## 2025-02-08 The last time I played this game was the first time I played it, in 2008, when Tomato's fan-translation for it was released. I blew through it on an emulator on my laptop and was completely engrossed with it from beginning to end, despite having never played [[Earthbound]]. Despite all that, I actually...don't remember much of this game? Just the vibes and that the ending made me sad. So now, playing it again 17 years later, my feelings on it up to this point in the game (start of Chapter 7) have changed quite a bit! Or at least, gotten a lot more developed. The anti-capitalist themes flew over my head completely when I played the first time. Ironically, one of my few memories from my first playthrough is being pretty weirded out by the fact that the game has no currency system at the start. "I can just grab items and come back later for more?" People in Tazmily just help each other out for the sake of it. It's literally a socialist commune LMFAO. And then the Pig-Mask Army introduces capitalism and the whole place goes to hell. It's honestly really hard to watch. **Mother 3** also has a lot to say about grief and how to deal with it. The tragedy that occurs to Lucas and his family is the centerpiece of it all, but it's also the little griefs too. The grief you feel seeing the world around you change for the worse, the grief seeing the environment get more corrupt with every passing year, the grief you feel as people pick up and move to a new place without you. Walking into Tazmily after the time-skip felt exactly the same as when I walked past my old neighborhood and saw my favorite milkshake place having been replaced by a fucking Subway. Honestly I like the difference to **Earthbound** here, where rather than travel through a bunch of towns, you just see one town morph and change. You end up getting to be familiar with the extended cast - kind of like a **Trails** game, but you know, not needlessly verbose. One thing that's been interesting having now played **Earthbound** is how much more of a traditional [[JRPG]] Mother 3 feels. The dialogue is a lot less quirky than in **Earthbound**, to an extent. I mean there's definitely still silly throw-away lines, but the whole game is a lot more focused and plot-driven and a *lot* less subtle compared to its predecessor. I don't think one way is better than the other, just different. It's like the difference between **Snowpiercer** and **Parasite**. That said, I'm not particularly pleased with **Mother 3**'s pacing in retrospect. My God does it take time to get going. I genuinely think the whole chapter with Salsa could have been 80% shorter, too. It's wild that I only now feel like the game's finally starting to pick up and I'm basically near the end of it. It takes way too long to get to the time-skip. Also, the game is a lot more balanced in its gameplay compared to **Earthbound**, which is fine, but for some reason I liked being able to turn my party of pre-teens into psychic demi-gods in that game compared to this one. Not that either game is hard, but you know! That's a petty point. Oh also last thing: legitimately one of the most gorgeous 2D games I've ever played. The sheer amount of unique sprites they managed to stuff into this GBA cart is unreal to me. One example: Duster walks and runs with a limp. When you sneak into an area wearing Pig Mask outfits, they keep that limp animation even with the brand new sprites. It's small details like this that show how much love and care was given to **Mother 3**. I'm loving it and can't wait to see how hard the ending hits me this time. ## 2025-02-10 That's a wrap! Yeah this game still hits, years later. It's not as perfect as my protected memory would like to suggest, but it's still a fantastic game. I forgot about the homophobia with the magypsies[^1] in this game, but man is it bad! It's bad in like, a well-meaning, Swery65 sort of way, but it's still so bad. I want to describe it as "he a little confused, but he got the spirit!" but even that is impossible for me to do when you consider the scene where Lucas gains his psychic powers. It's a huge blemish on an otherwise fantastic game. Also, Reggie's entire design is just...*yikes*! I honestly think *this* is the biggest stuff holding [[Nintendo]] back from an official **Mother 3** localization. All that being said, the game still made me cry like a big fat baby, probably more than it did the first time I played it. I'm more intimately familiar with the grief that comes with being alive, which is the biggest reason why. The emotional pay-off of the journey is more than worth it. One thing that I do want to note is Porkey. I didn't really care about him much the first time I played, but now having finished **[[Earthbound]]**, I think it's kind of mandatory to play **Mother 3**. It's subtle, but his character arc is so interesting to me the more I walk away from the game, and I find it and his resolution the most unsettling part of the game. He claims to be such an evil little shit-head because he's bored, but the world he's created says otherwise. He desperately misses his past life - carefully reconstructing aspects of it everywhere he is, preserving items and dioramas of Ness and his adventures. He wants a friend so badly, but he's incapable of making that known in a health way. It all leads to him being stuck in the Absolutely Safe Capsule for eternity. > [!Quote] Shigesato Itoi > So 5.5 billion years from now, Porky will still be alive. ...But the grief of that is incredibly depressing to me. It's amazing... Porky is truly a poem in himself. I agree, and I think it's interesting that Itoi used the word "grief" to describe Porky as well, given how often I've used it writing about this game. He's a tragic character that was abused by his parents and just wanted someone to play with. He's still a huge piece of shit that doesn't deserve redemption, but it's hard not to mourn the person he could have been. It's funny. When I wrote my first entry at the start of this playthrough, I said that **Mother 3** was less subtle than its predecessor. In some ways that's true, but on a replay I realize that there's a lot that goes unsaid, too. It feels like a game that will always give me something new to think about on every replay, in every new chapter of my life. I could go on and on about it for hours. **Mother 3** is definitely not a perfect game. But it comes very, very close. [^1]: even their names!!! *even their names!!!*