Mother 3 Plot Synopsis and Discussion
Jun. 7th, 2011 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroMother 3 is a story about innocence lost. Also a story about a father spiraling into depression and his sons being forced to grow up too fast. And a story about sibling rivalry. And a commentary on modern society and rural versus urban life. And a condemnation of living in the past. And a Lovecraftian horror story. And a grand quest to retrieve the seven macguffins before the evil empire does. And a story about stories in general.
But primarily, Mother 3 is a story about the end of the world.
The story takes place in the Nowhere Islands, in the peaceful Tazmily Village, where people live in harmony with nature and with each other. Chapter 1 follows Flint and his dog Boney, as he attempts to save his wife and children when mysterious pig-masked men set fire to the forest and release strange creatures into the wild. When one of these creatures kills his wife and one of his sons goes missing, Flint loses it and is barely seen again. He spends the rest of the game searching for one son, while effectively abandoning the other.
Chapter 2 features Duster, a thief-in-training who is dispatched by his verbally abusive father to retrieve an item from the haunted Osohe Castle. He recruits Princess Kumatora and they retrieve the item, but Duster disappears. Chapter 3 features Salsa, an abused monkey used by the villain Fassad and the pigmasks, and shows the flipside of some events from Chapter 2. (And when I say “abused”, I mean the sort of constant and meaningless cruelty that turns lab mice into quivering wrecks. The Slacktivist community would require a “trigger warning” for the chapter. Fassad’s eventual comeuppance is a reason for cheer.)
Chapter 4 begins the game in earnest, with a three-year time skip, the introduction of money, and Lucas (the non-missing son) as the main character. Though there’s a bunch of rotation, you’ll keep Lucas until the end of the game and the party will always include Boney, Kumatora, Duster and/or Salsa. After the time skip, the idyllic Tazmily has become a modern suburb, mostly due to the introduction of “happy boxes” and the destruction (by mysterious lightning) of any home that doesn’t have one. Lucas finds the rest of the party and learns more about the pigmasks, then in Chapter 5 destroys the Thunder Tower that’s causing the lightning.
Chapter 6 is a brief scene in sunflowers where Lucas meets the ghost of his mother while falling from an airship.
Chapter 7 introduces the "real" story, and is the longest chapter by far. The Magypsies (immortal psionic crossdressers, apparently) reveal that the islands the story has been taking place on are actually a giant dragon, kept asleep by seven needles. Someone has pulled one of the needles, and since the dragon's actions upon awaking will depend on the heart of whoever pulls the needles, Lucas needs to pull the rest of them.
This is the point where elements from the previous game really start showing up. Dr. Andonuts, from Earthbound, reappears. As do the Mr. Saturns of Saturn Valley. Near the end of the game (if you hadn’t caught on already), the villain is revealed as Porky/Pokey from Earthbound, the final town includes a theater showing scenes from Earthbound, and the final dungeon includes a gondola ride past various props and modes of transportation from Earthbound. You even get to pick up the Pencil Eraser (which the fan translators dutifully changed from the Japanese Octopus Eraser, just like in the Earthbound localization) and use it on a statue. For no reason. The final dungeon is also very reminiscent of the final dungeon in Earthbound. (Though in a humorous twist: In Earthbound, the map-screen icon of the robot enemies in the final area was a metallic diamond. In Mother 3, the map icon is the same, but the enemies are now giant metallic diamonds.)
Lucas discovers that someone else—a mysterious masked man working for the pigmasks—has also been pulling the needles. By the end of the chapter, they’ve each pulled three. (This chapter also includes the required snowy dungeon, lava dungeon, and underwater dungeon.) This chapter also includes a Mushroom Samba, where you meet hallucinations of characters from earlier in the game and they say terrible things to you. Also, you go swimming in sewage.
When you reach Chapter 8, a minor character who appeared in the early chapters explains the true history of the Nowhere Islands: The dragon allowed these islands to survive the end of the world, and a few people escaped to them in a white ship. They then erased their memories and replaced them with a fabricated story, working in things like Osohe Castle which had already been there. The Egg of Light that had been a macguffin early on actually held the original memories. Then Porky (Pokey in Earthbound) showed up in the Time Distorter, and brought brainwashed pigmasks from other eras. He created the chimera monsters, built Thunder Tower, and apparently learned the truth of the island from a traitor Magypsy. (Even later, you can figure out that recurring boss Fassad was Locria, the traitor Magypsy.)
By this point, Porky has managed to reverse any good intentions the people of Tazmily might have had—he’s corrupted them to the point where they’re all happily living in his cardboard “New Pork City”, where the only nature is in a garbage-filled dump. The party battles to the top of the Empire Porky Building to take the battle to the man himself.
Porky is completely out of his mind, apparently bent on the destruction of humanity but still given to stupidly childish flights of fancy and ideas of fun. Because of his time-travelling, he's stopped aging as some kind of mummy-thing and doesn't know how old he is any more. He seems pretty convinced he's totally immortal and would survive the dragon destroying everything, for that matter. Which makes his final comeuppance particularly horrific: At the end of your battle with him, he seals himself into an "Absolutely Safe Capsule" which protects him from all harm. Which he can never get out of. Safe for all eternity, he'll be alone and undying in this capsule. Dr. Andonuts muses that perhaps this is what Porky actually wanted.
Many of Porky's attacks are "??? What did Porky do?", reminiscent of Gygas' "You cannot grasp the nature of Gygas's attack!" in the first two games. Porky had effectively become an eldritch abomination. More than that, he’s representative of humanity, because he was the corrupting influence from the “old” world that destroyed itself. Given that Gygas was the linking factor of the first two games—and was an alien that had been raised by humans in his first appearance—this particular connection is even more appropriate.
The final battle pits Lucas against the masked man for control of the final needle; the masked man being none other than his missing brother Claus. Similarly to the other two games, this battle can’t be won by fighting, only by waiting out the bosses attacks as he is psychologically worn down.
Then Lucas pulled the final needle, and the island is destroyed as rocks rain from the heavens and earthquakes shake the ground.
The ending, done as a serious of conversations against a black screen, assures the player that everyone survived just fine, and they’re all somewhere, safe and happy. Which is about all the epilogue you can expect, really, given that the dragon and the needles only seem to exist to create a quest, and the real stories are about Lucas’s family, Porky, and the people of Tazmily. It doesn't really matter what happens "after the end", because we just spent the game seeing what people do after the end. And I’m just fine with that.
But primarily, Mother 3 is a story about the end of the world.
The story takes place in the Nowhere Islands, in the peaceful Tazmily Village, where people live in harmony with nature and with each other. Chapter 1 follows Flint and his dog Boney, as he attempts to save his wife and children when mysterious pig-masked men set fire to the forest and release strange creatures into the wild. When one of these creatures kills his wife and one of his sons goes missing, Flint loses it and is barely seen again. He spends the rest of the game searching for one son, while effectively abandoning the other.
Chapter 2 features Duster, a thief-in-training who is dispatched by his verbally abusive father to retrieve an item from the haunted Osohe Castle. He recruits Princess Kumatora and they retrieve the item, but Duster disappears. Chapter 3 features Salsa, an abused monkey used by the villain Fassad and the pigmasks, and shows the flipside of some events from Chapter 2. (And when I say “abused”, I mean the sort of constant and meaningless cruelty that turns lab mice into quivering wrecks. The Slacktivist community would require a “trigger warning” for the chapter. Fassad’s eventual comeuppance is a reason for cheer.)
Chapter 4 begins the game in earnest, with a three-year time skip, the introduction of money, and Lucas (the non-missing son) as the main character. Though there’s a bunch of rotation, you’ll keep Lucas until the end of the game and the party will always include Boney, Kumatora, Duster and/or Salsa. After the time skip, the idyllic Tazmily has become a modern suburb, mostly due to the introduction of “happy boxes” and the destruction (by mysterious lightning) of any home that doesn’t have one. Lucas finds the rest of the party and learns more about the pigmasks, then in Chapter 5 destroys the Thunder Tower that’s causing the lightning.
Chapter 6 is a brief scene in sunflowers where Lucas meets the ghost of his mother while falling from an airship.
Chapter 7 introduces the "real" story, and is the longest chapter by far. The Magypsies (immortal psionic crossdressers, apparently) reveal that the islands the story has been taking place on are actually a giant dragon, kept asleep by seven needles. Someone has pulled one of the needles, and since the dragon's actions upon awaking will depend on the heart of whoever pulls the needles, Lucas needs to pull the rest of them.
This is the point where elements from the previous game really start showing up. Dr. Andonuts, from Earthbound, reappears. As do the Mr. Saturns of Saturn Valley. Near the end of the game (if you hadn’t caught on already), the villain is revealed as Porky/Pokey from Earthbound, the final town includes a theater showing scenes from Earthbound, and the final dungeon includes a gondola ride past various props and modes of transportation from Earthbound. You even get to pick up the Pencil Eraser (which the fan translators dutifully changed from the Japanese Octopus Eraser, just like in the Earthbound localization) and use it on a statue. For no reason. The final dungeon is also very reminiscent of the final dungeon in Earthbound. (Though in a humorous twist: In Earthbound, the map-screen icon of the robot enemies in the final area was a metallic diamond. In Mother 3, the map icon is the same, but the enemies are now giant metallic diamonds.)
Lucas discovers that someone else—a mysterious masked man working for the pigmasks—has also been pulling the needles. By the end of the chapter, they’ve each pulled three. (This chapter also includes the required snowy dungeon, lava dungeon, and underwater dungeon.) This chapter also includes a Mushroom Samba, where you meet hallucinations of characters from earlier in the game and they say terrible things to you. Also, you go swimming in sewage.
When you reach Chapter 8, a minor character who appeared in the early chapters explains the true history of the Nowhere Islands: The dragon allowed these islands to survive the end of the world, and a few people escaped to them in a white ship. They then erased their memories and replaced them with a fabricated story, working in things like Osohe Castle which had already been there. The Egg of Light that had been a macguffin early on actually held the original memories. Then Porky (Pokey in Earthbound) showed up in the Time Distorter, and brought brainwashed pigmasks from other eras. He created the chimera monsters, built Thunder Tower, and apparently learned the truth of the island from a traitor Magypsy. (Even later, you can figure out that recurring boss Fassad was Locria, the traitor Magypsy.)
By this point, Porky has managed to reverse any good intentions the people of Tazmily might have had—he’s corrupted them to the point where they’re all happily living in his cardboard “New Pork City”, where the only nature is in a garbage-filled dump. The party battles to the top of the Empire Porky Building to take the battle to the man himself.
Porky is completely out of his mind, apparently bent on the destruction of humanity but still given to stupidly childish flights of fancy and ideas of fun. Because of his time-travelling, he's stopped aging as some kind of mummy-thing and doesn't know how old he is any more. He seems pretty convinced he's totally immortal and would survive the dragon destroying everything, for that matter. Which makes his final comeuppance particularly horrific: At the end of your battle with him, he seals himself into an "Absolutely Safe Capsule" which protects him from all harm. Which he can never get out of. Safe for all eternity, he'll be alone and undying in this capsule. Dr. Andonuts muses that perhaps this is what Porky actually wanted.
Many of Porky's attacks are "??? What did Porky do?", reminiscent of Gygas' "You cannot grasp the nature of Gygas's attack!" in the first two games. Porky had effectively become an eldritch abomination. More than that, he’s representative of humanity, because he was the corrupting influence from the “old” world that destroyed itself. Given that Gygas was the linking factor of the first two games—and was an alien that had been raised by humans in his first appearance—this particular connection is even more appropriate.
The final battle pits Lucas against the masked man for control of the final needle; the masked man being none other than his missing brother Claus. Similarly to the other two games, this battle can’t be won by fighting, only by waiting out the bosses attacks as he is psychologically worn down.
Then Lucas pulled the final needle, and the island is destroyed as rocks rain from the heavens and earthquakes shake the ground.
The ending, done as a serious of conversations against a black screen, assures the player that everyone survived just fine, and they’re all somewhere, safe and happy. Which is about all the epilogue you can expect, really, given that the dragon and the needles only seem to exist to create a quest, and the real stories are about Lucas’s family, Porky, and the people of Tazmily. It doesn't really matter what happens "after the end", because we just spent the game seeing what people do after the end. And I’m just fine with that.
