Mother 3 - TV Tropes
- ️Fri Nov 11 2011
Mother 3 is the long-awaited sequel to EarthBound and the third (and final) entry in Shigesato Itoi's Mother franchise. Like prior games, the game contains weird and quirky writing and gameplay which features deft employment of Mood Whiplash in its artistic story, and centers on a young boy with psychic powers and his friends — but in this game, the time and setting are vastly different, and the threat to humanity is much more earthly than it was long ago.
The story follows Lucas, a young boy living in the rural Tazmily Village along the Nowhere Islands. His family — doting mother Hinawa, eager brother Claus, kind canine Boney and gruff but loving father Flint — separate for the weekend while Hinawa visits her father with the boys in tow. While they're out of town, a mysterious technologically advanced army of men in pig-like masks begins invading the islands and stirring up all sorts of trouble, in particular taking forest animals and twisting them into horrific chimeras of flesh and steel. What's more, they introduce the once foreign concept of "money" to Tazmily Village, with the newfound emergence of greed and materialism threatening to drive the villagers away from one another. Once tragedy strikes, Lucas is forced to grow up fast to take on the pigmask army before it destroys the world he loves so dearly. While he receives aid from many allies (including party members Duster and Kumatora), it soon becomes clear that the scope of what's at stake is a lot larger than just the peace and quiet on the Nowhere Islands, especially when a mysterious Masked Man begins leading the Pigmasks...
Unlike its two predecessors, Mother 3 shifts focus several times between the main protagonist, his family, and the people (and sometimes animals!) who will become his allies — and true to its slogan, its story is regarded as the darkest (and most emotional) of the three games while retaining all of the silly charm which endeared its fans to begin with.
Mother 3 is notable for its long development cycle (approximately the length of the already-long production of the previous title), having been planned almost immediately after Mother 2 was released. Details began to surface of Mother 3 as a Nintendo 64 title — as part of the now-failed Nintendo 64DD add-on — and was even given the tentative worldwide title EarthBound 64 before falling into vaporware territory (its earliest development predated Duke Nukem Forever's, which didn't surpass its time in Development Hell until 2007). It was officially cancelled in 2000, but eventually resurfaced in 2003 and was finally released for the Game Boy Advance in 2006 — apparently due to renewed interest while Mother 1+2 was being worked on. However, Nintendo has yet to release the game outside of Japan, despite vocal campaigns of support for an international release. Lucas eventually saw international recognition due to his inclusion in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
Nintendo would end up not releasing the game outside of Japan, as not only did EarthBound horrifically undersell in North America, but the GBA was also all but dead in North America and Europe by the time Mother 3 released; by 2006, they had effectively stopped releasing first-party games for the system in Western markets in favor of focusing on the Nintendo DS. In response, a project to create an English-language Fan Translation began, which took two years to complete. Releasing in 2008, the fan translation would later receive an update in 2014 that fixed up minor typos, grammatical errors, and bugs; it can be found here
, though you'll need an official copy of the game to play it. As it stands, the translation is currently the only way to ever play the game in a language that is not Japanese. For ease of reference, this unofficial translation is the primary source for tropes.
This game provides examples of:
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