kane_magus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kane_magus) wrote2023-08-25 01:41 am
kane_magus) wrote2023-08-25 01:41 am
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Mother 3
It only took me... ...hmm, let's see... the fan translation was finished in October of 2008, so... two months shy of fifteen whole ass years to finally complete a full playthrough of Mother 3.
Some mild griping, first.
I'm pretty sure what made the difference this time was that I was able to do that damn "sound battle" combo shit way more easily on this playthrough. I'm not sure whether that was due to playing it in RetroArch this time, rather than whatever crap GBA emulator I was trying to use before, or if it was because I used a hacked rom that did something different with the audio mixing than the basic rom did, or if it was some combination of those two things. Either way, this time through, I was able to pretty regularly get anywhere from 5 to 10 or even the max of 16 hits in on the combos (depending on which battle music was playing, of course, as some are way harder to get combos on than others, since you still have to actually match the beat of the music, and some of the battle tracks have... rather off-kilter beats at times), whereas every time I tried to play it before before, I was doing really well to get more than 3 or 4 at most, regardless of what music was playing. While the game itself says that you don't have to use the combo system to get through the game, and I guess it's technically true that you're not forced to do so, it's... kind of almost required, actually? Because if you managed to get the full 16 hit combo (per party member), that usually ends with you doing something like 2 to 3 times more damage (per party member) than you would have with just single, normal hits. That's often the difference between finishing off a group of enemies in a single turn before they even get to act, and eating two or three turns of relatively high damage attacks. If you wanted to do the same amount of damage with just the regular, non-combo hits, you'd have to do some pretty heavy grinding to get that strong. In any case, it was far less frustrating to play this time, and so... I actually managed to beat it this time. Yay. I didn't even really feel the need to do all that much grinding, at least not until a certain point late in the game.
So, speaking of grinding, the only time I did some of that in this playthrough was when I made it to Tanetane Island and the Barrier Trio boss. At that time, I was at level 44, and Lucas didn't even have the ability to cast PSI Shield on the whole party at once yet (which, as it turned out, he got at level 45, though I didn't know that at the time), which pretty much meant the fight was... maybe not unwinnable, but nearly so. I looked up online the best place to grind, and there's a rarely appearing enemy in the forest just north of Tazmily Village that gives a whopping 16,080xp when you beat it, and if you go to the Chimera Lab first and buy a bunch of "Enemy Bufferizer" items, you can double that to 32,160xp per fight, which is more than even most bosses give. It took me maybe an hour or so (including the time to trudge back to Tazmily through the ocean from Tanetane again [urgh] and to go to the Chimera Lab and buy up something like 10 or so of those Bufferizers [basically cleaned out Boney's inventory except for his equipment and then filled it with those]) to get the whole party from the level 44 range to above level 60, at which point Lucas and Kumatora had all of their PSI abilities unlocked. After that, the rest of the game, including the Barrier Trio boss, was at least manageable, if not necessarily easy.
I'm pretty sure making it to Tanetane Island was the farthest I ever got in any of my previous playthrough attempts.
So, withallmost of the griping out of the way... Mother 3 is pretty great. That said... I still think I like EarthBound/Mother 2 better overall, though. For Mother 3 the "main quest" (i.e. to find the Dark Dragon needles) doesn't even start until Chapter 7. That would be like if, in EarthBound, the quest to find the eight "Your Sanctuary" locations didn't start until after you got to, like, Summers or Scaraba or something. The first chapter is very heavy and dark, what with certain characters dying or going missing or having violent nervous breakdowns. And then... chapters 2-6 almost feel like... ...filler, in a way? Especially in retrospect? I mean, not really, but still. They do introduce or further flesh out the other party members (Duster, Kumatora, and Salsa [though Salsa ended up playing far less of a role than I would have expected, after his chapter as the main protagonist]), and they also show the overall progression (or regression) of what happens to Tazmily Village over the course of the game, but honestly, it seemed like "most" of the game took place in chapter 7, at least to me. Or maybe split between chapter 7 and chapter 8.
And then, chapter 8, the only part of the game that I had never seen before. New Pork City. This is where most of the direct Mother 1 and EarthBound references live, aside from a few in earlier chapters (like the room with the "Friend's Yo-Yo" in chapter 5 or when Ionia asks if you want to rest near the end of chapter 7). And of course, chapter 8 is where the identity of "King P" is finally revealed (assuming you didn't play Super Smash Bros. Brawl or read stuff on the Internet and have it completely spoiled for you, like I did).
I think my biggest "complaint" about Mother 3 (well, I mean, aside from the gripes above) would be that the story simultaneously tries to be both super serious (i.e. the events of chapter 1 and how that affects the entire rest of the game, and all the animal abuse in chapter 3, and just the overall tone of what happens to Tazmily Village as a whole) but also tried to retain the super silliness and whimsy of the previous games (like, sometimes you just find present boxes that, when you open them, do absolutely nothing at all other than play a fart noise, as one example... or one villain being injured at one point and later on only being able to communicate via trumpets inserted into their nose and thus needing an interpreter... or, you know, just everything about the Magypsies in general, for another example). Serious mood whiplash at times.
Another, milder "complaint" is that, unlike Mother 1 and EarthBound, which are world spanning adventures, Mother 3 mostly takes place in the same relatively small(-ish) area, and you do a fair bit of backtracking. Sure, there are some set piece areas that you go to as one-offs, like the Thunder Tower or the Chimera Lab or Tanetane Island, but most of the game takes place in and around Tazmily Village. Now, granted, Tazmily Village itself changes pretty drastically from the start of the game to the end (and becomes unavailable entirely once you go to New Pork City), so it's not nearly as bad as it could've been.
Things that Mother 3 does better than the previous games...
I think the party members are way more fleshed out as individual characters in Mother 3 than they were in the previous games, though. In the previous games, once they joined the party proper, the PCs almost seemed to cease existing as individual people, in a way. Like, say, Ness never really received much more characterization than "the chosen one from a small town," Paula was "the token girl who was good at magic and had a penchant for getting kidnapped," Jeff was "the nerd who invents stuff" and Poo was "the Asian martial arts kid." It was even worse for Ninten, Ana, Lloyd, and Teddy in Mother 1. The playable characters in Mother 3 get way more chances to actually do stuff, though, besides just "being in the party."
Also, because most of the NPCs are named characters who live in Tazmily village, and you see most of them fairly often through the course of the game, they also get lots more chances to be developed than most typical NPCs in Mother 1 or EarthBound (or any other RPG, for that matter) do. Even so, outside of a few like Wess or Alec who played more prominent roles, I was still finding it difficult at times to remember who any given character was or what their deal was. Not helping things was when the randos just called "Guy" or "Woman" or "Old Man" or whatever started showing up later on, either.
As for the villains... there was Fassad and the Masked Man and, eventually, King P himself (and, I guess, maybe that one Pork Trooper who really liked DCMC that you fight twice?), but aside from those, most of the rest of the bosses were just one-offs and mostly forgettable. Unless they were That One Boss, like the fucking Barrier Trio. But even then, the Barrier Trio were just... statues. There was nothing particularly special about them as characters or anything. And maybe the Ultimate Chimera, but that was more an instant game over condition than a boss, because you don't even go into a battle screen if you encounter it. You just die immediately.
All in all, I would say that Mother 3 is... mostly stand alone and could be played without having any knowledge of the previous two games. That said, there are definitely more than a few callbacks to both of the first two games that would be lost on a player who has never played them. Like, I'll just straight spoil a couple (though not where they take place in the game). There's a long hallway that seems to exist for no other reason than because the Mother 3 rendition of the Mother 1 title screen theme plays in it... and then the very next room after that (one of the best rooms in the entire game, if you've played EarthBound) plays the Mother 3 version of "Pollyanna (I Believe In You)", aka the first overworld theme from Mother 1 (and Ness's house in EarthBound). Also, at another point when you're just semi-randomly wandering around during chapter 7 looking for Needles, at one point, when you least expect it, all of a sudden, "Snowman" starts playing (here, for reference). In any case, the previous two games are great, so I'd recommend playing them before playing Mother 3, because it will enhance a playthrough of Mother 3 to, at the very least, catch all those refs.
I think that now that I am done with Mother 3, I will go back and replay Mother 1 for like the third or fourth time (because, this time, I did not do a full playthrough of both Mother 1 and EarthBound before attempting Mother 3 again... I just did another full playthrough of EarthBound alone, first). And then, maybe after that, I might give Cognitive Dissonance another try as well, as I've never finished that one yet, either.
(Post started at... *checks timestamp* ...1:41am. Post actually posted at 4:41am, exactly 3 hours later.)
Some mild griping, first.
I'm pretty sure what made the difference this time was that I was able to do that damn "sound battle" combo shit way more easily on this playthrough. I'm not sure whether that was due to playing it in RetroArch this time, rather than whatever crap GBA emulator I was trying to use before, or if it was because I used a hacked rom that did something different with the audio mixing than the basic rom did, or if it was some combination of those two things. Either way, this time through, I was able to pretty regularly get anywhere from 5 to 10 or even the max of 16 hits in on the combos (depending on which battle music was playing, of course, as some are way harder to get combos on than others, since you still have to actually match the beat of the music, and some of the battle tracks have... rather off-kilter beats at times), whereas every time I tried to play it before before, I was doing really well to get more than 3 or 4 at most, regardless of what music was playing. While the game itself says that you don't have to use the combo system to get through the game, and I guess it's technically true that you're not forced to do so, it's... kind of almost required, actually? Because if you managed to get the full 16 hit combo (per party member), that usually ends with you doing something like 2 to 3 times more damage (per party member) than you would have with just single, normal hits. That's often the difference between finishing off a group of enemies in a single turn before they even get to act, and eating two or three turns of relatively high damage attacks. If you wanted to do the same amount of damage with just the regular, non-combo hits, you'd have to do some pretty heavy grinding to get that strong. In any case, it was far less frustrating to play this time, and so... I actually managed to beat it this time. Yay. I didn't even really feel the need to do all that much grinding, at least not until a certain point late in the game.
So, speaking of grinding, the only time I did some of that in this playthrough was when I made it to Tanetane Island and the Barrier Trio boss. At that time, I was at level 44, and Lucas didn't even have the ability to cast PSI Shield on the whole party at once yet (which, as it turned out, he got at level 45, though I didn't know that at the time), which pretty much meant the fight was... maybe not unwinnable, but nearly so. I looked up online the best place to grind, and there's a rarely appearing enemy in the forest just north of Tazmily Village that gives a whopping 16,080xp when you beat it, and if you go to the Chimera Lab first and buy a bunch of "Enemy Bufferizer" items, you can double that to 32,160xp per fight, which is more than even most bosses give. It took me maybe an hour or so (including the time to trudge back to Tazmily through the ocean from Tanetane again [urgh] and to go to the Chimera Lab and buy up something like 10 or so of those Bufferizers [basically cleaned out Boney's inventory except for his equipment and then filled it with those]) to get the whole party from the level 44 range to above level 60, at which point Lucas and Kumatora had all of their PSI abilities unlocked. After that, the rest of the game, including the Barrier Trio boss, was at least manageable, if not necessarily easy.
I'm pretty sure making it to Tanetane Island was the farthest I ever got in any of my previous playthrough attempts.
So, with
And then, chapter 8, the only part of the game that I had never seen before. New Pork City. This is where most of the direct Mother 1 and EarthBound references live, aside from a few in earlier chapters (like the room with the "Friend's Yo-Yo" in chapter 5 or when Ionia asks if you want to rest near the end of chapter 7). And of course, chapter 8 is where the identity of "King P" is finally revealed (assuming you didn't play Super Smash Bros. Brawl or read stuff on the Internet and have it completely spoiled for you, like I did).
I think my biggest "complaint" about Mother 3 (well, I mean, aside from the gripes above) would be that the story simultaneously tries to be both super serious (i.e. the events of chapter 1 and how that affects the entire rest of the game, and all the animal abuse in chapter 3, and just the overall tone of what happens to Tazmily Village as a whole) but also tried to retain the super silliness and whimsy of the previous games (like, sometimes you just find present boxes that, when you open them, do absolutely nothing at all other than play a fart noise, as one example... or one villain being injured at one point and later on only being able to communicate via trumpets inserted into their nose and thus needing an interpreter... or, you know, just everything about the Magypsies in general, for another example). Serious mood whiplash at times.
Another, milder "complaint" is that, unlike Mother 1 and EarthBound, which are world spanning adventures, Mother 3 mostly takes place in the same relatively small(-ish) area, and you do a fair bit of backtracking. Sure, there are some set piece areas that you go to as one-offs, like the Thunder Tower or the Chimera Lab or Tanetane Island, but most of the game takes place in and around Tazmily Village. Now, granted, Tazmily Village itself changes pretty drastically from the start of the game to the end (and becomes unavailable entirely once you go to New Pork City), so it's not nearly as bad as it could've been.
Things that Mother 3 does better than the previous games...
I think the party members are way more fleshed out as individual characters in Mother 3 than they were in the previous games, though. In the previous games, once they joined the party proper, the PCs almost seemed to cease existing as individual people, in a way. Like, say, Ness never really received much more characterization than "the chosen one from a small town," Paula was "the token girl who was good at magic and had a penchant for getting kidnapped," Jeff was "the nerd who invents stuff" and Poo was "the Asian martial arts kid." It was even worse for Ninten, Ana, Lloyd, and Teddy in Mother 1. The playable characters in Mother 3 get way more chances to actually do stuff, though, besides just "being in the party."
Also, because most of the NPCs are named characters who live in Tazmily village, and you see most of them fairly often through the course of the game, they also get lots more chances to be developed than most typical NPCs in Mother 1 or EarthBound (or any other RPG, for that matter) do. Even so, outside of a few like Wess or Alec who played more prominent roles, I was still finding it difficult at times to remember who any given character was or what their deal was. Not helping things was when the randos just called "Guy" or "Woman" or "Old Man" or whatever started showing up later on, either.
As for the villains... there was Fassad and the Masked Man and, eventually, King P himself (and, I guess, maybe that one Pork Trooper who really liked DCMC that you fight twice?), but aside from those, most of the rest of the bosses were just one-offs and mostly forgettable. Unless they were That One Boss, like the fucking Barrier Trio. But even then, the Barrier Trio were just... statues. There was nothing particularly special about them as characters or anything. And maybe the Ultimate Chimera, but that was more an instant game over condition than a boss, because you don't even go into a battle screen if you encounter it. You just die immediately.
All in all, I would say that Mother 3 is... mostly stand alone and could be played without having any knowledge of the previous two games. That said, there are definitely more than a few callbacks to both of the first two games that would be lost on a player who has never played them. Like, I'll just straight spoil a couple (though not where they take place in the game). There's a long hallway that seems to exist for no other reason than because the Mother 3 rendition of the Mother 1 title screen theme plays in it... and then the very next room after that (one of the best rooms in the entire game, if you've played EarthBound) plays the Mother 3 version of "Pollyanna (I Believe In You)", aka the first overworld theme from Mother 1 (and Ness's house in EarthBound). Also, at another point when you're just semi-randomly wandering around during chapter 7 looking for Needles, at one point, when you least expect it, all of a sudden, "Snowman" starts playing (here, for reference). In any case, the previous two games are great, so I'd recommend playing them before playing Mother 3, because it will enhance a playthrough of Mother 3 to, at the very least, catch all those refs.
I think that now that I am done with Mother 3, I will go back and replay Mother 1 for like the third or fourth time (because, this time, I did not do a full playthrough of both Mother 1 and EarthBound before attempting Mother 3 again... I just did another full playthrough of EarthBound alone, first). And then, maybe after that, I might give Cognitive Dissonance another try as well, as I've never finished that one yet, either.
(Post started at... *checks timestamp* ...1:41am. Post actually posted at 4:41am, exactly 3 hours later.)