio are ROUGH, they have tons of HP, tons of high power PSI, are immune to PSI themselves until they have half HP, it's a tough fight.  It's not the first fight I've died to but it's the first fight where I feel like me dying wasn't entirely on me, it just is a hard fight.  That being said, it's a fight I enjoyed quite a bit. A common thing plaguing these traditional turn based RPGs is that they kind of become "solved" after a certain point.  Like you start to figure out the best possible strategy for each fight and execute that until the game is over.  So it's really nice when games throw a boss fight at you every once in a while where the best possible strategy doesn't work for whatever reason and you have to really adapt to survive.

There was also a nice bit of levity in this chunk of the game!  I'm super glad because between the Tanetane Island hallucinations and the death of Tazmily, I was very emotionally drained.  And the game, knowing you probably would be, went "play as Dog".  It's not a long section by any means, it's probably less than two minutes if you do it correctly, but like.  You just get to play as Boney and be a cute little dog for a second, it's a very nice moment, especially since it breaks up the really sad song with a nice, jaunty tune.  On top of that there were some really funny enemies in this section.  There's a robotic monkey with insane defense that when you do it kill it, the end of battle screen just says "it was a good experience" instead of distributing any EXP, great bit.  There's this absolute weirdo called "Negative Man" who just sits in a corner crying about how much his life sucks as you beat up on him, only for it all to be a waste of time because he gives off three EXP.  Just some great bits amidst all the depression, I can relate.

I can feel our battle against the Masked Man coming.  Like, throughout the journey so far, we've had this very close back and forth with the Pigmasks and, by extension, the Masked Man, in our hunt for the Needles.  In every instance of a needle being pulled, save for the first one, the party has either been just ahead or just behind the Pigmasks.  This all culminated in the fifth needle being pulled, wherein Lucas and company did the leg work only to have the Masked Man show up as they were getting ready to pull the needle.  This encounter is very brief though as the Masked Man quickly unleashes a PK Thunder and knocks the entire party out cold before pulling the needle himself.  Side note, it's insane how PK Thunder is depicted as this incredibly potent game ender in this game's narrative when like, PK Thunder is arguably the worst offensive PSI just due to how much it misses.  Anyways, this encounter feels like it's choreographing that next time we meet, we'll have to fight him.  It's a fight I look forward to, if/when it happens.  Which should be soon, actually, I'm already very close to the next needle.

5/26/25 - The Sixth Needle, Chapter 7 Finale, Chapter 8 start, and Leder's Story

I was not at all expecting what Leder's whole deal was.  Like I've said in the past, I have seen a playthrough of Mother 3, I remember like the broadest strokes of the plot, I somehow forgot the major plot twist that Mother 3 effectively takes place after the apocalypse.  Honestly, it kind of kicks ass, the game isn't just going "oh these events are happening and the world is worse off", it's going "these events have happened before, and it literally destroyed the world, and those that are currently being corrupted are the last survivors of the damned world".  Because yeah, that's true too!  The cast of characters you see throughout Tazmily, not their ancestors, not their grandparents, not even their parents, ARE the last survivors of the end of the world.  The entire idyllic Tazmily life was a fabrication, created by people who saw what happened to the world and decided to erase all of their memories and live a quiet, peaceful life together in the hopes humanity might be saved.  The only people who were actually born on the Nowhere Islands are those younger than Kumatora, who is about 18 post-timeskip.

And you know what's killer?  There are so many hints earlier on in the story that this is where this is going.  An important note is that the islands were once inhabited and were abandoned, save for the immortal beings protecting the needles, before the Tazmily villagers arrived.  The villagers, despite their desire to do so, also did not have time to develop a history and mythology of their own civilization, and as such they never talk about and, in fact, don't have any memory of a time before about 18 years ago.  These both matter because, right outside the village, is a church.  You visit this church as one of the first things you do in the game, as Flint you pray at the altar for protection on your journey and for the safe return of your family and the game does the "what's the player's name" thing at this point.  Only thing?  Nobody knows what this church is for!  They say so several times throughout the game, that the church seems like an important place but you don't know why.  This was meant to be interpreted at earlier points as a sign of the world changing, Tazmily is losing their faith as it were, but with this reveal it makes complete sense, of course they don't know what this church is for, it's not theirs!

Chapter 2 is basically just one big hint to all of this.  Like, when you first go into the castle where the chapter takes place, you are sent on a mission to find the treasure your family was supposedly protecting for generations.  Duster, initially, finds the wrong treasure and returns it to Wess only to be reprimanded.  But like, if Duster was truly being trained to guard this treasure, why would he not be able to recognize it?  Obviously for the player experience but like, Duster should just know, Wess should have sketches and documents of a treasure their family has allegedly been guarding.  Even the castle being as decrepit and ruined and full of Ghosts is a huge hint!  Kumatora is supposedly the orphaned daughter of the king and queen of this land, and in Chapter 2 she's no more than like 15.  The issue is, of course, that the castle looks like it has been abandoned for centuries, so long that the names on the tombstones of the people who may have once lived here have been scrubbed away.  I know I've gone on for a while about this twist but like, when it first happened I was very unsure of it like "why do we need this" but now I'm just super excited about it from a thematic and narrative perspective.

Anyways, I have gotten ahead of myself.  This all happens in like the latter half of the section I played recently.  So, we did indeed fight the Masked Man.  Again, it's crazy that his whole deal is using PK Thunder and that's how he instantly overpowers the party when in reality that attack misses like it's nobody's business.  However, there is a method to the madness here, as the game has been building up to our party acquiring arguably the most famous thing in the Mother series outside of the Mr. Saturns: the Franklin Badge!  The Franklin Badge is always an important item in the Mother series but in this game there's a lot more weight given to it because of the Masked Man.  The Masked Man getting hit by his own lightning is such a game changing moment, it had always been a forgone conclusion before this that the Masked Man was just more powerful than us and that we had to hurry to get to needles because if we allowed the Masked Man to get to them, we would be unable to stop him.  And now we are on equal footing in a way, he's still stronger than us but we have a chance.  The boss fight is really fun too, the Masked Man takes two turns each time he comes around, highlighting how much more powerful he is than the party, and he attacks using PK Love, Lucas' signature move, which puts the party on the backfoot considerably when it goes through.  Such a good fight to wrap up Chapter 7.

We've finally made it to the big city!  We were summoned there by the big boss of the city shortly after pulling the sixth needle, with no option to say no.  New Pork City is probably the thing the most people know about the game, given that it's the Mother 3 stage in Smash.  Not what I would've gone with, it's like easily one of the worst stages in the game and people are honestly only coming around to it now because of nostalgia, imo.  New Pork City is an excellent grounding point in the story, which seems insane to say as it's a floating city that is a bizarre, warped combo of a modern big city, i.e. the name invoking New York, and the kind of carnival you would see in like an Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode.  But, throughout Chapter 7 the game has been leaning so heavily into the quest, finding the seven needles and making sure we pull them before the bad guys do, that it's been focusing less and less on the core themes of the game.  Like, we see all the people of Tazmily leaving slowly but surely to eek out a life in the big city but otherwise Mother 3 kind of leans full force into the fantasy aspects of its narrative.

New Pork City brings it back around, though.  From the moment the chapter starts we are back into the commentary on modern civilization.  The limo that is sent for us by the big boss of the city is full of entertainment, it has a stage, a billiards table, several bars, a dartboard, a tabletop game, etc.  But all of these are fake.  If you check them all they say as much, they look flashy and expensive and like they would be fun to use, but they are all just set dressing.  This keeps up when we get to the city itself.  There's an amusement park full of rides that are ultimately too small for anyone to go on and instead must be admired.  A movie theater that seems flashy and impressive from the outside but is instead showing the same movie on repeat and has already fallen into disrepair.  The shops are more expensive and give you significantly worse product compared to what you were buying on the mainland, all under the guise of being "souvenirs".  As you go on, the city becomes more and more populated, but most of the NPCs in the city are soulless husks, repeating simple phrases that, often, contradict each other, as if they were robots made to give the illusion that the city is more lively than it is.  I think one of the first NPCs you encounter has a really telling statement about the city, he assures you that the city is great because it offers people freedom.  This has been a note the bad guys have been saying throughout the game, that by adopting capitalism and modernity they are becoming "free" but now that we're here, we see that the "freedom" they tout has quite the price tag.

But there is another layer to New Pork City that really solidifies the commentary it is going for.  On the surface, New Pork City does not appear to have a residential area, being comprised mostly of entertainment venues and the large central skyscraper overlooking the town.  As you progress, however, you end up in the sewers of New Pork City and shortly after, find an apartment building.  The apartment building being connected through the sewers is already a red flag and, as you would expect, the apartment building is trash.  It's poorly maintained, junk has piled up in the halls, there's an abundance of solicitation papers and eviction notices everywhere, they're keeping a guy prisoner down there, it's a whole thing!  This communicates a very clear message: the people of New Pork City are expected to live in squalor underneath this "utopia" for the chance of the "freedom" that the big boss provides.  And I mean, hey, if you don't like it, maybe work harder you know, why did you choose to have such a low salary, everything is just personal choice after all, you chose to not make as much money.

Speaking of the big boss, we finally reveal who the secret mastermind behind the whole operation is.  The mysterious man who has been commanding the Pigmasks through Fassad and the Masked Man, who turned this beautiful world into a capitalist hellscape, who is hunting for the needles to reshape the world in his image.  And it is the one, the only... Porky?  Who the hell is Porky?  I kid I kid, in the localization for Earthbound this character is named "Pokey".  I, like many people, already knew that this is what the reveal was going to be, not only have I seen a Let's Play, take a shot, but I loved Subspace Emissary back in the day.  Me and my cousin would do sleepovers in high school like once a month and every time we'd make a big bowl of popcorn and stay up all night doing Subspace Emissary, so I've fought and defeated Porky about 30 times probably.

  

Porky being the villain kind of presents an interesting subversion of the usual Mother vibe.  Like the Mother series before 3 was noteworthy for being a series where the adventure feels very much like what a child would come up with, a 80s/90s coming-of-age story with some fantasy elements to it that slowly evolves into something more serious and sinister as you get to the end and fight a true, very Lovecraftian evil.  In Mother 3 though, the game is always serious and always sad and now at the end we see the opposite, Porky's utopia is what a greedy, capitalist child's idea of being a dictator is like.  It juxtaposes oppressive imagery like the dark, utilitarian colors and the sense of being always watched, with toys and games and rides.  It's as much a prison as it is an amusement park.  It's such an interesting way to twist the overall narrative theming of the series, I like it a whole lot.

Get Dungeon Man'd

I don't know if I will finish the game by the next update.  I feel like I could, easily, but I also feel like I should have a break because if I get to the finale I might forget to talk about the latter half of chapter 8.  But I'm getting there, we're almost finished y'all.  This game is probably an easy lock for my GOTY, it'd be crazy for another game to top this, frfr.  I apologize to those who have read this far because I realize it's been a lot and also it's still going to be a lot, I have a very distinct feeling that Chapter 8 is going to double the length of this thing, lol.

5/26/25 - The Empire Porky Building

I could've beaten the game right here.  I saved right outside the final area, a deep cavern heavily reminiscent of that in Earthbound, and part of me was like "I could do this right now".  However, to make sure I don't forget anything from this section of the game before I get overwhelmed during the finale, I decided to break here.  I'm excited though, y'all, I've been thinking about this game nonstop these past two weeks I've been playing it.

I've talked about the audio off and on throughout the playthrough but something I haven't talked about is how much it manages to get out of the GBA soundchip.  I'm not going to sugar coat it, GBA games sound terrible.  It's really amazing how many games managed to mine gold out of it, to be honest, so many iconic soundtracks originated on a console that has the audio quality of an undercooked turnip.  Mother 3 though, I think, is intentionally using the insufficient audio capabilities of the Game Boy Advance.  As we approach the ending of the journey, we are seeing various motifs and songs, not just from this game but from the entire Mother series, be utilized in various scenes, and I think the game is actually doing a clever trick with the fact that the GBA sounds wrong.  The first song you hear in the final dungeon, adorably titled just Hippos, is a tune meant to invoke a sense of calm and joy, but it just feels a little wrong doesn't it, a little unnatural, in the same way the cyborg hippos featured on the floor are just a bit unnatural.  There's this interesting song that plays shortly after that accurately encapsulates the feeling of "trying to sound sexy but ultimately just sounding creepy" because that's what happens.  And the final two songs in the dungeon are literally nostalgic tunes from previous Mother games but they sound just a little wrong, like they're looking back on memories but the distorted memories of someone whose recollections of the events grow more and more distant as time passes.  It's fascinating work.

You can tell this is meant to be the final Mother game because it finally resolves the series' long running bathroom joke.  A pretty consistent bit throughout the series is its bathrooms, it's an amusing play on the fact that more traditional RPGs tend to never depict common household rooms like kitchens, bedrooms, and, of course, bathrooms.  The Mother series, tending to be set in the present day, has bathrooms everywhere but they are always occupied or, if they aren't, an NPC rushes into the bathroom before the party has a chance to look inside.  This all culminates in Mother 3 where a portion of the Empire Porky Building is a maze of public restrooms.  It's like actually the perfect payoff to this running gag, I was so happy to see it, I had somehow completely forgotten this happens.

The final dungeon really gives us a deep look into our main villain's psyche.  Porky spends the entire dungeon toying with you, treating your assault of his fortress as little more than a game.  He summons you up to the hundredth floor but controls the elevators remotely, sending the crew to random floors for little reason other than to show the true extent of his power and influence.  He has an entire floor devoted to the most dangerous chimeras he's ever developed, the hippos I mentioned in the previous paragraph, where keeps them as pets in elaborate enclosures.  He has a floor where a harem of beautiful women tend to his every desire, their only role in life being to serve him.  He sends the party through a dangerous active construction site where people are actively risking their lives dozens of stories up to build him a pool.  He shows the gang his lab where he brainwashes people into loving him and devoting themselves to him.  Even the house of the final Magypsy, the immortal beings who are meant to protect this island until the day when someone arrives to reawaken the Dark Dragon, is just another floor in his tower.  He makes it clear throughout, he is in charge and we are little more than his playthings.

But at the same time, you kind of develop a sympathy for the devil here.  Porky is a right bastard, mind, the game is not acting like he's redeemable at all.  But there is a certain sadness to the Empire Porky Building as well.  Several floors are devoted to Porky playing games with people, not the sick twisted games of a mad man, but actual games like whack-a-mole.  You are reminded, in these final hours, that Porky was just a child when all this happened to him, a child in desperate need of a friend, and who filled that void with greed and hatred.  There's an interesting moment in Earthbound where we get a glimpse into Ness' mind and find out that, despite it all, he wanted to see Porky as a real friend and hoped Porky felt the same way.  And now we find that Porky may have felt the same way, he has collected memories of Ness and keeps them close to him, displaying various trinkets of Ness' journey in places close to him.  But there is an inherent wrongness there too, as if Porky is amassing accomplishments because he is incapable of connecting with who Ness was and so instead must settle for what Ness did.

In fact, the game spinning Porky as potentially sympathetic is the final trick it plays on the player.  When you reach the 100th floor, Porky's true domain, you have a really cool boss fight for starters, the Natural Killer Cyborg rules.  But then you encounter Porky himself and he appears as he did in Earthbound.  A small child asking for a playmate.  But even he cannot keep up the charade anymore, the child in front of you is a robot puppet and after beating him, you encounter the true Porky Minch.  An old, greying husk of a man being kept alive by the machines he clings to so dearly, becoming a prisoner to them in the process.  

He seems to be actively dying as we speak to him, unable to breathe the entire time, but his hatred for humanity and goodness keeps him going.  He talks about the contempt he has for the people of Tazmily, how he found this little island full of the people who ran away from the end of the world living their idyllic little lives, and how he wanted to destroy them.  To Porky, humanity destroying itself is an inevitability, it is what humans do, and so he wanted to do it all over again.  Show these people that they are destined to become the thing they were running away from, and how easy it is to make them become it.  He believes strongly in the idea that the only true point to anything is to have fun, and to Porky, having fun means destroying the lives of those around him.  He sees himself as a god above all, and when the needles are pulled and his soldier, the Masked Man, awakens the Dark Dragon on his behalf, he will make it real, create a world in his image, a world where the only thing that matters is his own fun.

Something I really like about this whole thing is that Porky's long speech about humanity's inevitable self destruction is yet another look into his psyche.  Because the only person this applies to in the entire narrative is himself.  Porky has set up everything in such a way that his own failures from when he was a boy have come back to haunt him.  Much like Mr. Carpainter, the cult leader who recruited Porky to be his right hand when he was just a boy, Porky has relied on the power of lightning to maintain his control.  And just like Carpainter, it is all undone in the end by the party acquiring a Franklin Badge.  And just like Mr. Monotoli, the mayor/businessman of Fourside who recruited Porky as a financial planner, Porky has built a monument to his own greed and populated it with near indestructible robots.  And just like Mr. Monotoli, his plan fails due to the arrival of a blues band who is extremely loyal to the gang.  He even directly caused this one, he arrogantly invited the band, DCMC, to play at his "end of the world party" believing that they were under his thumb and that he could use their music to finish brainwashing the populace, but in Lucas' hour of need, they, along with the few NPCs from Tazmily who never fell for Porky's scheme and the sudden reappearance of Flint, who has been absent from the game since the end of Act I due to looking for Claus, show up to defeat Porky's army of robots.  Porky believes everyone else is prone to self destruction because he is prone to self destruction.

I'd be interested to know for how many people Fassad being the final Magypsy was a huge twist.  Like, I already knew going into it, that was one of the things I did remember from being exposed to Mother 3 so many years ago, but even so I think I would've figured it out pretty quickly.  I mentioned before that after Fassad's rebirth as a cyborg, he is only capable of talking through smooth jazz and that his speech is in a song that sounds familiar.  The song is actually an isolated motif of the Magypsy song, strongly hinting at Fassad's identity as the seventh "traitorous" Magypsy, Locria.  Though an interesting thing about the reveal is meeting Fassad's only friend, a mouse who he cared for and who primarily knew him as Locria.  The mouse is saddened by the idea that Locria is never coming home and puts forward a different perspective on his villainy, that due to his villainous appearance and laugh people assumed the worst of him and eventually he grew cold and mean and cynical about the world, leading to him allying himself with another being who wished to destroy it.

Something I thought of last night while I was playing is that like.  I don't want to besmirch the work Sakurai did for Mother 3 and it's inclusion in Brawl.  It's really great that so much Mother 3 representation got in the series, being the only character in the entire roster who is exclusive to Japan and, at that, being a late GBA game.  A lot of people know about Mother 3 because of Smash and that's great, it's a magical game people should know more about.  But also like, can't help but feel a little bit like Mother 3 got the shaft when compared to its predecessor.

Like, people have criticized Brawl for spoiling the big twist at the end of the game and while I personally think it's fine because, a, I think people really overdo it with the spoiler protecting, like, if being spoiled on something really ruins it for you then either the thing isn't good or the problem is you, but also Mother 3 has so many more interesting things going on in its narrative that knowing Porky is the big bad doesn't even matter in the end, I sympathize with the idea that it's something you would rather experience yourself.  More than that though I feel like the way they use Mother 3 gives off a bad first impression for those who are experiencing the game through Brawl.  Infamously people have gotten the impression that Lucas is just a whiny kid who cries a lot from Smash when you know.  Of course he cries a lot, the game is sad.  New Pork City being the only stage in the entire Smash series to represent Mother 3 is also bound to leave players with a bad taste in their mouth because it's one of the worst stages in Smash history and does a really poor job of conveying Mother 3.  And then like, Lucas' moveset is this weird blend of being more interesting and faithful to the source material, having unique things like his up smash being his signature move, PK Love, and having the rope snake grab, but then at its core it's "Ness but to make it less of a clone he's given a more inaccurate kit".  Like idk, I love that Mother 3 is so prominently in Smash and I love the fanbase is into it enough where Lucas was able to come back as a DLC character in 4, but I also feel like Smash could be doing more to better represent Mother 3.

We're almost there, my next gaming session will be the end.  I'm at the weird point where I'm excited to see it end and don't want it to end.  I've already done the honors of writing in my spreadsheet that Mother 3 is the #1 for this year, because I can't imagine that they'll fail to stick the landing and not end up as my GOTY.  Like I feel different now that I've played this game.  It's the feeling I had two years ago when I played GRIS and last year when I played Okami.  Once a year a game comes along that alters you, I guess, lol.  See y'all on the other side, I'll try to be comprehensive through my tears.

5/28/25 - Porky and the end of the game

Y'all, I'm not okay.  Like, I was emotional the entire final boss fight, I cried through the credits, it was a lot.  I am kind of speechless, honestly, like, I don't know how to quantify the ending of this game and how it effected me, it's just.  Beautiful.  Tragic.  Heartwarming.  Just a teensy bit funny.  It's a lot of emotions.  I'll try my best though, I don't want to, after this long, just go "I don't know what to say, lol".  Here we go.

A nice little bit at the end of the game comes in the form of the final enemies you can encounter.  I don't think I've mentioned this before, but Mother 3 is kind of unique vs. its predecessors in that not only are there overworld sprites for enemies, like in Earthbound, but more or less every overworld sprite is a literal 1:1 interpretation of what the enemy actually is.  In Earthbound they would use sprites that mostly conveyed the enemy in question but as you got later and later into the game the enemies got increasingly abstract until you reach the end game and basically every enemy on the overworld is represented by either a weird ball of light or a metallic diamond.  Mother 3, therefore, does a fun thing where in the final area you encounter these classic Earthbound sprites and expect it to be like a Starman or something, only to then just have it be a weird ball of light or a metallic diamond.  I thought that was cute.

Keeping up with the theme of Porky being self destructive and accidentally recreating the failures of his past mentors, I really enjoy that they have Porky effectively cosplaying Giygas as the penultimate boss of the game.  In a way, it makes sense, Porky has kind of become an unknowable Eldritch being in his own right, the immortal child who is always aging but never growing older.  He even perceives himself as a god, and wishes to make it real when he awakens the Dark Dragon.  But, like with most things regarding Porky, it's just all smoke and mirrors.  Giygas was so ancient and powerful and unknowable that we literally could not grasp the shape or form of his attacks, but with Porky, we're just not sure what he's doing.  And Porky is too much of himself to sell the cosplay regardless, continuing to taunt our protagonists before, during, and after the battle.  When we tell him about the Masked Man's newly discovered identity, he just laughs at the notion that the Masked Man ever had a name to begin with.  As we battle with him, he taunts us about his power, his immortality, the futility of our own quest.  And as we near the end, we understand the truth about Porky: he is just afraid of death.  He has lived for so many years he can no longer count simply out of a fear of dying, a fear so powerful that it eventually leads him to enter a machine that will keep him safe and alive for all eternity.  And in doing so, he will spend eternity alone.

That being said, while I think that Porky's boss fight is compelling from a narrative and thematic perspective, I kind of find it underwhelming as a boss fight?  Compared to some of the other boss fights in the game and the interesting gimmicks and strategies those entailed, Porky just feels so basic.  Like, in my experience, Porky is just not a very aggressive fighter, opting to take turns trying to status opponents or up his shields, I think genuinely I was more in danger of hitting myself than I was from Porky.  I guess it fits his character pretty well that he chooses not to really fight and wall up, but because of this Porky doesn't really feel threatening in any way?  Like he only attacks like once every few turns because of his "stop hitting yourself" strategy and like.  Lucas is such a good healer at this point that even this is nonthreatening, it's legitimately better to just eat the damage using your powerful PSI attacks and then heal on Lucas' turn.  The only thing Porky really has going for him is that he can be a pretty big PP sink because of that and get you that way with some of his late fight panic attacks, like when he hits like 8 times at once, but I didn't really feel in danger, he only really "got me" after the boss fight was already over, if Porky was the final boss I would've felt a bit disappointed, ngl.

Luckily he wasn't!  I guess in a way he was because the actual final boss is more of an interactive cutscene where your goal is to keep yourself alive, but I digress.  As we approach the final needle, we find out that the Masked Man is already there.  Our gang rushes to stop him, only to have lightning come down and hit them, knocking out Kumatora, Duster, and Boney, leaving only Lucas to face him.  If you attempt to revive the party, he will, out of turn order, hit them with another lightning strike to knock them out completely.  It has to be you two.  On the stage of the final needle, the two people who can pull it must battle to see who will get the right to awaken the Dark Dragon, whose wish will be fulfilled.  Lucas' or Porky's.  And Lucas cannot do anything to the Masked Man.  I don't mean that his defenses are high, I don't mean he has loads of buffs and shields and counters up, I mean Lucas physically refuses to attack the Masked Man.  He only can sit there and tank damage, and keep himself alive.

Earlier on, when we first enter the cavern the final needle is contained within, Flint stops Lucas and asks him to let him go on ahead, and if it feels like he's been gone a while, only then to follow him.  There is something Flint must do himself.  After the gang makes the decision to follow Flint, they find him deeper on in the cavern hunched over in pain.  Flint's first move is to confirm a suspicion that the party and, no doubt, the player has had for a long time: the Masked Man is Lucas' lost twin brother, Claus.  Claus, who disappeared three years ago attempting to avenge his mother, has been the mysterious leader of the Pigmask Army this whole time.  He has had his entire sense of identity removed from him, mechanically altered and brainwashed to be Porky's ultimate weapon.  Knowing this, Lucas cannot act, he has lost so much on this journey, he cannot lose his brother again.

And so we must stay alive.  Tank Claus' hits.  Hope that something changes, something happens to end the fighting.  We cannot let Porky win but we cannot let Claus lose.  It's almost kind of a hopeless scenario, as you tank more hits, get closer to death, and Lucas' PP runs lower and lower, it feels like there's nothing that can be done.  Until a voice starts drifting in on the wind.  At first very faint, but gets louder as the battle goes on.  It's Hinawa's voice, Hinawa is calling out to Claus, trying to snap him out of it.

I really enjoy how they use Claus' battle to tell the story of the internal struggle Claus is having with the Masked Man.  When the battle starts, the Masked Man is operating robotically, doing effectively the same pattern of sword slash-beam fire-beam fire-sword slash turn by turn.  At this point, Hinawa's words are unable to reach Claus, he is simply the Masked Man.  But as the words start to stir something inside of Claus, we see the Masked Man get more aggressive.  It's as if the programming is realizing it's starting to slip and wants to end this quickly.  It goes directly for the powerful PK Love Omega, despite Claus' body being unable to handle it, and after a couple casts of that we enter the next phase.  In this one, the Masked Man is still trying to nuke Lucas, but you can sense Claus' resistance growing.  The Masked Man can only muster up PK Love Alpha, the weakest version, and his attacks, while still strong, are gradually doing less and less damage.  This all culminates in an attempt to do one final big attack to end this, PK Love Beta, before the Masked Man reverts to its standard battle programming.  But Hinawa's words are reaching Claus more and more, digging him out of this, and we reach the final phase of the battle.  At this point, the Masked Man is basically poking Lucas.  A sword swipe for 10 HP, a beam attack that grazes him for 9, etc.  And between each hit, Claus more and more comes out of it.  He stumbles and falls and gazes Lucas in the eyes and remembers, remembers who he is.  And at the end of it all, he takes off his helmet, revealing the face nobody has seen in 3 years, and makes the decision to end it.

Hinawa's dialog during this is also truly heartbreaking.  Like, she seems so desperate, calling out to Claus over and over again even though she seems unable to reach him, saying things like "you're Claus, you're our son" and "you aren't Porky's robot, you're Claus".  You honestly have to wonder if she has been calling out this entire time, and only now, as Porky is gone and the two brothers are facing each other one on one, is he starting to hear it.  It gives you a brief moment of hope in the end, that maybe we can save Claus.  But then your heart drops in the end, as she says her final words.  And I quote: "Claus... Claus... Claus... Come to your Mother!  You must be so exhausted, come here Claus."  Claus died three years ago, he died on his quest to avenge his mother, likely killed by the same Mecha Drago that killed Hinawa.  In Porky's endless desire to prove he is above the natural order, that he is a god, he has kept this boy alive artificially for no other reason than to pull the needles.  

I mentioned previously that when you confront Porky with your brother's name, he laughs at the notion that his "monster" might have a name, that it might've once been human.  But Claus is human, and he makes a choice: he chooses to join his mother, using the lightning that Porky gave him to attack Lucas, knowing that it will reflect back and kill him.  And in his last moments, Claus stumbles over to his brother, embraces him, and apologizes for everything.  He is so sorrowful for what he has done, what he was forced to do, and so grateful that he gets to spend his final moments not as a machine, but as Claus.  And as he goes, he expresses one final hope that, someday, the two of them may reunite in the next world, and play together like they used to.  I am crying again just writing about it, y'all, ahhhhhh.

I don't know if this is exactly how the battle is meant to work, but if it's not then I had an amazing coincidence that really deepened my experience.  So, the second time that the Masked Man attempts to use PK Love Omega, Flint comes out of nowhere and jumps in front of it, protecting his son.  He then proceeds to beg Claus to remember who he is, saying that he's been looking for him for so long, before the Masked Man attacks him a second time, causing Flint major damage.  After this point, I decided to eat a turn by attacking Claus because my HP was still pretty high and I didn't want to burn through PP too quickly, since I could probably eat a turn or two before healing, and to my surprise the attack actually went through instead of Lucas being unsure what to do.  I don't know if there's just a chance for an attack to go through or not or if that attack is coded to go through, but I really liked that it happened there, it felt like Lucas had a brief moment where he stopped seeing Claus in the machine and decided the Masked Man must be stopped after almost killing their brother.  And then, after the hit lands, Hinawa interjects telling Lucas he must stop fighting, as it sadly echoes throughout the battle arena.

There's also this really beautiful scene right before Claus truly wakes up and decides to end the battle where we flashback to the twins as infants.  It's a scene creating parity with a similar scene in Earthbound where we flash back to Ness' infancy and his parents talk about what they want for their boy in the future.  In Mother 3 Hinawa and Flint are expressing their joy that they have been blessed with two sons and how they hope they grow up.  They talk about how they want them to be kind, like their parents, and happy and, most importantly, that they hope that they are able to accomplish things together they would not be able to do alone.  It's a beautiful little scene, and it's heartbreaking knowing that, in a few seconds, their promise of "being able to accomplish things together they would not be able to do alone" comes to pass, as Claus frees himself from Porky's control with Lucas' help.  This game is just a little sad, you know.  Just a little.

 

And so, with Claus finally freed from Porky's control, Lucas pulls the final needle.  The Dark Dragon stirs from its slumber, the world thrown into chaos during it.  Tornados ravage the deserts, volcanoes erupt, the structures built on top of the islands sink into the Earth, meteors rain from the heavens destroying many buildings and presumably killing several people.  We pan out to a world on fire, a giant black mass heaving and itself up from the Earth, a creature so large we cannot comprehend its size or its shape.  And with that, the screen fades to black, and up pops the word "End".  Mother 3, as is its want, ends with the world being destroyed, a last bit of tragedy added onto the pile.  It may not be a satisfying ending, but it IS the correct one.

...I'm kidding.  Shortly after the game says "End", you are allowed to walk around in this black screen.  Eventually you run into someone, an NPC from the game also stumbling in the dark.  This continues for a few minutes, you run into various NPCs who all say a little thing about how they survived, how they are feeling about this situation, many of them are sad, many of them are hopeful, etc.  But eventually you run into one that says "Lucas wants to talk to you" and you're like "wait, am I not Lucas".  Very quickly you realize you're you.  The player.  The name you input at the beginning of the game when you went into the church.  All of the NPCs are overjoyed that you, too, survived.  Happy to see you, greeting you as a lost friend.  Congratulating you on your part in saving their world.  It's such a happy scene, I had a big smile on my face the entire time.  The player feeling like part of the journey is one of the hallmarks of the Mother series, but it's never been used this effectively, imo.

  

But, this happiness cannot last.  The NPCs quickly start asking questions.  Yeah, we've saved their world, but what about ours?  And before long, it becomes clear its our time to go.  We have other worlds to save, other challenges ahead of us.  And so the cast of Mother 3 says their goodbyes, thanking us for all we did and hoping that we see them again soon.  And I cried again here because at this point it really did feel like saying goodbye to friends.  I love this cast, I would spend an eternity with them if I could.  But I can't, now, can I?  The true ending of Mother 3 is the acceptance that you cannot keep playing Mother 3 forever.  Sure, you're their hero, but you can't stay being their hero, you need to be your own too.  And so we say goodbye.  But this goodbye doesn't have to be forever.  We belong to Mother now, and Mother belongs to us, and any time we need it, we can come back, talk to a save frog, enjoy a dip in the hot spring, look at the Cattlesnakes and not pet them because this game came out before people understood the importance of petting the animals in video games.  It's bittersweet, and it's powerful, and it's Mother 3.

At this point the credits roll and I am recovering from my tears because man, this game.  I am not okay, not even a little.  Which the credits are a bad time to recover because it's literally a roll call of everyone you met along the journey!  I get emotional over those in games that aren't sad!  Like, if I love the journey, which I obviously have, doing a roll call and/or screengrabs from the game is a surefire way to get me to happy cry.  I tear up at the Earthbound credits song to this day, and I probably will do so with the Mother 3 credits now too.  The moment that REALLY got me, was at the end of the roll call where we see the family of Flint, Boney, Hinawa, Lucas, and Claus together for the first time in the entire story and then Lucas and Claus walk off together into the ending.  Mother 3 is a story of multiple characters and multiple perspectives, and here, at the end, it reminds you that despite what it has seemed like, it is not just Lucas' story.  It was the story of Claus too.

There's so much else I want to talk about too.  The music in the finale, which is all beautifully done.  The battle background of the Masked Man and how it gets more and more distorted as Claus surfaces more and more.  The final save frog, oh my god, the final save frog, I love him.  I could legitimately go on and on about this game forever I feel like, but, I've already taken enough of your time, if you've even read this far.  And there is still one last thing I feel we need to address before we finish this one out, it's something that has dominated my playthrough even though I wish it hadn't and I feel like this won't be finished until I ask one last question: do I like Mother 3 more than Earthbound?

Get Dungeon Man'd Again

The short answer is no.  The long answer is that I think for the most part I like them the same.  Some days I might say yes, even, I do like Mother 3 more than Earthbound, there's a lot of reason to.  Mother 3 is more thematically compelling, more narratively interesting.  Its well written, tight, and well executed and I adore it to death.  There are so many reasons why I think Mother 3 is a better game than Earthbound, and I hope across this I've done a good job of communicating why that is.  But Mother 3, as brilliant of a piece of art as it is, I feel fails at the most important thing Earthbound succeeds at: the vibe.  Earthbound feels so special, from its music, to its visuals, to its story structure, it's just weird and quirky and unique in a way that, despite people's best efforts, cannot truly be replicated.  And I feel like Mother 3 misses that thing that makes Earthbound so uniquely beautiful, and it's a thing I feel makes me ultimately like Earthbound more.  It's like, Earthbound is a story you invent as a child, you know.  It's the kind of adventure a child with a lot of imagination comes up with on the playground, it's something pure, and innocent, and may not make the most sense but it's so distinctly it's own.  Mother 3 is the book you really loved as a kid to grow up and find out that it's even better than you thought it was your entire lifetime.  The latter may be a better work of art, all told, but the former is something magical.

I apologize for this.  I deeply do, and I didn't expect to keep you hear for this long.  The bell rang, I should've dismissed you.  Seriously, if you read all this, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.  Mother 3 has very quickly came to mean a lot to me in a short time and I couldn't stop myself from talking about it in too much depth.  I have a lot of anxiety about this blog, you know, like, I've historically had considerable trouble upkeeping anything.  There are podcasts that got to a couple episodes and stopped, a Discord community that has an entire channel devoted to my writings that I've abandoned, another blog where I did a similar thing to what I'm doing here that I got overwhelmed with and abandoned.  But whether or not this goes on for years or days, I'm glad at least that I was here to document myself playing Mother 3.  I don't know if/when I'll see y'all again, I doubt I'm going to have ANYTHING to say about Dead Rising, but hopefully I do, y'know.  Thank you for your time.