A game I played the English patch of nearly a decade ago, it was high time I return to Mother 3 to see what the original Japanese was like. Mother 3 not only held up in my memory as a game definitively better than Mother 2 (Earthbound) in every way, but also it exceeded those expectations and is a really wonderful piece of storytelling with some really clever design both narratively and mechanically. It took me around 27 hours, and I played on the Wii U Virtual Console (the game is very pretty on a TV <3 ).
First off, the mechanics of this game aren't THAT different from Earthbound, but they move the bar just enough to take it beyond the "Dragon Quest clone with a slowly raising/lowering health gimmick" status that Earthbound largely occupies. Mother 3 introduces a "heartbeat" system that allows the player to combo basic attacks by tapping the A Button repeatedly in time with the music, almost in a "Earthbound meets Rhythm Heaven" kind of way. This doesn't seem like much, but it has a fairly ingenious way of working together with the slowly raising/lowering health gimmick. Where previously spells whose animation were the most dangerous threat to how quickly you could potentially heal a dying party member, now the player can actively CHOOSE to continue a combo or stop it prematurely to try and rush down an enemy or save that teammate before they bleed out.
This system has some problems, the largest being that it's entirely up to the player's intuition on what beats of the background music the combo can be executed and some are VERY unintuitive and difficult to figure out. Given that the game seems largely balanced around the player having some skill at this system (granted I beat the game as a kid never using it, so it's not impossible to do), this can make certain boss fights or even normal enemies FAR more difficult than surrounding enemies or successive bosses that just happen to have a background track easier to time the beats to. Faults aside, the heartbeat system makes combat far more engaging, and really encourages the player to get into the fantastic musical score of the game, which has to be one of the best on the GBA (which you'd hope for a game that came out 2 years after the DS did).
Speaking of the music, this game has some incredible presentation. Cutscenes are blocked with care, and some of the most important (especially one near the end of chapter 1) are some of the most impressive conveyance of emotion and atmosphere that I've seen in a 2D game with no voice acting. Similarly, this game brings back a lot of visual motifs and music from the other two Mother games (mostly Earthbound), and while sometimes it certainly feels like it's there just for familiarity's sake (like the cave theme), other times it is used in a fiendishly clever way to convey the atmosphere of a scene (like the introduction to chapter 4). The Tazmily theme is also used in a variety of ways throughout the game to convey different meanings, and the game overall uses the theme of the "uncanny" to great effect.
I will be posting another blog post in the future entirely dedicated to narrative analysis of Mother 3, so I will keep comment on the story here brief. Mother 3 has a very well crafted story. The main characters actually feel like characters, and even Lucas' characterization, while brief, feels meaningful to the plot. However, it is not without its missteps. Aside from naming and presentation decisions for the "Magypsies" done in impressively poor taste, Mother 3 was originally going to be a much longer N64 game, and it shows. The game's last half disrupts much of the pacing and vignette style of the first half in favor of rapid fire globe trotting that doesn't add much to the characters. This leads to many major themes' presences getting very confused and tangled up among new minor themes, and an overall feeling that there was originally more to this story. That said, what is there is a damn good story for an RPG that tackles some quite dark themes with good taste, and even the Magypsies are actually treated quite well as characters within the narrative (their main problematic elements coming from their contextualization within the narrative, and not so much from their treatment within it).
EDIT: I totally forgot to mention about the game's difficulty. While the game certainly seems balanced around the heartbeat combos being used well, if you do use them, the whole game has a really well done difficulty curve. The difficulty never felt outright unfair or just rushing through enemies to kill them before my health ticked down like so much of the last of Earthbound is. It's a pretty hard game, but it rarely feels outright unfair. There are a couple proper horrible enemies and one not very well explained boss fight, but the game on the whole is consistently challenging in a way that feels fair, fun, and engaging.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Mother 3 is a truly impressive sequel. It manages to not only improve on the groundwork laid by its predecessor but also add in so much on top of that it could be its own franchise on top of that. It is a damn shame that this game never got officially localized, and I cannot recommend the English fan translation enough for those of you who love Earthbound (or JRPGs at all) and are willing to go through downloading a GBA emulator and installing the translation patch.
First off, the mechanics of this game aren't THAT different from Earthbound, but they move the bar just enough to take it beyond the "Dragon Quest clone with a slowly raising/lowering health gimmick" status that Earthbound largely occupies. Mother 3 introduces a "heartbeat" system that allows the player to combo basic attacks by tapping the A Button repeatedly in time with the music, almost in a "Earthbound meets Rhythm Heaven" kind of way. This doesn't seem like much, but it has a fairly ingenious way of working together with the slowly raising/lowering health gimmick. Where previously spells whose animation were the most dangerous threat to how quickly you could potentially heal a dying party member, now the player can actively CHOOSE to continue a combo or stop it prematurely to try and rush down an enemy or save that teammate before they bleed out.
This system has some problems, the largest being that it's entirely up to the player's intuition on what beats of the background music the combo can be executed and some are VERY unintuitive and difficult to figure out. Given that the game seems largely balanced around the player having some skill at this system (granted I beat the game as a kid never using it, so it's not impossible to do), this can make certain boss fights or even normal enemies FAR more difficult than surrounding enemies or successive bosses that just happen to have a background track easier to time the beats to. Faults aside, the heartbeat system makes combat far more engaging, and really encourages the player to get into the fantastic musical score of the game, which has to be one of the best on the GBA (which you'd hope for a game that came out 2 years after the DS did).
Speaking of the music, this game has some incredible presentation. Cutscenes are blocked with care, and some of the most important (especially one near the end of chapter 1) are some of the most impressive conveyance of emotion and atmosphere that I've seen in a 2D game with no voice acting. Similarly, this game brings back a lot of visual motifs and music from the other two Mother games (mostly Earthbound), and while sometimes it certainly feels like it's there just for familiarity's sake (like the cave theme), other times it is used in a fiendishly clever way to convey the atmosphere of a scene (like the introduction to chapter 4). The Tazmily theme is also used in a variety of ways throughout the game to convey different meanings, and the game overall uses the theme of the "uncanny" to great effect.
I will be posting another blog post in the future entirely dedicated to narrative analysis of Mother 3, so I will keep comment on the story here brief. Mother 3 has a very well crafted story. The main characters actually feel like characters, and even Lucas' characterization, while brief, feels meaningful to the plot. However, it is not without its missteps. Aside from naming and presentation decisions for the "Magypsies" done in impressively poor taste, Mother 3 was originally going to be a much longer N64 game, and it shows. The game's last half disrupts much of the pacing and vignette style of the first half in favor of rapid fire globe trotting that doesn't add much to the characters. This leads to many major themes' presences getting very confused and tangled up among new minor themes, and an overall feeling that there was originally more to this story. That said, what is there is a damn good story for an RPG that tackles some quite dark themes with good taste, and even the Magypsies are actually treated quite well as characters within the narrative (their main problematic elements coming from their contextualization within the narrative, and not so much from their treatment within it).
EDIT: I totally forgot to mention about the game's difficulty. While the game certainly seems balanced around the heartbeat combos being used well, if you do use them, the whole game has a really well done difficulty curve. The difficulty never felt outright unfair or just rushing through enemies to kill them before my health ticked down like so much of the last of Earthbound is. It's a pretty hard game, but it rarely feels outright unfair. There are a couple proper horrible enemies and one not very well explained boss fight, but the game on the whole is consistently challenging in a way that feels fair, fun, and engaging.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Mother 3 is a truly impressive sequel. It manages to not only improve on the groundwork laid by its predecessor but also add in so much on top of that it could be its own franchise on top of that. It is a damn shame that this game never got officially localized, and I cannot recommend the English fan translation enough for those of you who love Earthbound (or JRPGs at all) and are willing to go through downloading a GBA emulator and installing the translation patch.