"Heartrending, strange, and funny."
by earthbound kid on 2006年05月13日 04:41 PM
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Mother 3’s tag line is “Strange, funny, and heartrending.”
These words are in the wrong order. The first chapter is completely heartrending. Its title is “The Night of the Funeral.” Nintendo released some commercials for Mother 3 in Japan. In the first three, a girl tries to talk about the game, but ends up sobbing.
It’s true, that chapter gets under your skin. Something about it found my lying in bed, thinking, “if later chapters don’t involve one of a.) the resurrection of the dead b.) time travel or c.) zombies, I’m-a be deeply dissatisfied.”
Strange and funny reveal themselves more slowly as the game develops. I’m twenty six hours of play time into the game now. I’ve collected 6 out of 7 in a collection of things, so I reckon once I get the last one, the story will gear up for the eventual denouement. I think a fully literate person would have finished the game after putting this many hours, but I’m taking my time with text. I’ve only used an online guide to figure out two parts. One was a puzzle didn’t figure out because none of Japanese-English dictionaries have the translation of “wall staple” in them. The other was my own impatience causing me to give up on a minor puzzle. Still, the game’s pretty straight forward.
The game is in the Mother series, one is right to expected a fair number of quirky things, like the wall staples and a rope snake to cross chasms, but the text in Mother 3 isn’t as jokey as EarthBound. Instead, it seems that the series designer Itoi has found himself a story, and he aims to tell it. In a series of interviews on his website, he talks about how when he first started making Mother 3 a decade ago, he wanted it to be cinematic, and he wanted it to have a sense of place. As such, instead of bopping around from town to town, you spend more time crossing the environs surrounding a central town, all contained on “the Nowhere Islands.” EarthBound is a great game, but it’s true that it’s not much as a story. It’s more like a collection of short stories by a single author. There are a lot of repeating themes, and it does fit together if you look at it askew, but it’s not really a story. It’s a game. Mother 3 is a story. Like the rope snake mentioned. In EarthBound, something like it would be a throwaway gag or at best brought back later for a second chuckle, but the rope snake actually becomes a character later in the story. I found myself compelled by its personality, though it was given only the barest chances to express itself.
Itoi said that when he was making the original version of Mother 3, it was planned to use the hard drive expansion for the 64, so he could make it store all kinds of details about the town. He wanted to make it almost like an RPG prototype of Animal Crossing, which was also designed for the same hard drive and graphics. In the end though, since he wasn’t able to limit his vision, he kept adding more and more to what he wanted Mother 3 to be, so they eventually just cancelled the 64 project all together. Three years ago, he took a cab ride with Iwata and Miyamoto, and it was decided to revive the game on the Game Boy Advance. Based on compared screenshots, the new Mother 3 definitely owes a debt to the old one in terms of plot and characters. However, it’s also the case that he had to give up some of the Animal Crossing-esque features of the town. There is still a much better sense of the town as a functioning place.
So, the game isn’t EarthBound.The story is divide into chapters, during which you take the role of different characters in order to advance a real plot. In his interview, Itoi talks a lot about trying to figure out how much of the game belongs to him and how much of it belongs to his fans. How much is the game about making money and how much is about making art. Those questions are unresolvable, of course, but he does a decent job of mentioning the nuances around it. Don’t get me wrong, there are still a long list of needlessly weird and fun things, like talking to frogs to save or battling dung beetles or getting advice from the sparrows or the transvestite psychics, but on the whole, things exist to propel a vision. In making something new, the Charybdis being too different and weird, and the Scylla is being boring and the same. He steers between the two pretty well. A lot of standbys from the old game don’t seem to have made it into this one, and I haven’t battle any hippies or rednecks so far. I haven’t seen a hint man or had my picture taken. So near as I can tell, all of the food is to be eaten without condiments. In fact, I haven’t even used a phone, which was pretty much the defining theme of the earlier games. However, there are still a lot of elements from the old game, and while I can’t say for certain yet, there’s a hint that the plots might turn out to be connected. Or maybe not, but at the very least, it’s as connected to the old game as any two of the fantasies final.
In terms of the hardware mechanics of the game, the graphics are slightly better than EarthBound, in that it’s still 16-bit sprites, but there are more custom animation and such. Apparently, the creature designer for this game also works on Pokémon. His monsters look good. The viewing area narrows into a letterbox widescreen during the cut scenes, and whenever you talk to anyone, it labels their dialogue with a name (though a few characters get stuck with ‘man’ or ‘young girl,’ and whatnot). All in all, the game is delight to look at, and the mechanics are clean and fun.
The music is a half full glass. While the songs are fun and numerous, and there’s a special music player feature available at the main menu so that you can just play the song from the inevitable rock concert whenever you feel like it without having to make a special save point before the concert so you can go in again later (like I did in EarthBound), even still since the Game Boy Advance doesn’t have as powerful of sound processing software, things don’t sound quite as nice as EarthBound from a purely technical point of view. Given the hardware limitations, it’s better than it’s fair to expect. It would be nice though if he’d put out a CD with fleshed out versions of everything.
Like its predecessors, the game’s battle system is a tweaked version of Dragon Quest, but the tweaks make it really fun. Essentially, you can double the number of damage points you give to an enemy by using the “sound battle” system, which means hitting A in rhythm to the music. After you read about your character’s attack, you can potential get up to 16 weaker bonus hits on an enemy by pushing the button to the beat, and the various enemies use different musical themes to make it more interesting. Of course, like EarthBound, the game uses a rolling HP counter, if you spend too much time getting sound battle points after an enemy attack, you risk having your health drop lower than necessary, which adds a strategic decision to either make hits fast and use several turns or to make a powerful but slow hit during a single turn. The whole sound battle idea is apparently just a trick by Itoi to make people listen to the music in the game more closely. (As are the special presents with… Ah wait, I shouldn’t spoil that.) I think it’s a clever trick that makes the grinding a lot more fun, and the music is really nice so it works out well. I’ve never considered myself an RPG fan, so in the old games, I would always just Auto battle my way through to the end. With this game, the Auto function has been taken out, but I don’t mind at all. In a pinch though, you can just hold down A and not let go, and if your opponent is weak enough, you may win. There’s no auto health up feature though, so it’s up to you to negotiate those menus as fast as possible after one of your character’s receives a fatal blow.
So, no, it’s not EarthBound, and nothing could be, but if you can read Japanese at least sort of and you own a Game Boy Advance compatible device, you owe it to yourself to buy this game. My rating is ★★ out of ★★, though this is pending the end of the game. I swear to holy goodness, if they don’t unbreak my heart, I’m-a sob and sob and write Itoi a really nasty letter.