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.
( Mild griping behind cut )
So, with
allmost 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.)
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