“Hey man your wife is dead but I made you a cool knife I hope that helps”
Mother 3 is a 2006 RPG developed by Hal Laboratories and published by Nintendo. Development started in 1994 where it jumped from the SNES to the unreleased Nintendo 64 disk drive before finally landing on the Gameboy advance with a 16bit artstyle rather than the 3D art that had been previewed.
Because the initial release of its predecessor Earthbound was unsuccessful, Nintendo felt that it would be a waste of resources to translate a game released during the last days of the Gameboy Advance and it was never released in North America. However, as soon as the game was released, work began on an unofficial (read:a little illegal) translation patch of the game. Upwards of 30,000$ was allegedly spent on this translation to no material gain and it can now be played on most modern smartphones (until Nintendo decides they don’t want you to anymore).
I had never played Mother 3 or the original Earthbound (which despite its initial sales failure earned cult status years later), but having played it now, I fully understand why people are so desperate for Nintendo to let them throw money at it.
In this game you play as several characters: Lucas, a shy and quiet boy, his gruff and closed off dad and Duster, a little thief boy who lives in their town; as you navigate the characters grieving over the death of Lucas’s mother at the hands of monsters who have begun invading your idyllic town. At the same time as the monsters, you must investigate pig-faced people who have brought trade, money and capitalism to your town that has never known any of these things. It’s a story about the ways people react to grief; as well as the ways industrialization affects nature and small towns, as you watch your home expand and grow, bakeries turning into restaurants and inns turning into hotels.
Also it looks like this:
He’s lashing out at his neighbors after learning about the death of his wife in this scene. Really.
Yes, you may have noticed that this game was developed by HAL laboratories of Kirby fame. The whole game is rendered in this cutesy artstyle but not to worry! This game knows exactly how jarring the dissonance between theme and visuals is and plays with it the whole way through. It’s adorably childlike. You save by telling stories to frogs, you fight by pressing buttons to the incredibly catchy music and the dialogue has cute, silly moments like these throughout:
The game is self-aware enough to not try to constantly depress you (even the area preceding your mother’s grave is littered with tacky grave puns) but it also knows when it can shut up and let the sadness happen (the aforementioned scene of the father lashing out is a full uninterrupted minute and it’s as uncomfortable as it sounds).
The gameplay is as close to perfect as it can get. Combat is easy to learn turn-based fighting that incorporates a “ticking down” health system that gives you a chance to prevent frustrating last minute losses, and none of the playable characters in your party feel useless at all. Outside of combat feels fantastic. Your movement is exactly the speed it needs to be to explore the wide world without feeling frustrating and, not to be even dweebier than I normally am but I’d really like to talk about this room for a second:
You enter through the bottom door and there’s no indication that this bookshelf can be pushed to reveal a hole in the wall, but the two boxes encourage you to explore the room anyway. You go for the bottom left first to save, and then because there’s something in the way you go for the top right, which is juuuust high enough that if you turn around and go for the top left you’ll end up inadvertently walking into the bookshelf and pushing it to the left. It’s so clever! There’s no hints needed at all!
Unlike most of the games I’ve talked about, it’s not 100% guaranteed you’ll never be able to buy Mother 3 legally. Demand has been high for years and Nintendo recently accepted Undertale to its platform, a loving spiritual successor to Mother 3 by American Toby Fox. Every year, reports come out that mayyyybe this year there will be a modern rerelease of mother 3, it happens so often it’s become a bit of a joke but the only real obstacle to its release is that Nintendo doesn’t presently feel like it. If they ever do, I strongly recommend you check it out.
(Or you can just download it by googling “Mother 3 translation ROM”. I’m not a cop.)
Hardware Decay 