Who said the Game Boy Advance is dead? I'll hear none of it. I may not have used mine to the fullest extent, but it sure was host to a great many must-play titles. Most of which I completely missed out on at the time, and now one of which that damn near everyone outside of Japan missed: Mother 3.
The concluding part of the Mother series, you'll be controlling distinctly pixelly characters as they face off against more weird alien foes in an RPG like no other. If you can read Japanese...
Fun Times
The Mother series of RPGs is really rather well received by those who play them. When one gets locked to a region that isn't your own, but you absolutely must play it, what are you going to do? Import it? Learn Japanese? Hope that it's a short wait for a release in your region?
To date, there is no official Mother 3 release in English. Two years after its release, however, came the Mother 3 fan translation, which I'm emulating here. I sure hope the dedicated community brushed up on their Japanese before embarking on what must have been a monumental endeavour. Long live fan communities.
After naming our cast of characters - a family and their dog - we get to see their little staycation with their grandfather, Alec, up in the mountains. Golden skies, farmyard animals, friendly dinosaurs that love being subjects of shoulder barge training, talking crickets looking for a fight, and your choice of favourite food (crumble, if you're me) make for an introduction to the controls.
Mother Fran writes a letter to father Franklin. Yes, I do wish I had a heads up on the naming before being given the keyboard. It's a lengthy letter telling him how good this was for the boys, and how, next time, he should be here with them.
Tomorrow, they'll tell him all about it. If they make it through the night...
The forest between father and family is engulfed in flames. In a community as tight as that in Tazmily Village, there's only one thing to do in this situation: roll up our sleeves and get stuck in. The town bell rings loud. You can't not be aware of something happening tonight.
I was already enjoying what I was seeing in Mother 3, the art style is lovely. And then I saw the town bell and its ringer.
Genius. I don't know how direct or accurate the translation is - translators often have to tweak things so that dialogue makes sense in different languages - but so far, this fan translation doesn't feel half-arsed or homemade at all.
As we progress through the forest, the creatures of the night are as spooked as some of the townsfolk, and they show it by attacking us. The combat system is a simple turn-based affair. Select an action, like a basic attack, select a target, wait for the system to dish out the damage and keep going until one side drops out of the fight.
It's a lot of the A-button, at the moment anyway, but with weird creatures and weirder battle descriptions.
While 'Lighter' and 'Fuel' are names that scream out 'firestarters', we have been catching glimpses of masked beings in the forest, and it's actually these guys who are causing all the problems. We don't know why, but I'm sure we're determined to find out.
After finding Lighter, we have more cause for concern - strange insects blocking our way, never before seen in these parts.
You'd think that three flies against a cowboy with a +2 stick would be an easy fight, but I had to scoff a piece of Nut Bread or two to survive this one. Mother 3 doesn't mess around. It may look cartoony and approachable, but make no mistake, this is a solid RPG that demands some attention.
See what I mean? You think you can take on a flying rat in a burning log cabin without preparation? It's that attitude that'll get you killed. It got me killed. I didn't want to be killed this early on - though I was probably playing for half an hour by this point.
There's a kid to save from this fire. Get up, and kill that rat.
Returning Fuel to his father, we get a chance to reflect. I'd been playing for a long time already, but it was time that flew by. The story just kept me playing. It wasn't the first time an RPG opened with a rescue mission, but it was one that engaged me more than most. Was it the writing? The graphics? The relative ease of the gameplay?
It was probably all of the above, but there was one thing I was working towards...
Ohhh shiiiii...
Now that's a call to action. The fire was one thing. Missing family? That's quite another. We need help.
Once again, the village bands together. Once again we trek through the forest, defending ourselves from Yamonsters (angry vegetables) and Snakes. Monkey gives us hope, finding a scrap of cloth high on a cliff we can't climb. Wess, a villager everyone sees as too old to be useful proves otherwise, entrusting Monkey with a manky sock stinking of his skilful son, who for reasons involving having no good ideas, I named Barry.
This is the subtle introduction of character skills. Barry can jam giant staples into walls to create ladders, the exact skill we need in these cliff-climbing circumstances.
The top of the cliff is home to more of these alien fellas, clearly up to no good. We do what any human would do in this situation, and put our foot right in it.
Yes, Barry! Kick him! Kick this abomination in the face!
The fight didn't start too well, with Barry and Monkey falling early, leaving just me against the Caribou. Bashing and kicking it would take too long, so I had a look at the skills I had. Power Smash seemed appropriate, though it did miss on the first attempt. A couple more - along with the odd health item shoved into my mouth - and the Caribou is no more.
The aliens got away, and we've run into a dead end. But we need to find our family, damn it. Returning back to the forest, we learn that our kids have been found and pulled from the river. But what about our wife?
After Lighter wallops us across the back of the head, our world turns black. We get a flashback of the last time we saw Fran. We wake up in jail as the first person in the village to be put there. I really need a save frog.
Oh, yeah, the frogs are save points in Mother 3. Just go with it.
Final Word
This was over an hour of gaming by the time I finally had a good break in the story to call it, and then I had to run around the village looking for a save point. My son helped me break out of jail using a nail file hidden in an apple. Just go with that, as well.
I've not played the Mother series outside of whatever small amounts I've played for the 1001 list. I think I started watching a playthrough of one of them, but don't recall finishing it. From all I've seen and heard, though, these games are rightly applauded.
Not only applauded but absolutely cherished by the fans. I know the efforts that go into creating stuff for board games, and even though I've spent hours upon hours doing all of that, I can't even begin to imagine the efforts involved in getting a Japanese GBA game, translating it in its entirety, and releasing it to players desperate to experience something they're 'not allowed' to.
It's an RPG for goodness sake. They've got thousands of lines to translate in a short game. I've no idea how lengthy Mother 3 is. I'd never know, were it not for fans spreading the word of its existence across the world.
I want to keep playing this game. I'm definitely invested in the story so far, but now I'm wondering if I should go back to the first Mother and take it from there. I read this story is loosely connected to that of Mother 2, but it's still connected somehow.
I've no idea how hard this game will become, how huge its world is, how long its story is. I don't know what its story is even about - I haven't been told that I'm the only saviour of the world or anything. How refreshing, to have an RPG just begin with relatable threats, and no mention of being a star child or something.
From what little I've seen, then, do I recommend it? Definitely. First impressions are important, and Mother 3 has made a good one. Or it's fan translation certainly has...
Fun Facts
Originally in development way back in 1994, Mother 3 would switch over to the Nintendo 64, then the N64DD when the game proved too big, cancelled entirely, only being brought back after the release of Mother 1+2 when - you guessed it - fans demanded another game.
Mother 3, developed by Brownie Brown, Hal Laboratory, first released in 2006.
Version played: Mother 3 fan translation, GBA, 2008, via emulation.