- Rating so far
- ★★ out of ★★.
2006–5−14 “Heartrending, strange, and funny.”
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.
2006–4−18 “Mother 3 hype.”
My level of Japanese ability is a deeply held secret, even from myself.
People ask me sometimes, “Have you take a Japanese Language Proficiency test?” No. “Why not? You’re fluent, right?”
I dunno. I really, really don’t know. I guess I’m afraid to find out that I don’t actually speak Japanese at all.
The other day, a coworker said, “[Boy, I’ve lost some weight, eh?]”
Only Japanese doesn’t bother to use pronouns where it doesn’t need to, so it was more like, “[Boy, lost some weight, eh?]”
So, I figured she was talking about me not herself, and I brushed it off, as one should with compliments. Then I had to play it off when she said more, and it became clearer that she was talking about herself. Not agreeing with someone’s self-reported weight loss? Man, that’s gotta be impolite. This made me wonder, “Is this even an allowed topic in English? You can say, ‘You’ve lost some weight,’ but can you say, ‘I’ve lost some weight?’ That’s impolite, right? Isn’t it that you’re only allowed to say, ‘I gained some weight,’ not the reverse?”
The Japanese, of course, have no beef with point out people’s body sizes, though such a thing is considered quite impolite in English. This has put me in the middle of untranslatable conversations before.
Recently, I’ve been reading things like blogs by MoOog Yamamoto and Miho Hatori, but then I wonder, am I really reading these or is it all the work of my drag and drop dictionary software?
My favorite TV show right now is the Chinese conversation class on the publicly funded channel. I liked the premises of the first two seasons I saw — a Chinese girl is a nurse talking to a giant toy Giant Panda about Chinese grammar; the same Chinese girl is now in a bar and being hit on by a Japanese guy, who then has to run off to learn what she just said — but I haven’t been digging on this season’s theme — a business dude works at a magazine in China, but doesn’t know Chinese until his coworkers teach him. My favorite part of the show is how I can’t understand any of the Chinese, but I understand all of the Japanese without even thinking about it. I love when the Chinese word for something is unpronounceable, but the Japanese word for the same thing is something obviously stolen from English like, “passuporto.” Times like that make me glad I learned Japanese.
The other day, I was thinking, “it’s all translation.” All interpretations of anything are translations. If two people communicate, the interpretations that go into their heads as a result are translations of their partner’s words. Some interpretations are wrong, and some are better, but none is perfect. The reason is, no two people have the same brains, so no two people have the mappings of ideas inside of them, which is to say no two people have the exact same language in the strictest sense. So all ideas have to be mapped from one brain to another, which means translation. However, as we all know, perfect translation is necessarily impossible. A translation can be good or bad, adequate or inadequate, but the only perfect translation of all the possible nuances in a text is the original text itself.
So, MOTHER 3 is dropping the day after tomorrow, and I’m reading the hype online. Every week, they put up great teasers for the game, like:
こもちカンガルーザメ
おやの パワーのみなもとは
こどもからの おうえんだ。
てきながら あっぱれの
ちょっと いいはなし。
Joey-holding Sharkaroo
The source of the mother’s power
is the encouragement of the joey.
While they are monsters,
this is still a pretty admirable story.
Then for the last promotional item, they added this handwritten note from the creator of the series:
I read it, as well as I can, which is to say, who knows how well, then I looked at one of the English language fansites hyping the game and they had a link to some translation that said the creator wanted the game to be released to the world, but for now, just the Japanese version would drop. And I was like, huh? I don’t remember it saying anything like that. I worried for a moment, but sure enough, I was right. A few hours later, the site posted a translation that basically synchs up with my memory:
MOTHER 3 is a playground with plenty of room for your imagination to run free. The more you think about it, the greater MOTHER 3 will become. The more you feel it, the deeper it’ll become. The more fun you have, the more you’ll grow.
April 2006
→Shigesato Itoi
This is basically what it looked like in my head before.
I’m really encouraged by his message. He’s saying that the more you think about MOTHER 3, the deeper it becomes inside of you. This was really true of his last game. In the end of that, he had you literally praying for your characters to win a fight. I think the same process happens when I translate some texts. The thing about “the Joey-holding Sharkaroo admirably drawing strength from its child” really touches me in a way, but I think that the reason it does is because I had to put effort into understanding what was being said at all. This gets back to a basic truth of videogames in general: the harder the game is, the more rewarding it feels to beat it honestly.
So, here’s hoping that the text of MOTHER 3 will be the perfect blend of difficult but beatable and in so doing draw me into it. I’ll let y’all know. Expect reviews someday.