Mother 3 (2006)

If this picture doesn't make you want to play Mother 3, none of my words will either.

Continuing my pursuit of "next-level" video games, I found a way to get my hands on this one and give it a go. This game was released in Japan in 2006 for the Game Boy Advance. The story of its coming to be is almost as good as the game's plot. It's a sequel to Earthbound (Mother 2 in Japan), a SNES game that saw release in the US but meager sales (and which I think I can safely credit for turning my cousin into an RPG-head like me). This title was in development for N64 as Earthbound, and spent five years in development for the Nintendo 64 DD drive that never came out, before finally being cancelled along with the peripheral in 2000. Three years later, Nintendo asked the developer, Shigesato Itoi, if he wanted to take another crack at the game for the Game Boy Advance. Three years after that, the game drew near.

Eager Earthbound fans waited for the announcement of an English release that never came, then took matters into their own hands and created a fan translation, an increasingly common occurrence for games that have a small but very dedicated fanbase outside Japan. Not knowing Japanese, I played the translation.

It's pretty short for an RPG; unlike DQ8 which as in my previous post I mentioned took 200,000 hours, I finished this one in just over 20. (As an aside, I wonder if they couldn't make viewing the game clock optional. It's an unavoidable sinking feeling that I get when I see I've put in almost three days of work hours on a piece of entertainment. Maybe this calls for better time management instead.)

It's also better than Earthbound, by a lot.

Those little musical notes you see in the battle screen are one of the keys to Mother 3's fantabulousness. There's a hidden rhythm game built into every battle, where if you start your attack and time it with the beat of the music, you can score up to 16-hit combos and make grinding/leveling MUCH less of an issue to getting the story. But there are an insane amount of battle songs (~20 each with 2-3 variations) and as you get further into the game, there are changeups or stops in the beat that will throw you off, so you really have to pay attention (or settle for 4-hit combos as I did). I think I only had to grind once in the middle for about a half hour, and even then I overshot the mark and made the next boss too easy.

The second awesome gameplay mechanic is the rolling HP meter. Say you have 100 HP and the enemy smacks you for 110 HP damage. In another game, you'd just keel over dead. In Mother 3, your meter goes into a countdown toward 0 HP. This leaves you a (very short) time to select a heal item or cure spell to rescue yourself from death. The rolling means battles can get frantic in an instant, with lots of A-button pushing to flip through everyone's actions so you can get to the healing before the character dies. There were moments in the boss battles near the end where all four of my guys' meters were either going up from being healed near death, or going down toward death. It was a flurry of numbers that heightened the excitement beyond a standard RPG where you can spend hours thinking about your next turn.

Also, while Earthbound looked goofy for the sake of being goofy (tweaking many of the prevailing RPG conventions of the first few generations of gaming), Mother 3 takes the same pixellated children's-story approach but destroys your heart with a tragedy of loss, exploitation, and commercialization. Not BSing here, that's what it's about. And yes, it manages to do that AND still be tons of fun.

SPOILER LINK ALERT: The end might leave you scratching your head, but this interview with developer Itoi sheds light on what he believes it means.

I've discovered a site that shares many of my sensibilities regarding "pushing" the video game format beyond its kid-centric origins to more of an art form. They published this list of the "best" games of all time, and unlike many junky Internet lists, I actually agree with most of it...except Secret of Evermore over Secret of Mana, no frickin' way.