Mother 3 (2006, Brownie Brown, HAL Laboratory)
I've never been the biggest fan of the first two Mother games. Its 1989 Famicom debut title took its inspiration from the Dragon Quest series, then on its still currently highly venerated third entry, lifting its basic mechanics and wrapping around them a story set in a modern day America-style world. Classic DQ's clumsy menuing is more or less replicated here in which you have to select an action from a menu before interacting with anything or anyone, and the basic turn-based battle system in which you contend with static enemies in a black void offers little to really engage with. Worse, the enemy encounter rate is obnoxiously high and quickly makes an exhausting chore out of walking around otherwise charming and lovingly detailed environments as you're constantly having to take breaks to fight stuff. And man, fighting stuff gets boring. I could level similar complaints against the second and third Dragon Quests, at least in their original releases, so in the critical method of comparing objective aspects of a game against its contemporaries and within its genre, I can't ding it too hard. I'm not really reviewing it here, after all; I just don't like to play it much. And I've tried several times!
Anyway, 1994's Mother 2 on the Super Famicom, released for the SNES in the U.S. in 1995 as Earthbound, does alleviate some of these issues. It presents a plot similar in theme and content to its predecessor, while expanding its scope and including a sprinkle of mechanical improvements. The DQ-style menu is still present, but thanks to the SNES's more generous button layout you can now press a button to automatically do the obvious thing on whatever you're facing (Talk to people, Check objects, etc.). Battle now takes place against one of several kinds of really cool-looking psychedelic backgrounds, depending on what enemy you're fighting, and features a "rolling HP" meter in which any damage dealt will gradually drain from your HP instead of immediately being subtracted, so if you're dealt mortal damage and then frantically mash until a battle is over by running from or defeating the enemy, your HP meter will stop draining where it lies. Here there's a slight tilt to the left on the slider of the genre spectrum of Action to RPG. Enemies, instead of being randomly dealt out after a certain amount of steps in the overworld, now visibly walk around and can be avoided if desired; the game will also defeat enemies on the overworld instantly as you encounter them where victory would be a forgone conclusion. Battles can still get a little repetitive but overall it's a marked improvement over Mother and a decent RPG in its own right. But something I've never really gotten over in this game and in the one before it is its kind of uncannily quirky vibe. The strange looking overworld sprites, the odd dialog that lacks some integral element of humanity... the games aren't really funny to me so much as ...weird. There's a couple of amusing and even touching moments in Earthbound but it rarely felt like I was engaging emotionally with it, like I wasn't on the right wavelength, like I was the wrong kind of audience for it or something.
I cried near the beginning of Mother 3. I cried at the end. I laughed at its jokes. I was shocked at many of its twists and turns. I felt bad for its characters, and then felt happy for them. I felt scared for them, and excited for them. Setups are carefully layered throughout its narrative and then resoundingly paid off, like any great story; even something as minor as seeing a character send off a letter and then having its recipient, whom I was controlling, find it an hour or two later after I had forgotten about it, brought me joy simply due to the game's dramatic presentation of the events. The storytelling in this game is about as good as any 2D sprite-based game is going to get. So much is conveyed through so little. It's sly and clever, without ever being cynical or meanspirited; there's a care for the player's attention in its expression, either melancholy or comedic. What I mean to say is that the game, in its tonal delivery, whatever that tone may be, is always sincere and kind. It knows what it wants to make you feel, and then does it without reservation, and always delicately. In this sense, it is very much a game for children in that it delivers its messages on a broadly understandable and relatable level while never seeming to talk down, like a good YA novel. Its themes of modernization and the ills of capitalism are delivered without much subtlety, though they fit precisely into a story starring little cute, and very well animated, pixel art characters. I can't speak well enough of this game's writing, for Shigesato Itoi is a capital-W Writer, and has here spun a yarn that is altogether compelling, funny, and tragic. A videogame this is, however, and there is more to a videogame than its story.
The narrative progression of Mother 3 couldn't be more different from the two games that preceded it, in that it begins with an episodic structure before converging into a more conventional serial plot. The events of the story have grown in number and significance from Mother 2, but the scope of the world has narrowed a bit. Itoi was wary of doing another "road show" style of RPG, in which a character travels from one town to a dungeon to another town and so on, and so we have a game wherein large portions of its plot take place in one small village, and traveling from place to place doesn't happen so much in the context of adventuring as instead from the characters being pulled there by circumstance. In this way the overall game world feels more claustrophobic and less significant, and much more straightforwardly traversed than the previous games, even if they too were, strictly speaking, linear. There isn't a lot to do in the game besides whatever the next story event is, which isn't necessarily a knock against it, just that it does add to a feeling of being railroaded from one plot point to the next while the world serves as nothing more than a backdrop. In a game with the production values of, say, Dragon Quest VIII, released within a couple of years of Mother 3, one can have a lavish overworld and several towns while telling a compelling story, but this game takes what it has and focuses on effectively hitting more personal and less grandiose tones.
Battle mechanics are carried over mostly unmodified from Mother 2, and with it its ever-so-slight action element of the rolling HP meter. More than a couple of times, when all but one of the party was dead and the last one standing had been dealt a mortal blow and the character had no means of reviving anyone or healing themselves, I last resort mashed the A button frantically to continuously do normal attacks and skip through dialog boxes as fast as humanly possible. Sometimes the enemy's health was low enough that it worked, and the relief one feels after such an encounter never diminishes. Rolling HP becomes a surprisingly large part of battling in this game, moreso than I remember it being in Mother 2. I say the battle mechanics are mostly unmodified, but there is one significant addition in the form of a combo system. Every enemy will have one of a handful of musical themes when you encounter them in a fight, and pressing the A button to the rhythm of the music in the midst of a character's normal attack will add another less powerful attack, and another, up to 16 hits if you do it right. Getting the full 16 hit combo feels so good. Eventually I caught on to the idea of mashing A to the beat even outside of the actual attack just so I can come in at the right time and increase the likelihood of success. It's deliciously compulsive and goes a long way for player engagement during repeated battles over its two predecessors' more humdrum systems. The timing is a bit strict, and some of the music will have a weird time signature or a section where it stops and starts back up to throw you off, so to consistently pull off combos is never a trivial matter.
The interface is nice and snappy, and every selection feels good in a way that the first two Mother games did not. Menus come up fast, and moving the cursor and confirming a selection are both satisfyingly responsive. However, the organization of the Goods and Equip menus is an absolute nightmare when it comes to having to sort out what your characters have, who can use what, and then shuffling the items around so that they can equip whatever it is you want them to equip. You can't have one character equip the weapon that another character in the party has in their inventory, you have to go into the Goods menu and move that weapon from the one character's items into the other's, then exit the Goods menu and enter the Equip menu and equip it. If the character you want to move the weapon to has a full inventory (which is always), you need to shuffle at least one item from theirs to another's. If you happen to buy a bunch of weapons and armor from a merchant you have to do this whole stupid musical chairs routine with every character's items to get everyone set up properly, even moreso if one character de-equipped something that another character can use. It's all absurdly tedious, and there's no automation or even at-a-glance info to benefit from during this whole exercise. I feel like Square had this mostly figured out in one way or another ten years before this game was released.
In battling standard mooks there isn't a lot of tactical depth to be had; it primarily involves executing the rhythm of the combo attacks successfully and then healing efficiently. Standard JRPG stuff. But if one runs through the game and fights enemies as they come, i.e. if one doesn't intentionally grind, then boss fights become quite tactically interesting. I like to say that in a well-designed game the obstacles it puts in the player's way grip tightly around its mechanics, in that one will have to utilize everything that the game offers at some point in order to be successful, and here in Mother 3 this comes through at least in its boss fights. Buffs and debuffs can be crucial, and a clever use of one character's PSI ability with another's in some battles can win the day where it would initially seem that your team is simply underleveled. Aside from the storytelling the boss fights are easily the best parts of Mother 3. The game is designed around fighting every enemy you encounter, and by that token, sometimes I didn't really feel like fighting every single thing, especially during backtracking portions (we'll get to that momentarily), so there were a couple of bosses for whom I did have to grind a bit to be a match. Honestly, I didn't mind the few times I had to pre-boss grind. If I can make a confession, I do indeed like to occasionally see Number Go Up... anyway, like the previous Mother games, party wipes only mean you lose half your carried DP (money) and go back to the last save point you encountered while still keeping all of the items and experience you might've gained. This dampens the threat of death quite a bit, and I prefer to have an RPG balanced around the consequence that I might lose everything if I push my character(s) too hard. Makes it more thrilling, whereas here it's merely a minor annoyance, a game mechanic that comes part and parcel with the experience of the story rather than a dead end in the decision tree. While I'm harping on this kind of thing, the way money accumulation works in this game series still doesn't make any sense. You get money from battling, but the money goes into your bank account which you have to access at the save points, which are usually pretty close by to places where you can use money. When your party is wiped, you lose half the money that you're carrying, and your account is untouched. The typical proximity of places to access your bank account to places where you can spend money means that there's basically never any reason to carry money around, nor would you ever carry money around, since all money accumulated from battles goes straight into your bank account, not your pocket. It's all ass-backwards. Small complaint, but it is a weird dangling game mechanic that stuck in my mind.
I've thus far praised the story for how well it engages the player on a personal level, and indeed it hits high highs that most videogames never even aspire to. It's truly wonderful and well worth experiencing in this aspect alone. There is, though, a slight dip around the late-middle game where you're traveling from place to place to (sort of) acquire several McGuffins, through which the plot becomes less interesting and the fact that you're playing A Traditional Japanese Role-Playing Game starts to seep in. Ironically, when the game starts to feel more like an adventure than it did previously is when the narrative begins spinning its wheels. You traverse an area, fight its enemies along the way, and then reach the big boss; from here you fight it and then, after however many attempts it takes, beat it. Then you need to backtrack through the same area you just went through to get to the boss in order to reach the next thing you need to do. It's this backtracking that often is filled with unavoidable battles with the enemies you were just fighting not even an hour ago that really hammers home the mechanical and structural simplicity of Mother 3; it robs the beating of that big boss of its catharsis, that now everything is okay and we can move on to the next plot point. No, you must instead perform the chore of dispatching or running from enemies you've seen already over and over again, and if you do choose to run, then you might end up underleveled for the next boss encounter because the expected level progression is designed around fighting all the enemies you come across. The obstacles the game gives you in this late-middle portion of the game don't serve the story progression, and feel like padding, which in a game that's 30-35 hours long shouldn't really be necessary. I wouldn't have complained if 5 hours or so of runtime weren't there if I didn't have to repeatedly perform the simplistic but time-consuming act of fighting the same dudes I was just fighting. In the context of a game that once moved at a brisk pace these moments stick out. There are also areas of the game that are profoundly uninteresting dungeon crawls, and worse, there are a couple of instances of point-and-click adventure style tasks, in which you scour the area for the right person to talk to or object to interact with, both of which mainly serve to annoy. All this to say that, in the absence of more sophisticated mechanics or anything to do in the world besides the main story, the game elects to make occasional busywork out of the walking around, battling and pressing A next to stuff that is provided.
Mother 3 is at once charming, hilarious, heartwarming, and heartbreaking. It is also old-school to a fault. A shell of old, simplistic console RPG sensibilities bursts at the seams with an ambitious and ultimately quite beautiful story. Where its inspiration Dragon Quest saw fit in the interim between 1994 and 2006 to add things like monster training, job systems and crafting along with all sorts of side activities in a bustling world to the entries in its series, Mother 3, structural differences aside, seems like a two-years-later iterative sequel to Mother 2, only held back until 2006. RPGs by then had more. A JRPG can move you by its story, but Hell, so can an anime series. A game's story and presentation can overshadow certain shortcomings, but only by so much. You must interact with the videogame, and for a not insignificant amount of runtime I was downright frustrated with my interaction, and any other game I would bash harder for its lack of systemic innovation and sometimes excessive padding. But I can't ignore how the game moved me, in how it made me feel real emotions for its fictional characters, and in how its ending, and its ending's ending, made me reflect fondly on what an altogether wonderful journey I had.
Final rating: 4/5 (Good)