How Mother 3 Breaks You

what you're looking at here is a japanese tv commercial for a 2006 video game and even by japanese advertisement standards it is strange just a woman on camera crying and this is how nintendo chose to promote mother 3 the long-awaited sequel to mother 2 or earthbound as it was known in the west a cute little jrpg that swapped out traditional dungeons and dragons for the lynchian nightmare of american suburbia it was fantastic and it was ignored at least in the us where tepid critical and non-existent commercial reaction was a likely factor in mother 3 never being officially translated even after a hellish production that lasted 10 years seeing development switch platform no less than three different times and at one stage even being officially cancelled before being revived for the gameboy advance mother 3 is a game that shouldn't and in some ways still doesn't exist which is a shame because it's also one of the most beautiful games i've ever played mother 3 is the kind of emotionally moving experience that makes well the kind of hyperbole in that last sentence difficult to avoid to the point that yeah if i only had a 30 second tv spot to put across what this game is i might just point a camera at a woman who's played it and let her experience speak for itself thankfully though we don't have 30 seconds we have 43 43 minutes oh god but that is that is too long uh sometimes these videos they just they they get away from you well enjoy and i want to use that time to ask how does mother 3 do this to people and to me that answer starts even before the game does what i mean by this is that mother 3 has the best goddamn name entry screen in existence and i know that's hyperbola again but watch how much storytelling happens here see you're not just entering your name here but the names of your entire family first we meet lucas who just from the way he peers into the darkness of the doghouse we can tell is this shy nervous kid next we meet klaus and just from the way he interacts with lucas we can tell is the more adventurous and outgoing of the two twins someone lucas looks up to and literally falls over himself trying to keep up with we meet the stoic and silent flint who watches over his two boys as they gently pull their mother the timid hinawa into frame flynn steps aside to make room for her and we get a portrait of just this really happy little family and look at how much we've learned not just about who these people are but the different relationship dynamics that exist between them i mean seriously if you can think of a name entry screen that does more for its game story than this then please leave it in the comments as well as your home address so i can come to your house and fight you the name entry screen makes something else clear this is a story about a family one that really loves each other and are excited to be together and the little moments that follow build on that like how you wake up as lucas in your pajamas but try and run outside and hinawa stops you before gently guiding you back upstairs to get changed and it's subtle but what i love about this moment is how it puts you in the place of lucas of this over-excited child who tried to do something silly like run outside in your pajamas and when he now stops you it forces you to see her from lucas's perspective as this gentle caring loving presence protective of her sons and it's a little moment but it establishes the connection between the two beautifully and same when you find klaus doing just about the coolest older brother thing he could be doing wrestling friendly dinosaurs him even helping you learn to fight in the tutorial battle with this little mole cricket building on that feeling that clauses someone lucas looks up to and learns things from and it's like god damn every part of these characters lives it all just feels so cozy and wholesome and unfortunately it does not last you take control of flint's who's waiting for genoa and his sons to return from their grandfather's cabin but something isn't right people have seen massive mechanical ships in the skies above the village and mysterious wildfires have been sending the once peaceful wildlife into violent frenzies after flint rescues a child from a burning building he's approached by isaac who's just returned from the area where hanewa and the boys were last seen and he says this i heard what i think might have been screams there's a subtlety to isaac's words here the creator of mother 3 had to beg his programmers to implement a text system that would let him control the speed at which text appears on screen and you can see how effective that is here the slight pauses in between isaac's words making his speech feel slow and reluctant conveying a subtle sense of dread like he thinks there could be really something very wrong with hinawa and the boys and you feel it you feel that fear as the entire village scrambles to find flint's family when finally klaus and lucas are pulled from a river shivering and colds creating a brief moment of relief and then it happens flint is approached by bronson the village blacksmith and he has something to say i picked up a giant dragofang uh it'll make a great weapon i figured you could probably use it as for the bad news it's where i found the dragofang it was in your it was pierced through your wife's heart he now killed by a strange mechanical creature the reluctant childish way bronson speaks here gives this moment a nearly delirious absurdly cruel feel but what really drives home the tragedy is the animation that follows mother 3 has an incredible amount of animation particularly for a jrpg and it gives even little moments a spectacle and emotion and watch how beautifully flint's anger and grief is conveyed here the loss of his wife spiraling him into a frightening delirious rage even his own sons having to be shielded from his anger until finally flint has to be knocked out his final flicker of consciousness the memory of the very last time he will ever see hinawa and she disappears from his life forever this moment still really messes me up the game having pulled you into this peaceful gentle family life before ripping it apart in a way that feels so cruel and random and cold emulating the way real life tragedy often feels and it's by doing that the mother 3 [Music] breaks you oh no wait hang on there's still like 23 hours left in this game oh [Applause] jeez so yeah everything we've talked about so far this is all just like the first two hours of the game and to fully talk about what mother three is we now need to talk about a piece of stationery wait no that sounds really stupid the hobonachi journal is like the best journal in existence they're these really well made daily diaries with all these really interesting little facts and pieces of information and i love these things seriously i own like three of them and i mainly use them to write about my feelings at night because it helps me sleep and this isn't even a sponsorship i just think these things are really i should have made this a sponsorship my favorite thing about hobonochi journalists however is that each day comes with this little quote each one coming from an expert in their fields ranging from topics like daily living what it is to be human in a modern society and what it is to create and it gives these books a kind of soul like it was made by someone with a deep passion and curiosity for the world around them that person being shigesato itoi itoi is one of those people where the more you learn about him the more weird and fascinating his life becomes he spends a lot of his early years alone his parents mostly absent from his childhood and grew up to become the top copywriter of 80s japan leading massive anti-war campaigns like this poster which loosely translates as you first mr prime minister he also voice acted the dad in my neighbor totoro launched hobonochi inc one of japan's most profitable companies made a social media app for pets has been arrested five times for political protests wrote several very strange children's books as well as novels centering around his different conversations with neuroscientists rock ago actors and game designers he's this dude with an endless hunger and fascination for the world around him and the reason any of this matters to us today is he's also the creator of the mother series and what i think gives these games their soul is how you can feel etoy as a person bleed into them both in little mechanics like having to constantly call home to keep nez from getting homesick in earthbound to that infinite passionate curiosity manifesting in the world design of mother 3 and to show you what i mean here let's talk about baths as a man who on ocasion will bathe multiple times a day i think baths are great the sensation of letting life's troubles melt away in the steamy comfort of a hot bath is a pleasure i value greatly which is why it makes me so happy that bats or these hot springs are a big part of mother 3 in the baths are how you recover your health and magic each bath having its own intricately designed little aesthetic creating a unique look and atmosphere for each location and that's an atmosphere the game literally forces you to soak in as if you want the healing effects you'll have to stay in the bath for at least 6 seconds and what i think is really interesting about this is how it creates this little moment of pause not just for the characters but you the player where you just sit back and experience these beautiful little environments and it's subtle but i think it's in this you can see the philosophy of mother 3's world design with a lot of modern games there's a focus on feeding the player upgrades to motivate them to explore its world and that's cool but what i'd love about mother 3 is how it does the same except with experiences instead of upgrades and to show you what i mean here i want to talk about a moment that happens about 9 hours into the game at this point you've become very familiar with present boxes basically mother 3's take on treasure chests which usually contain things like health items or equipments but then this happens [Music] and what's interesting is that this moment doesn't benefit you in any way you get nothing new and your stats aren't better all you got was the memory of this happening and i can remember when i first played this game and thinking how odd this bit was but years later long after i'd forgotten what lucas's strongest weapon was i could still remember this moment and i think that's kind of beautiful in itself but it's little moments like this that make up the world of mother 3 and sometimes these instances are really subtle sometimes it's just the pleasure of experiencing these really weird or cool new environments where everything from the pixel art to the sound design combined to create these really unique little atmospheres even down to the distinctive sounds your feet make on different surfaces and again this might seem slight but then when you get to the final area of the game listen to how footsteps are used to create a sense of finality and foreboding other times these moments can just be really weird like an entire dungeon created from toilet stalls where toilet signs fly off the wall and attack you and each new stall is a gateway to a stranger more nonsensical encounter or a church that acknowledges this is a video game and asks you for your real life name in a way that definitely won't come back and be meaningful later and that's the thing about mother 3's world it is weird it's filled with all these bizarre little moments that run the gambit from surreal to just hilarious like there's a part later in the game where you have to drain a lake and a scientist gives you a choice of three different chimera with which to do it the dry guy the clay brothers or the pump camara the pump camara being the very clearly correct choice but pick one of the other two and you can watch them fail in these really stupid and hilarious animations and i like this not just because it's funny but because so much effort went into creating this weird little moment that a lot of people aren't even going to see in a way that i think other games just wouldn't see the point of doing a lot of work went into bringing mother 3's world to life and one of the places you can really see this is taz mili village home to lucas and his family and it's awesome how much subtle world building has gone into this peaceful self-sufficient little community like the jail which has never been used or the fact that the concept of money doesn't even exist here the villagers free to take whatever they want from the local bazaar everyone pitching in and providing what they can but where you can really see the depth of tasmania is in its 56 residents all of which have their own unique character sprite as well as expressive little animations each one with their own unique personality home environment and even connections to the other villagers to the point that you can actually map out the different families and relationships that make up tasmili and you can even keep track of those villagers as their stories play out over the course of the game meaning it's really easy to get invested in them if you pay attention to the point that someone like nana the socially awkward town loner to have developed their own online fan communities despite the fact you could easily go the entire game without speaking to her that's the awesome thing about mother 3's world it's rare you go more than 10 minutes without experiencing something new or funny or touching or weird it is a world carved out of these beautiful little experiences and what i love about one of the three's battles is how they're an extension of that idea mechanically mother three's combat is sound it's fun and frantic intense thanks to the rolling health system i.e the system by which a death blow from an enemy won't actually kill your character instantly but instead begin a countdown where death only comes once your health hits zero meaning if you can heal them or end the battle before that point they'll be okay creating some really tense split-second decision making especially in the game's punishing late game boss encounters that force you to think about everything from how you use the limited inventory space of each character to the individual weaknesses of each opponent and how to exploit them failing to do so meaning bosses like the barrier trio will blow your skull out through the back of your head sending you crashing back to the game over screen again and again and it's great but a few minor nitpicks mean i probably wouldn't rank it among my favorite battle systems and yes i do think ten two is one of the best systems of all time and if you disagree with that then i'm sorry i'm sorry you hate food but i also think in judging mother three's battles solely on a mechanical basis you might be missing the best thing about them and to show you what i mean here let's talk about negative man you find negative man hidden away in a side path of a small late game dungeon there is no explanation for him he carries no story significance beating him does not progress your game he just kind of is and when you fight him this happens negative man muttered it's always the same negative man sobbed moaned and started wailing negative man moaned just get rid of me now he barely attacks and when he does he inflicts just a single point of damage and so for a while it's just you and your party wailing on this morbidly depressed protoplasm and then when it's over it's just like what the was that but i think in the same way what you took from the firework was the memory of the firework what you take from negative man is the memory of negative man he is just another strange part of this world you got to experience but this time it's through the battle system and it's not just him there are so many strange and memorable encounters like this remember the mole cricket we talked about from the tutorial he later returns and explains that he was emotionally devastated by his loss to you and has spent years training for revenge he takes you to the cricket kingdom where a cricket elder will preside over your rematch lays out an elaborate system of rules and then after everything you beat him in one hit and it's great sometimes the encounters are just really weird and random like searching a haunted kitchen and finding a spooky jar of ghost jam and this enemy doesn't appear anywhere else in the game it was just made for the surprise of this moment and that's the thing about mother 3's encounters they are constantly surprising and memorable despite the fact that the enemies are all just still images they still convey a massive amount of personality thanks to the beautiful soft expressive artwork that makes even machines of war feel friendly and cute many enemies even having their own unique gameplay mechanics that build on that personality like the rocking ghosts who are a pain in the ass but if you can pull two of them into the one bottle they will begin jousting each other instead of you and there are so many of these battles i want to talk about but the last one i will is big bro and lil big bro two enemies who by themselves are kind of useless due to their crippling anxiety meaning they can't even attack you but if you return to this area later in the game the two have overcome their personal problems together and made a single competent enemy and it's so stupid and sweet but this is the beautiful thing about mother three's world it is designed around creating these little moments that just stay with you and it encourages you to be curious to seek out the oddities that are waiting for you and the battles become just another part of that and so while a huge part of this game is about grief and loss it's also about the joy of existing in a world that is endlessly surprising and fascinating and that's why it feels so wrong when that world starts to change there is no gentle way to put this but the evil creeping through mother three's world and particularly tasmilly isn't your typical rpg ambiguous nameless darkness it is straight up fascism and i don't say that because the pig mask army do literal nazi salutes or the fact that they say offensive things in battle or that they want non-binary people to disappear for reasons that are confusing and ridiculous but in how they corrupt the culture of tasmanly and it starts so small the mysterious salesman facade introducing the concept of money to tasmily by purchasing pigs from a local farm boy and from that one interaction the entire town begins to twist and distort as the villagers begin to listen to facades promises of happiness but also his messages of fear as he warns them of great lightning storms that will obliterate their homes and the monstrous chimera that have begun to flood their forests both the work of facade and his pig mask army but the people of tasmania don't know this and fear begins to spill throughout the community facade infecting tasmaily with his capitalist way of life and something really sad starts to happen you watch this village die not by being destroyed or burnt down but by having its entire way of life erased as its dirt roads become paved with concrete and its buildings begin to stretch into the sky as the villagers begin to want more and more now earning money by working in a massive factory run by the pig masks abandoning their small self-sufficient way of life so that when the factory is shut down the villagers are left without any means to support themselves forcing the villagers to abandon tasmily leaving its once bustling streets now silent and empty its people migrating to newport city a capitalist nightmare where every corner reeks of falsehoods from its overpriced but ineffective weaponry to its skyline made up of cardboard cutouts its buildings a mishmash of different cultures and aesthetics spliced together without reason or thought the little village of tasmily now gone absorbed into this grotesque concrete monolith its rulers oblivious to the lives they've destroyed one of those lives being lucas it's about eight hours into the game before we take control of lucas again and now everything's different three years have passed since the death of hanoa and watch how beautifully the game conveys the emptiness lucas still feels from her passing in a scene that mirrors the beginning of the game he awakens in his pajamas but try to run outside this time and it's not hanewa that stops him but lucas's memory of her and having previously experienced this moment you feel that you feel the emptiness left by hanewa in lucas's life approach the mirror to get changed and another memory of hinawa is triggered lucas feeling his mother's absence in every corner of their home and it's devastating but it's not just hinawa he's lost shortly after his mother's death klaus disappeared and flint now spends every waking second searching the mountains for his lost son returning only sporadically to place flowers at hinau's grave lucas having watched as every part of his world is replaced with something colder and crueler now alone in a frightening new existence i'm guessing this is probably appearance by now but for as joyous as mother 3 is its world can be obscenely dark and even frightening there's even one section later in the game where the characters experience a surreal mushroom fueled hallucination based on what etoy describes as his worst fear a place where everyone you love hates you and this section is a god damn nightmare inside the mailbox was the sound of yourself crying everyone's waiting for you everyone's waiting to throw rocks at you spit on you and make your life hell stuffed inside the mailbox was sheer never-ending darkness i'm gonna beat you boy daddy's gonna beat you your mommy's waiting for you she's waiting she's waiting for you it's moments like this where it feels like the game is actively trying to shock and upset the player including one that would nearly certainly get this video demonetized if i was to talk about it properly but you can check the description if you want my thoughts on it and a full content warning it's the darker moments of mother 3 that feels so at odds with the earlier joyous happy tone of the game but that contrast seems intentional famously one of vitoria's childhood memories is that he wandered into the wrong cinema as an infant and witnessed a murder scene from the film military policemen and the dismembered beauty and while not explicit you can see how this scene would have been traumatizing to a small child not expecting it how afterwards it would have made the world seem like a darker more frightening place and itoi has spoken about wanting to create moments like this in his games that replicate that loss of innocence that concept that loss of innocence is a huge part of lucas as a character when you first meet him he's constantly described as a crybaby and cuddled weaker and meeker than his older brother klaus and this is reflected in his battle ability with only a slightly higher attack stat than average and lacking both the magic of kumitora and the debuffs of duster okay look i accidentally deleted the aura in duster when i was entering his name in the name entry screen and by the time i noticed it it was too late and i'm not going back and recording the footage so can we just not be too mean about it in the comments okay thank you but as the game goes on something really cool starts to happen lucas learns that he is one of two people who can pull the needles binding a massive dragon beneath the core of mother three's world and if someone pure-hearted pulls the needles the dragon will awaken to be a force of good but if someone evil does it it will devour all of humanity and so lucas accepts this massive impossible adventure alongside his dog boney kumatora and doste a duster and as the game goes on lucas's weakness begins to fall away people commenting on how much he's grown and the really awesome part is you start to feel that in the battles lucas eventually obtaining powerful end-game spells like mass heal and mass resurrect meaning he now becomes the beating heart of your team the party member that you will build your entire strategy around creating this feeling that like wow this kid went from being this weak lost child to now being this ultra powerful psychic user he went through hell but he got through it he became stronger and it's just this really lovely conveyance of character development through gameplay mechanics however there's a problem in that someone just as powerful as lucas has also been pulling the dragon's needles but when they do there's not a sense of good or evil just a deep feeling of emptiness hi uh it's me again so we're about to enter major spoiler territory and so you can skip to here if you want to avoid but i just want to say i don't think you knowing what's going to happen in mother 3 is really going to affect your enjoyment of the game it's it's just not that kind of experience but hey listen you do you buddy okay i'm gonna go actually you know that it felt really weird and stilted being like i'm gonna go and just exiting the frame like that so um i appreciate you watching the video i hope you've enjoyed it up until this point there's a really weird meta bit that i'm pretty proud of coming up and um no you you know what this this feels weird and awkward and it's like i don't really know how to end this segment and the longer it goes on the stranger and worse it feels and oh my god it just it just keeps going uh john when you're editing this please don't use this footage it just makes me look like a rambling crazy person throughout your journey you'll encounter the masked man an extremely powerful psychic user who acts as an enforcer for the fascist pig mask army as well as the one other person able to pull the needles binding the dragon and it is not too difficult to figure out who this person actually is but the way the game confirms it to you is really cool at the start of the game mother 3 asks you what your favorite thing is and i entered the name of my partner because i liked them a lot and also the word wrestling wouldn't fit and this becomes the name of your most powerful attack which is why it's so jarring when the masked man uses that same attack on you and this confirms what you've suspected the entire game this fascist force of evil is your brother klaus you don't know what's happened him in the three years since he now is death but he's different now he's changed everything klaus was is gone replaced by something cold and nearly mechanical like something terrible and nihilistic has crawled its way inside klaus and it has the same thing that's been creeping through the entire world since the beginning of the game and it's only in the final hours of mother 3 you discover who this person is porky the villain of mother 2 and it's strange to introduce the central villain this late into the game but you've also felt his presence the entire time this is the person who's been splicing animals into freakish chimeras the one who has treated this world as well as the lives of every person in it as his own personal toy box that's who this guy is a being who seeks absolute control over all natural life to the point that he's even rejected death itself now an infinite endless corpse trying to contort the world to his will so while lucas's story has been about accepting death porky has completely rejected it and you can see how strong that rejection of all natural life is in the final moments of your battle with him where rather than be defeated by you he seals himself away in his absolute safety capsule where nothing can ever harm him again but from which he can also never escape his infinite endless existence free of all joy and all pain till the end of time this is why i think porky is a great villain he is oblivion he is the nihilistic desire to escape all feeling but it's that nihilism that's crawled inside klaus and so you step towards your brother the final needle in sight and the finality of your entire journey just hits you it's hard not to think back to who lucas and klaus were at the beginning of this game and who they are now as the battle begins your entire party is wiped out this fight is between lucas and klaus and no one else lucas battling not just to save the world but to get his brother back and klaus to bring about true oblivion and what's awesome is how the emotions of both characters are communicated through the battle mechanics klaus lashing out at lucas striking him with killing blow after killing blow but try and attack with lucas and he cannot bring himself to harm his brother even with the end of the world looming it's only when flint appears that this changes and he is overjoyed to see his lost son reuniting his family for one beautiful terrible moments before he's critically injured shielding lucas from klaus's attacks and it's upon seeing this lucas is able to finally let go of the brother he knew the two now trading massive vicious damage back and forth as both their lives begin to eek away but something else has started to happen a voice has begun echoing out through the darkness klaus it was hinau's voice we see an image of two cribs side by side a sunflower swaying gently in the breeze and hinawa pleads with her sons to stop hurting each other at first klaus ignores her unable to let go of all the emptiness that has brought him to this moment but as the spirit of his mother pleads klaus begins to do less and less damage and the battle messages start to change the masked man shut his eyes lucas wanted to cry the masked man gazed at lucas finally henero's words reach close you must be so exhausted and klaus removes his helmet we fade to white and this text appears klaus staggered towards lucas klaus embraced lucas lucas remembered klaus's smell i'm really happy you could be with me just before the end [Music] i'm going to where mom is now thank you i'm sorry oh my god that's so sad jesus christ um i cried the first time i played this and if nintendo's marketing is to be believed i think a lot of people did and what that comes down to at least for me is more than just this sad story between two brothers personally i think where it starts is the dragon at this point klaus has pulled three needles and lucas has pulled three needles and so the one to pull the final needle is going to be the one to influence the soul of the dragon and so what is the dragon what is this big ridiculous story element that's been looming over the entire game and personally i think the dragon is us and i know that sounds kind of stupid but to me this entire fight this entire encounter it's about grief and how we handle it do we embrace oblivion do we give into nothingness and reject all pain and happiness just to avoid the feeling of loss like klaus or do we take that loss do we feel every inch of it and make it part of ourselves like lucas to me that's the heart of this fight it ends and lucas pulls the final needle and the world gets plunged into this infinite darkness with text just appearing on screen that just says the end and it's devastating but then something really strange happens you can actually control the text you can control the end and as you do as you're moving it around this weird little black space you start to bump into people and you realize that it's every character you've met over the course of the entire game they're all alive and they're all okay and things are never going back to the way they were but maybe they don't need to maybe that's all right and it's here where something else really crazy happens the characters start speaking to you directly like you the person holding the controller and they start saying hey they hope you're okay how they hope things are going well in your world and it's weird but after everything you've been through with them it feels genuine like it's this sincere message of hope coming from this little video game it's like okay what you're watching right now i am not a person i am a collection of pixels on your screen being streamed through the internet i am a piece of data it's like if this piece of data said to you i hope you're doing okay i hope things are all right in your life and if they're not i hope they get better soon that's how this game ends and that that breaks me open this to me is why 15 years after it came out a game that was never released in english still has such a massive and passionate following that passion doing everything from driving the goddamn heroes of starman.net that did the fan translation of mother 3 to fuelling the fandom that still to this day celebrates every tiny moment of this game and even beyond that itoi has famously stated that if mother 4 were ever to be made he would rather be the one playing it than creating it and i think in a way he's gotten that wish you can still feel the soul of mother 3 in games like undertale lisa and even the upcoming odyssey a game that spent a large part of its development as an unofficial mother 4 and while the original earthbound is absolutely a part of that to me it's the story and heart of mother 3 that you can still feel in these games mother 3 is a game where terrible things happen they happen out of nowhere and for reasons that are impossible to understand or comprehend it's about those moments that divide our lives into befores and afters and how there is no preparing for them and once they do happen there is no going back but it's also about learning to survive in the space after those moments because the world doesn't ever stop being funny or weird or beautiful after long enough you'll start to recognize that you'll start to notice that whatever pain you suffer you can ultimately survive it and make it a part of you you just have to live long enough to let that happen hell that is worth saying to me friends thank you for joining me today i hope you had a good time with this one and i just want to thank my patrons over at patreon.com forward slash super eyepatch where for a single dollar you can help me lose my mind in creating long elaborate video essays just like this one and this week in particular i'd like to thank camimon ashley haldy either apathetic gaiety or a pathetic gayety egg forest melanie lopez mama katrong and b as ever you can find me on the let's fight of boss video game podcast twitch.tv forward slash super eyepatchwolf or on twitter at ipatchwolf friends take care of yourselves and i'll see you next time

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 1,328,510

Keywords: Earthbound, Nintendo, Mother, Mother 2, Mother 3, Gygas, Ness, Lucas, Negative Man

Id: pP60Hs_Bv5o

Length: 43min 38sec (2618 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021