LogFAQs > #951195729

#12. Mother 3 (GBA, 2006)



Like many other people, I didn't play Earthbound when it first came out, but many years later. I finally played it around 2005-ish. I appreciated the humor, the quirks, the music, and many big chunks of it, but overall, Earthbound was... decent. The pacing of the game was all over, with some segments way longer than needed, and some stretches not so fun.

When I heard about Mother 3, I was a little interested to at least try it and see if it was better than the previous game. And then there was the eternal wait. Finally, the fan translation happened. I was familiar with fan translations from a few games, like Cave Story and La-Mulana, which appeared earlier on my list. Reading the updates from the people working on the translation actually made me a lot more excited for this game, so I ended up playing it from day 1 of that patch.

Mother 3 is broken into chapters, which I think really helped the pacing feel for how they wanted to tell the story. The first few chapters all focus on different characters, as sort of a prologue to the main adventure, and allow time to lay several different strands of story. The first chapter comes in strong with all the goofy and weird things you'd expect, but then it just hits with such a blast of emotion too. It really sets the tone for how this game wants to be goofier, but also tell a very touching and engaging story. The later chapters pull together to one larger story involving all the characters. There are also ties to Earthbound that happen later on, so it really helped that I had played that before to fully appreciate what was happening here.

For the battle system, Mother 3 brought back the best thing about Earthbound, the rolling HP counter, but also added a fantastic new feature. You can tap along with the rhythm of the battle song to turn a single attack into a combo, up to as many as 16 hits. Some battles have a simple beat and let you rack up the hits, but boss battles can pull out all the stops weird syncopation, odd time signatures or changing tempos. As someone who played tons of rhythm games and loves that genre, the merge here was entirely up my alley. Trying to score 16 combos in every battle, or even in every attack was exciting, along with listening to the variety of songs and styles, which Mother 3 certainly has plenty of.

I loved Mother 3 so much that I went and bought a copy of the strategy guide that Fangamer put out (Pork Army Survival Manual), even though I didn't really need it after playing the game. I just wanted more of this game, and it was a fun book that was a great companion to go with the game experience.



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