To put in one word, the greatest RPG ever. Mother 3 the 3rd installment in the ever so great Mother/EB series combines excellent story telling with intuitive gameplay and a great sound track. Mother 3, unlike previous mother games has the game divided into 8 chapters with each chapter having a different main character for chapters 1-3. for example in the first chapter you control Flint, a cool cowboy-ish character. Chapter 2&3 take place during the same time but through the eyes of different characters, and from chapter 4 and on(which takes place a few years after the first 3 chapters) you play as Lucas, Flint's son. Reading this might not make allot of sense but once you start playing the game you will be amazed by the extremely well thought out story line. Another change is that instead of traveling for town to town, most of the game revolves around one town, the village of Tatsumairi on the Nowhere Islands. This may sound boring but the village goes through one drastic change and smaller changes through out the game, keeping it fun to walk around the village once in a while. Although at a first look this game seems to have no connections to past Mother games, but later on when you learn who is behind all of this you will figure out the connections with the cliff-hanger ending of Mother 2. Now, the battle system of mother 3 is while mostly the same as mother 2 has been spiced up a bit, using something called the "sound battle" system, this makes it so when you attack, if you press A to the rhythm of the battle music you can pull off combos, thus doing more damage. Although this is never mandatory, it will help you out during tough boss fights. The sound track for this game is one of the best featuring an outstanding 250 different pieces that are all a treat to the ear. There may be a few things people might dislike such as the shortness of the game, no real side quests, and the slightly unconvincing ending but every second of the 20-30 hours that you take to beat the game is so great that you feel like beating the game all over again right after you beat it (thats what I did). One warning: if you can't read Japanese don't play it, you will miss out on all the humorous yet compelling dialogue that truely shapes the game. So if you played the game without knowing what they are saying or using the English translations and didn't like it, instead of saying "this game was stupid" or "it sucked" go learn Japanese and play it again trust me you'll love it, unless your a complete Idiot who dosen't care about storylines or dialogue, which to me is 80% of an RPG in this age( it wasn't in the 1980s though). Over all this game is an amazing game that in a way is beyond a game, more like a beautiful epic about family love and what true courage is, and of course with great gameplay and truly lives up to its promo "Bizarre and fun, yet heartrending" (or something like that, I forgot its exact translation but it was something like that).
The Mother series (known as Earthbound outside Japan) has become a cult phenomenon over the years due to its quirkiness, originality, and deviations from the RPG norm. While Mother 3 doesn't break as much new ground as ... Read Full Review
In case many of you don't know, Mother 3 is the sequel to the excellent RPG for the SNES, Earthbound. However, there is no Ness. No Jeff, either. Instead, the protagonists are a cowboy named Flint, two boys Lucas and Cla... Read Full Review
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