Best known to western audiences at “The game with the blonde kid from smash”, Mother 3 is the magnum opus of Japanese copywriter Shigesato Itoi and is without a doubt the single most underappreciated game ever made.
Mother 3 presents itself as the lovechild of The Hitchiker’s Guide To the Galaxy and traditional turn based JRPGs like Dragon Quest. Released on the Gameboy in April of 2006 after more than a decade in development hell, Mother 3 closed out the Mother series with a final act of narrative brilliance. Itoi approached the Mother series with the intent of subverting the longstanding tropes of the RPG genre. With Mother 3, he sought to turn what he called the “Road Movie” trope on its head. The “Road Movie” trope as Itoi described it classified the traditional RPG story as a sort of road trip. The protagonist travels from town to town, experiencing independent episodic arcs in each. With Mother 3, Itoi wanted to create an RPG that took place in a single location that changed over time. In order to achieve this vision, each aspect of Mother 3’s Tazmily Village needed to be meticulously crafted. Every actor the player meets throughout their adventure across the Nowhere Islands has their own personal story, regardless of their importance to the plot.
I think one of the most palpable examples of these personal stories is Duster, one of the player characters. Duster was born out of Itoi’s desire to make Mother 3 a more inclusive experience, specifically the desire to represent a disabled character within his world. Duster is a master thief who walks with a limp, which is implied to be a result of an injury inflicted on him during his father’s insensitive training. Even in that single relationship between two characters whose significance to the overarching plot is rather slim, Mother 3 betrays the narrative depth that you’d expect of any great work of literature.
Tazmily Village, the primary setting for Mother 3, changes drastically as the game progresses through its various theater inspired acts. When the game begins, Tazmily Village exists as a rural utopia. There is no concept of money, and the people of Tazmily live comfortably alongside nature. As the games plot unfolds, Tazmily is slowly corrupted by outside forces, morphing into a larger urban center. As the village changes so do its people. The tone of the game is defined by its multitude of side characters, each of whom changes and naturally responds to the changes that occur over the games multi-year plot. The player is able to document the fall of Mother 3’s utopia through the perspective of the games tragic protagonist Lucas. Due to his unique circumstances, Lucas is resistant to the corruption that slowly consumes his home of Tazmily Village. As a sort of outsider to the village, Lucas provides an unbiased vantage point from which the player can judge the nature of the change that consumes the idyllic location.
Mother 3’s rather dark plot is offset by the absurdist comedy that pervades every aspect of the game. From the iconic enemy designs like “Negative Man”, who spends most turns in battle telling the player how depressed he is, to the frogs littered around the world that allow Lucas to save his progress, Mother 3 never takes itself too seriously. The comfortable distance between the game’s humor and its dark undertones make its narrative significantly more digestible.
One of the more interesting things about Mother 3’s narrative is that while it isn’t in direct conversation with its gameplay mechanics, it wouldn’t be able to present itself in any form other than a game. Because it uses a third person camera and very often presents the game from the perspective of characters other than Lucas himself, Mother 3 relies on gameplay to allow the player to identify with its protagonists. While the player is never able to personally enter the minds of any of the individual player characters, the consistency in their uses in combat lends a very genuine sense of identity to each character that doesn’t come through story alone.
Mother 3 is masterpiece of digital storytelling. The culmination of years of experience from an artist who has had his hand in every facet of written works. While I wanted to focus on the narrative for this blog post, there’s so much that went into this game. From the odd sound design (some tracks are written in 29/16 time) to the incredibly forward thinking presentation of genderqueer individuals, everything about this game is worthy of analysis. If this post has convinced you to play this game, send me a message on slack and I’ll send you everything you’d need to play it on a computer. I hope this convinces at least one person to experience what I believe to be the greatest game ever made.
Comments