Not just a matter of "oh yay weird shit", there's no shortage of that. I mean in terms of, like ... fuck it i'll just spoilertag the whole thing. Not safe for spoilers if you haven't beaten the game.
Likewise for my response!
[spoiler]The very tiny world in which you play, which I think goes hand in hand with a focus that's a lot more "go fetch this plot coupon" and a lot less of exploration. I thought the cast was pretty lackluster, with most of the people you interact with having essentially nothing to them except that interaction ... and really, is "Lucas's dog" really the best they can do for the fourth party member? The plot came off as a lot more lockstep than Earthbound's did, with your actions being essentially limited to "Go to the place we marked on your map for your next widget", and little to no reason to go back to anywhere or revisit things. That ties a lot into the size of the game, too. They're comparably long, but Earthbound got its length legitimately, by having a ton of places to go and a huge variety of things to see, where Mother 3 is a short game that pads itself with level grind.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]It may not seem that way, but Mother 3 is actually LARGER than its predecessors. The difference is that, rather than using cookie-cutter art assets to portray a progression of generic places and NPCs, it's the
same places and NPCs portrayed in different ways over a longer period of time. The central town in particular: people have new things to say after almost every event; and the town's gradual metamorphosis takes the place of the Onett -> Twoson -> Threed style progression. Now, if you didn't
like that approach, I don't know what to tell you; I found people like Bronson, Lighter, and the rest a lot deeper than even the central NPCs of Earthbound.
As for the "legitimacy" of their length, I find your assessment kind of backwards. It's hard to tell this on an emulator, since desynch is such a big problem, but Mother 3 contains almost no grinding. The first time I played through it, it was ridiculously difficult; I had to grind at the end of Chapter 1, in Osohe Castle, in the desert of Chapter 3, in the hallucinatory swamp, in the sewers under New Pork City--and
still, boss battles were a bitch. Three months later I finally broke down and imported the cartridge, and it was like a whole new game: I was getting 5- to 12-hit combos regularly, and I don't think I ever died in a regular battle. Boss battles were still tough, but I almost always managed to scrape by; they felt hard in a
fair way. Now that I'm on emulator again while waiting for my eLink flash cart to arrive, well, it's back to being grindy. I don't mind as much here, though, because dungeons aren't the slog they are in Earthbound; places like Peaceful Rest Valley, the desert mine with the five deadly moles, and the maze beneath the Pyramid just seem to go on way too long, to say nothing of Magicant. Mother 3 breaks this up by having lots of little adventures and set-pieces; it almost reminds me of the first half of Final Fantasy VI, the way the game never really stops and settles into the usual RPG grooves. Personally, I find that to be a very good thing.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Your objective for much of the game was both depressingly limited and absolutely primatized - you go to where the Needle you currently know about is and pull it, and the Magypsie there will tell you where the next one is, right up until the endgame - and then when you finally get to New Pork City you get a massive exposition dump. The whole Claus thing was blindingly obvious as soon as the first Needle was pulled, which I guess makes it better that they didn't try to play it up as any sort of surprise, but the fact that his big sad death was self-inflicted after he came to his senses ... well, that kind of robbed it of the impact, for me.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]That's, like, barely half the game. You can't disregard chapters one through six just because they don't conform to typical RPG expectations: there's a rescue in a burning forest, search parties in the rain, the quest to find Claus/avenge Hinawa, find the Valuable Thing in Osohe Castle (x2), satisfy Fassad's arbitrary demands while looking for some avenue of escape, the search for Duster (which turns into the search for the Hummingbird's Egg (which turns into the infiltration of the Lightning Tower))--all of which kind of ignores the point that while
what you're trying to ultimately accomplish is important, yes, so are
the methods you use to accomplish that. So yeah, you may "only" be looking for one needle after another for that segment of the game, but that contains some of my favorite segments: traveling the ocean, hallucinating on the island, moving the water from one pool to the other oustide the Chimera Lab....
As for Claus, it was never
supposed to be a surprise. Likewise, I'd argue, with Hinawa's death. These things are heavily foreshadowed, and immediately evident to anybody who sees the helmeted lieutenant. For the most part, Mother 3 is not about sudden, unexpected revelations. (Exceptions: Leder's text-dump, and the actual identity of Fassad. Who, for my money, is probably the best character in any videogame ever.)[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Mechanically, the timed hits system was pretty terrible. Doubling my damage output if I happen to be good at rhythm games is not good design. And while the scrolling HP thing in Earthbound was a nice little touch, Mother 3 made it a necessity. Too often, particularly later in the game, I'd get hit with an attack that would kill my entire party, and spend my next turn rushing through menus to set up heals so I won't die. Hell, the last fight with Claus was entirely about working the rolling HP meter to never technically die through like fifty rounds of being beat on. It lost a lot by virtue of that.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]I disagree? I mean, for one thing, see above about the difficulty of the rhythm battles. But for another, it's kind of philosophically appropriate: just as Earthbound's final battle requires "prayer" to succeed, Mother's final battle requires "singing". Mother 3 switches things up by making those two inherent prerequisites in most of the difficult battles: you need to have enough rhythm to be able to tap your foot to the time-signature of the background music, and you need to have faith that you can execute combos without delaying your healing spells too much before your characters die. Again, a lot of this is lost in emulation.
But yeah, the heal-before-death thing is definitely necessary. And why shouldn't it be? They actually slowed down the rate of health drop by a significant margin in the last battle, and the whole game still drops your health slower than Earthbound did. You can spend, I don't know, 4 out of every 5 rounds in the last fight just guarding despite the fact that you're "mortally wounded", and then heal when you hit about 40 health; once your healing spell takes effect, just
don't advance the text until your health is at max. It's one of the easiest fights in the game.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]What I loved about Earthbound, and still love about it, isn't as simple as just "quirky charm", like the TV Tropes page talks about. That's certainly a nice thing, and it's not like Mother 3 doesn't have it, but whimsy isn't enough to captivate. What set Earthbound apart, I feel, was more a sense of wonder to it. You're going to all these vastly different places, seeing all these otherworldly things, and it really had a consistent feeling of childlike joy as your horizons are wildly, shockingly expanded. Mother 3 doesn't have that. It feels like it's trying to be more dark, but it came off as just a lot more dreary, with nothing like the psychological impact of Earthbound's sheer creepy. There's no feeling of exploration, no feeling of awe. And where the game stopped was just retarded. I can't even call that an ending, because that implies some sense of "closure", or "resolution", or "anything". And yes, I moved the "End?" thing around and talked to people until it went to credits.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Again, man, we're probably going to have to agree to disagree. I found more meaning and significance in the magypsies alone than just about anything in Earthbound. It isn't just an attempt at darkness--Mother 3 has the maturity to say: nostalgia's nice, yes. There's a time to let go. Nothing lives forever, and trying to hold on for too long is more destructive than the evillest mastermind. I loved Earthbound, and I held it on a pedestal until I played this game--and then I realized, well, that was nice, but I can move on. I don't want to be Porky. I don't want to let my sense of childish expectations warp everything around me into a hideous caricature. The world will end someday, and everyone I know will be dead long before--let's have fun, and be good to one another in the meantime.[/spoiler]
