Mother 3, A tragedy of a family of four, their lives changed forever by mysterious men and the loss of family members.

The story takes place on Nowhere Islands, in Tazmilly Village, a peaceful happy village, but soon to be invaded by the pigmask army. Their main goal is to capitalize the village and make profits from the villagers.

BUUUUT BEFORE ALL THAT, the game shows you the main characters in the story, from the sweet sensitive boy Lucas, to the talented performing monkey Salsa, the game also allows the player to rename characters to their liking but if the player chooses “Don’t Care” the game gives them their default names. Other than asking you names for characters you are also asked with favorite food and  favorite thing to do, which is later on to be used in some game dialogue, in my opinion it sorta makes the game somewhat personal towards you.

Remember when I told you about your adventure starting out saving someone from a fire? Well you start out first as Lucas learning the tutorial for the game, walking, dashing, and battle mechanics. After the tutorial you are switched to Flint, the strong Dependable Father, greeted by a panicked mayor informing him of the fire.  Saving a trapped villager from a fire has to be dangerous, because theres like poisonous snakes, evil plants, and really mean fireflies so you gotta know how to fight. Each character has their own unique set of abilities, taking Flint for example where he uses Brute Force allowing him to use powerful abilities like hitting numerous enemies in one turn, increasing attack power and defense, and a high damaging ability that misses frequently which is kind of a gamble.

But every character has their own basic commands like “Attack”, “Item”, and “Flee”. Basic attacks have a neat little mechanic in them, if you press the attack button with the flow of the beat it allows you to do extra damage or chaining up a combo up to 16 times.

When facing an enemy all of them have different music, so if you’re good with music you already have an advantage against most people. If you’re not doing so hot, the game has your back with hot springs which restores health and magic points (you’ll get to that later on). Players must stay in the hot spring for a small amount of time for the restoration to actually occur, allowing players to take a small breather, take a bio break, and maybe have a little snack.

Or maybe just listen to the relaxing soundtrack of this game, Mother 3 has over 100+ different types of music thats bound to get some music stuck in player’s heads. From the melancholy “Tazmilly Village”, the funky upbeat battle themes like “Rock and Roll”, the organized tempo of the theme of the Pigmask army “Piggy Guys”, and or the super feely-feel “Love Theme” which hurts me inside because FEELINGS.

I can’t really find anything bad about this game. it’s easy and not easy, the sprites are cute, well if you count extremely emotional and heartrending or triggering due to loss of a loved one, sure that could be some negative aspects. But honestly this made me cry, or maybe that’s something that you don’t like about the game because you’re probs some super macho manly man or a super sassy individual and a video game made you cry and it tarnished your reputation.

 But an important part about Mother 3 is that

YOU MUST FINISH THE GAME.

Mother 3 is just like baking a cake, the beginning is slow and if you stop there you have an unfinished cake and it its gonna give you a bad idea about making cake, BUT IF YOU FINISH IT, IT’S AN AMAZING PRODUCT AND YOU BREAK DOWN IN TEARS BECAUSE YOU MADE IT, YOU FINISHED IT, AND YOU’RE PROUD OF IT.

Finding Mother 3 is gonna be a challenge, it’s only for the GBA ( Game Boy Advance ) and it’ll probably on Ebay or Amazon for a fortune or a small amount of cash, but if you have a PC/MAC, go grab an emulator for the game.