can we talk about mother 3?

[thecatamites]

Meant to blast thru M1 with all cheats on for while now since it always seemed like entry in this series I would relate to most. Also I think Ghosts Of Aliens was based on it.
I think there is some level of baseline indeterminacy or affective emptiness that I need in a videogame before I can really get anything out of the rest of it, like a structuring absence everything else circles around, or some blind spot surrounding actual player experience. Cleanse the gates of perception or something, reframe everything else in reference to this unusual sense of alert nullity. I liked EB and M3 but they never really got to me since they felt sort of overdetermined in terms of the effects they were going for. The parts I remember fondly are stuff like the Mr. Saturn village and Moonside and other parts that registered as uneasy slippages away from context of iconic pop modernity and into goofier territory, even as interludes.

Honestly I think an interesting history could be written about the various doomed efforts to elevate the basic Dragon Quest template by adding more dialogue and variegated pacing and plot and tone and meaning and so on to that structure. I played DQ3 recently and liked it a lot more than I thought it would but I think what I actually responded to most was the way it continuously just skirted the edge of being totally, stupefyingly unbearable and empty while always just managing to pull back in time thru charm and careful structuring. And if attempts to exorcise this founding dubiousness in later developments and reground it in more estimable things like story, art etc are why they end up feeling weirdly clumsier and narrower in range. At least as I think about them now.
(Example 2, Majora’s Mask came off as a lot more knowingly and openly weird than OoT but was simultaneously a lot more boring in many other ways (world map design etc) and I could never shake feeling that biting the apple of basic self awareness was both what allowed them to pursue stranger and more self-aware tangents and also what cut them off from the more nebulous ambivalent qualities which actually form the psychic motor of their predecessor.)

I don’t think I’ll ever finish DQ3 but I also don’t think even DQ3 really expects me to try to finish DQ3.

[Felix]

feeling pretty good about selectbutton itt

[Rudie]

Im sure there are japanese essays about all the evolutionary dead ends that happened in 8bit famicom rpgs. Lord there are so so so many of them. Looking at the famicom specific library is a parade in oh another one. I even have that complete famicom book and yeeessh.

[doolittle]

Man, what if JRPGs acknowledged that you’re probably not going to finish them and substituted several complete stories of a reasonable length for one epic? I already like how each town in EB or DQ has its problem that you solve, but it’s always in service of the grand narrative I lose when I put the game down. It’s easy enough to remember to check out the castle or tower full of ghosts, but it’d be neat if a game was content telling you one story about the ghosts, finishing it, and then telling you the story about the slave monkeys in the desert.

[botagel]

Live A Live has a final, “connecting” story route you can play through after completing all the short, 3-4 hour adventures prior to it, but the focus is on the individual stories and their use of common mechanics to do very different things.

It’s probably my favorite SNES-era RPG, even if Chrono Trigger is the closest to my heart. I’d love to see more games like it, focused on a few hours of interesting concepts (and the “anthology with common mechanics” idea is great, too).

[Tuxedo]

Nice post.

There’s a point when you cannot bear videogame setpieces anymore and look for the exact opposite.

Old school SMT scratches that itch for me. Just endless identical corridors. On and on. Nothing any real human would have made.

Earthbound Zero has Mt Itoi, a final dungeon with absurdly difficult enemies (after an otherwise easy game)

Itoi admitted in an interview that he didn’t have time to balance anything here. You’re on your own.

You have three options:

• grind (not recommended)
• outfit your team carefully, learn how to deal with every enemy encounter, etc
• completely rely on an overpowered temporary ally, and leg it to the end of the game when it leaves the team (the cool one)

[sleepysmiles]

Yes this is a topnotch MOTHER thread

here’s my sketchy, overlong post about interesting stuff in MOTHER1.
I guess if MOTHER2 is about the Hero’s Journey through adolescence and MOTHER3 is about having to accept the end of childhood then MOTHER is just embracing the experience of being a child and finding the wonder in the world around you. There is a mundanity to the environments and most of the enemies that’s markedly different from the subsequent games. More of the things you fight are wild animals gone berserk or inanimate objects brought to life. The weirder stuff consists mostly of the alien invaders and magical fantasy creatures that are explicitly from an imaginary land. (Oh, and some zombies.)

The world you explore is rural and low-key. There are no Saturn Valleys or hallucinatory alterworlds or factories full of talking puke. No floating Asian mashup kingdom in the clouds, no lost underworld full of dinosaurs. The people you meet say funny things and there’s a smile to everything (literally – just look at your characters in profile!), but nothing is as jokey as MOTHER2. Instead, you find the fantastic in the normal places you go. The fragments of a song, lingering about – in a cactus with a face, in a music box hidden in a doll, in the chords of a singing monkey. You’re not going on a journey outside the known world, so much as uncovering the liminal spaces between the mundane and the fantastic.

The one glaring exception is Magicant. Magicant is a kingdom of spiral-shell spires and fluffy pink clouds, a dreamland right down to the music. You’re safe in Magicant, and everyone there loves you. Their benevolent queen is a kind old lady who cries out at night for a lost child, and can’t remember the lullaby she used to sing to him. You later learn she’s your great-grandmother. That’s why the series is called MOTHER in the first place – you begin in the comfort of your home (until the peace is momentarily shattered by a poltergeist, of course), where your mother will cook your favorite food and your sisters will watch over your stuff and your dad calls you on the phone to give you words of encouragement – and Magicant, the hub to which you return time and time again, imitates all these kindnesses for you. It’s a child’s dream of a mother’s love, personified.

Then you help the old lady sing her song, and the dream shatters, and can be returned to no more. You face down the alien who has created so many problems for you, only to realize that he’s an angry, frightened child. More than that, a fetus, suspended in an artificial womb. You “defeat” him by singing to him that same lullaby, taking the role of the MOTHER and using it to remind him of the kindness he was once shown. The last bosses of MOTHER3 seem almost to mirror it.

As far as how it connects to the later games: notice how the early areas of M2/EB are suburban towns with dirt roads and grassy cliffs. The same exact environment that composes the entirety of MOTHER. Now notice how M2/EB abandons this similarity after Fourside, and gradually spins out into more and more openly foreign places – first in the sense of leaving behind western culture for Asian and Mediterranean influenced places, then into the darkest jungles, then into a world lost to time, then… to the dreamworld from the first game, recontextualized as the center of your hero’s mind. And then the fantastic invades your hometown and you’re forced to travel to the most alien, frightening place of all in order to stop it at its source.
I don’t know where i’m going with this, really. Just think that MOTHER2 is a more thoughtful follow-up/foil to the original than it is a mere rewrite. I would even say that the familiar two-boys-and-a-girl party is supposed to parallel the party from the first game, and that it’s Poo’s arrival (in the form of a hippie’s spacecake vision) that marks the game shaking things up and getting weirder than ever before.

[doolittle]

Thanks! I’d never heard of it. I need to check it out.

[toups]

there are not enough blood potions for this post

[Rudie]

Yeah Live A Live is very very cool but lord if you arent playing it on fast forward it is going to be super rough in chapter 8-9.

[frothking]

Mother 2 is more nostalgic, and experimental, in a way. It had its share of awful item mechanics, like “condiments”, and that whole escargo express diablo inventory juggling.

There’s a thing on Mother 3, about the music.
Yes, it’s held back by the awful sound of the gba.
Yes, the first one has the best music. It needs to, it was the whole point of the game. A fetchquest to find the 8 bits of that 8bit weapon of mass destruction. It even works on the final boss.

It’s how the game handles it. It’s how the game holds it.
If you are on a forest listening to the ‘dangerous woods’ theme, and you transition to a battle, the battle ends and the theme goes back to where it was, instead of starting over like in Mother 2 and every other run of the mill mass slimemurder simulator.

Still gives me a ‘warm, fuzzy feeling’. Someone did their homework, their lovework, there.
When will all the other games hold the music for us, like that?

[OneSecondBefore]

Fan-Made Mother 4 Is No Longer 'Mother 4'

Good. Titling this game as a mainline sequel to someone else’s franchise was such a shitty, bone-headed move, even more so in light of the fact that Mother 3 is explicitly positioned against this kind of self-righteous nostalgia. Maybe now, if it actually ever comes out I’ll play it.

[frothking]

Why they didnt call it “Stepmother”?

[frothking]

Shane Mesa, composer for Mother4/Stepmother had a breakdown recently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mother4/comments/7a0gsr/shane_mesa_a_note_from_mom/?utm_content=title&utm_medium=hot&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=mother4

[parker]

No, we can’t talk about mother 3.

[jsnlv]

I do think a lot of my love for Mother 3 comes from the colors and shapes out of which its world is constructed; it’s not a coincidence I used this image as an avatar for a while on Steam:

Not only is this a phenomenal color scheme and excellent pixelwork, but it comes in the middle of what is probably my favorite part of the game: the chimera research lab. That is some of the most effective and horrific sound work and suspense-building in what is otherwise not a scary game. Seriously:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=BPYyaOUxVfY

The Ultimate Chimera isn’t even a specific combination of animals; it’s like a child’s drawing of a “scary monster” given form. I like it a lot.

[Ymer]

Has Leon ever made a witty post about how 80% of all GBA videos on Youtube have desynced audio?

[Felix]

guys I have to admit that I have never once in my entire life noticed input latency enough to be bothered by it

I’ll be running an emulated rhythm game on a wireless keyboard with bluetooth audio and it’s still fine

I can only assume that growing up running shitty emulators on shitty computers somehow neurologically inoculated me against this

[Ymer]

Do you not run your TV in Game Mode either?

[Mikey]

I don’t think my TV even has Game Mode

I don’t think I even have Game Mode