Is this game really short or what? I’m not done yet, but I know there’s eight chapters, and I’m on chapter 7. Based on the circumstances, I would guess that I’m more than halfway done with chapter 7 as well…I’m about to try and pull the fifth needle out, and my last save is clocked at 11:37. So what’s the deal? I mean, I don’t mind, but am I in for a crazy surprise when chapter 8 is like half of the game’s length or something?
I’ll post the review here when it’s ready. (also coming soon: a review of FF4: The After Years. I finished the game like a month ago, but it sucks so bad that I’m having trouble caring enough to edit the review properly.)
EDIT: Review’s up.
The creator of the Earthbound series (known as Mother in Japan), Shigesato Itoi, says he believes that over half of a game’s story is assigned meaning by the player. I really don’t agree with this; in fact, the meaning I tried to assign to the story of Mother 3 - the Game Boy Advance sequel to Earthbound that never made it to the U.S - was completely ruined by the contents of the story. I fault the game for this, as it seemed to tell a story about one thing and then dropped it for something completely superficial at the end. So, I assigned a new meaning to the game: A poor climax can ruin a story - that’s what Mother 3 is now about to me.
You might read that and think “No way! The end of a story is just one part; it doesn’t ruin the story!” This might be true in a story that has no depth. But, before you sit back, smug and confident that I’m wrong, humour me by listening to a couple of alternate endings I wrote to popular pieces of literature:
In 1984 by George Orwell, Winston Smith uses his cunning to make an escape from the Ministry of Love, finds some cool weapons like a laser and a rocket launcher. He then busts his girlfriend out of captivity and tears down the established government in a blaze of sheer manliness that one could only see in a first-person shooter or testosterone-laden action film like The Fast and the Furious.
In Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, George and Lenny escape Curley and the mob of workers, do some odd jobs, and eventually meet up with Candy again. They then purchase their dream farm and live out their dream in peace for the rest of their days. Curley made his peace with Lenny and continued life without the need to satiate his anger with violent retribution. They all lived happily ever after.
If you’ve read these novels, you would know that these endings are not only stupid, but they complete trivialize their stories as pieces of meaningful literature. I am indeed asserting that Mother 3 alluded to a significant theme, and completely blew it at the end.
Mother 3 opens with a heavy focus on a family: Flint and Hinawa, the husband and wife; and Claus and Lucas, the young twin brothers. They live in the simple, peaceful village of Tazmily. In Tazmily, there is very little excess; there is no frivolous technology, nor is there much technology to make life easier. Houses are made of simple wood, and there is no money - not even a barter economy. Instead, people simply live and work to help each other out. It’s very idyllic and utopian in its simplicity.
Tragedy befalls the family one night when Hinawa and the boys are coming back home to the village through a forest. They don’t get back in a timely manner, and to make matters worse, on that rainy night that they’re to arrive, the forest catches fire. Flint and the other townspeople work on saving the villagers, putting out the fire, and finding Hinawa and the boys. What they find instead is a strange army of men in pig masks with strange metal machines they have never seen before. These people are using the machines to modify plants and animals with machinery, or even other animals. In any case, after fending them off, Flint eventually finds the boys…but Hinawa is gone forever.
After this event, life begins to slowly change for Tazmily. Nevermind the local flora and fauna being altered, but lightning begins to strike things sporadically at any given moment, and a peddler by the name of Fassad comes to assure the people of Tazmily that they can be happy if they just take one of his Happy Boxes. The people of Tazmily are reluctant at first, but eventually take the Happy Boxes into their homes. The city then begins to modernize into a materialistic society.
Do you see what this is hinting at? Even the logo of Mother 3 has the words constructed of an odd mixture of wood and metal, implying an uncomfortable, unnaturalization of something that was once untainted. Excuse me if this sounds a bit punk rock or conspiracy theorist, but in the modern world, we are brainwashed to think that we won’t be happy unless we have things - better products, better technology, easier lives; in other words, material wealth. Why do we think that? Because commercials and advertisements tell us. We buy name brands because they’re the names we see the most often. We watch the most popular movies and play the most popular video games. How did they get so popular before they were even released? Hype and advertisement. All of these things skew what truly brings a sense of happiness and fulfillment in life. Being a materialist myself, I won’t argue that material wealth can bring happiness, but there is a line that has to be drawn. To put it in a succinct, corny manner, materials can’t bring someone “true happiness”.
This is what Mother 3 spends half of the game establishing. This theme is pretty sound right up until the end of the game, where it’s all shrugged off for some random throwbacks to Earthbound, the game’s predecessor, and a final tear-jerking climax. Yes, the climax was powerful emotionally, and I totally almost cried. No, it was not a good ending. It had absolutely NOTHING to do with what the rest of the game was about, so while everything wound up peachy keen at the end, the climax was a huge waste of potential.
This is the problem with leaving it up to the audience to assign definitive meaning to the majority of a story; if you do that, you’re not really telling a story ABOUT anything. You’re just throwing out a bunch of words and symbols, and inviting your viewer to desperately pick it up and weave it into something. Maybe this is preferable to a lot of people; the Mother series has a very strong cult following, and its fans tend to really love everything about it. I, however, just don’t get it. If you have something to say, tell me a story about it. If you have many things to say, tell me many stories. I’m not interested in a story that bombards me with many points and meets me halfway on all of them; if I was, I’d write my own damn story.
Anyways, other than that, the game itself is pretty standard. It’s presented in 2D isometric view, and it contains standard turn-based RPG combat. There is a twist though, and that’s the musical battle system. When attacking with a physical attack, a player can press the “A” button on the downbeat of a song for up to sixteen consecutive hits. This, however, is a huge gimmick, because the damage scales down too heavily after the first 4-6 hits for it to matter if you keep going. More importantly, the way damage is dealt to your characters in Mother 3 makes it a bad idea to do the full sixteen hits, even if you can do it with ease. You see, when a character suffers damage, it isn’t all dealt immediately; their HP slowly rolls down, slot-machine style. So, if a character gets hit for an attack that would kill them, you have time to use an item and heal them if you’re quick enough to do it before their HP drops to 0. As such, it’s usually a bad idea to take advantage of the musical combat, as it makes normal attacks last exponentially longer than they would if you just hit the enemy once. Overall, though, the combat isn’t bad, though it is a bit grindey.
A poor climax can ruin a story. Can it ruin a game? I’m still not sure of that yet; it didn’t in this case, after all. Mother 3 wasn’t unenjoyable to play by any means. It had a good mix of drama and humour, it never flitted drastically between dire seriousness and ridiculous humour quite like Earthbound did, and to top it off, it was really short (I finished it in about seventeen hours). I would probably recommend it to anyone who was a fan of the Earthbound games, as well.
Still, I can’t shake the immense feeling of disappointment I suffered when I saw how the game came to an end. After playing Mother 3, I’m convinced that I’m just not a fan of Mr. Itoi’s storytelling. Being asked to give a story my own meaning means that it will never give me a new perspective. Instead, I’ll always base things off of my own experience, I’ll never learn anything, and I’ll never grow as a person from them. And what’s the fun of that? When did that become the goal, the true beauty of storytelling?