Mother 3! The sequel to Earthbound!

Doubtful, since it was a GBA game. Have you looked into the Raspberry Pi much? It’s $35 and you can build it out as an emulation box and fit literally every game for every console ever made up through the 16 bit era on a small SD card.

belatedly, this is one of the few RPGs where stat up/stat down spells are not completely useless in practice, and in fact are necessary for most of the bosses

Stat buffs and debuffs are pretty much essential in Dragon Quest games(which is appropriate given how much inspiration the Mother series took from there), less so in Final Fantasy.

The only way Mother 3 would ever run on a SNES Mini is if you hacked it and installed Retroarch. There are plenty of devices that support GBA emulation though, even a soft-modded Wii will do it sufficiently.

i feel like i'm a retropie factory this holiday season. built about 4 so far and about to start saying no

waaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh i finished it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh

So uhhhh how exactly do I go about playing this thing? Does everyone just use computer roms/emulators of the translated version?

I’d love to figure out how I could get it on my 3DS but I know like nothing about homebrew and hacking and shit. (I just finished Earthbound so naturally I need to get on this)

yeah it shouldn't be too hard to find a patched or translated rom, also there are a lot of ppl who sell the eng. translation as a bootleg gba cart on ebay. love mother 3, beautiful game, get in there!

3ds can't play gba games at least not from a cartridge so yeah you'd have to do some hacking stuff or get an actual gba or emulate it on pc

Huh, I googled about cartridges and apparently there are quite a few bootleg English cartridges of the game on Etsy! I think I might go with one of those and just try to find a GBA somewhere. Thank you!!

Apparently they still make r4 cards!

did you ever play this? it's like... better than earthbound

omg i wanna play this

me too. don't have any real way to do it though, unless ps4 is now an option? or SNES mini

literally it's so fucking good, it has all the charm of EarthBound but where EB was incredibly formulaic in terms of gameplay and narrative and linearity, Mother 3 shakes things up a lot more.

I think you p much have to play it with a GBA emulator on a computer, they still haven't released any official English translation

this is far from optimal but it works
https://www.playemulator.com/gba-online/mother-3/

heard it got cancelled

RIP mother 3, too problematic for our modern times ;_;

one thing you have to watch out for with emulation is that it's really hard to get the audio properly synced. the battle system is rhythm based so you're not going to have a very good time.

you can buy reproduction carts with the translated version on 3t5y and 3b4y then pop it into your beautiful DS Lite

oh yeah i forgot about that, my brain eventually got the hang of it but it was undoubtedly trickier than the real thing. certain emulators are much better than others (I think mGBA is supposed to be good?) and I think there are settings you can tweak to adjust the latency

I wound up ordering a GBA cartridge of the translated version from Etsy. It works extremely well!! They’re only $15 USD plus shipping too. If anyone wants to play it I’d say that’s probably the best way to go if emulators aren’t your thing. I haven’t had any issues with the rhythm battles either

I actually just finished chapter six and, like, holy shit, this thing is incredible. I don’t know how this ends but I’m guessing I’m gonna get emotionally wrecked.

I’m surprised at how different it is from EarthBound actually! The gameplay in EarthBound was dense and the world it created was very strange in the best way, but there wasn’t much of a story. This one, however, has a beautiful story and the world in it is lots of fun to explore. You’ll want to talk to everyone and inspect everything just to read the humourous script. And the music is top notch

Maybe my one complaint about it is that I wish the battles were harder? I didn’t die a lot in Earthbound but the battles in it were so tense and thrilling, whereas I seem to be just coasting through this thing. There is some interesting stuff going on it though — and katherine’s comment up thread about how stats up/down spells are actually important in this game is very true.

all of that is incredibly OTM. It retains the quirk and joy of EB but it has many heavy themes that make the overall vibe a little less breezy and lighthearted

I take back my previous comment about difficulty - these last two chapters are tough!!!

too problematic for our modern times ;_;

― vision joanna newsom (Stevie D(eux)), Friday, May 29, 2020 12:07 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

hoo boy um yeah

but yes this is somehow better than earthbound

i enjoy that when you're playing as duster your attack combos express themselves as a wicked slap bass solo

If you have a mac and want to use an emulator OpenEmu is the best program.

I finished this last night at like 1 a.m. and uh yeah that ending is just devastating

I wound up ordering a GBA cartridge of the translated version from Etsy. It works extremely well!! They’re only $15 USD plus shipping too. If anyone wants to play it I’d say that’s probably the best way to go if emulators aren’t your thing.

I only have a gameboy color. By any chance could this work for me?

it's a gba game so no, you're 1 generation behind

well that was an incredible game

i think i prefer earthbound slightly bc nothing in mother 3 really rivals finding the inverted world in that one cafe or your soul traveling through time in a robot body but it sure was emotionally devastating on a level i've never felt from a video game before

Earthbound mechanically is just slow and brutal... I don't think I'd have ever gotten through it without emulator speed-up cheating.
Mother 3 is superior in virtually every aspect, though it owes so much to the previous two entries.
I grinded through it on emulator with the bad sound sync which made it a lot harder than it should've been, many years back. I don't know if emulators are better now with that. Or, can a Pi do it now with the sound timing intact?

I wonder, the English translation of Mother 1 worth going through? Love the music, but I doubt I'd make it through the game.

oh i mean in terms of gameplay no contest mother 3 is the better game, i'm talking more in terms of the ideas in each

though i've played earthbound twice with an emulator and never thought it slow or brutal

I wonder, the English translation of Mother 1 worth going through? Love the music, but I doubt I'd make it through the game.

I ordered a translated copy of Mother 1+2 a few days ago so I’m about to find out. will report back with my results. I know there are hacked versions with an “easy ring” item that double your xp and cash, but I’m curious about its difficulty..

I played Mother 3 on a Pi and fucked w the settings enough to get the audio to a point where I could pull off combos reliably (tho it still required a shift in my head of hitting the button just slightly before the beat I think)

The impression I get of Mother gameplay-wise is that it is VERY much a product of its time in a way that ages very poorly, like difficult and monotonous and a bit of a slog, to the point where the vibe I get is that a lot of players prefer the Easy Ring bcz it just makes it more tolerable

I will say that although M3 is the superior game in every way, EB is still my fav bcz it was the one i played first and also the overall tone is a little more lighthearted, also it has a gay child who's in love w his best friend which helloooo queer visibility way ahead of its time

speaking of queer visibility, my understanding from the way people talk about it whenever i google it is that the magyspies are the reason nintendo won't ever put out mother 3 internationally. i am personally fine with an immortal race of genderqueer drag queens who keep the world whole through their presence. it was fassad that rankled (but then *SPOILER* he is also a magypsy, which makes me feel better about it)

also i'm just now picking up on "fassad" = "facade." i bet the fans who translated the game think they're hilarious for this

Mother 3 is more sophisticated than Earthbound, but comparing the two feels like apples and oranges. I feel similarly about, idk, SMB & SMB3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8_huZmO0aQ

yoooo

you can't make me watch that

I ordered a translated copy of Mother 1+2 a few days ago so I’m about to find out. will report back with my results. I know there are hacked versions with an “easy ring” item that double your xp and cash, but I’m curious about its difficulty..

― josh az (2011nostalgia), Sunday, June 14, 2020 7:55 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I finished the first Mother game last night (w/o the easy ring) and PHEW it is tough. You've got to do hours of grinding and it's hard to know where to go next without a walkthrough. Sometimes you'll defeat an enemy, take two steps you'll get attacked by another enemy right away. there's lots to enjoy though... the music's great, the charm's still there and the battles are often quite fun (especially the last boss fight which has wonderfully creepy 8-bit sound effects). It's obvs inferior to its two successors but it's neat for what it is

aw man now i'm done all the mother games and I feel sad :( i don't know what to play now.. is this what's finally gonna make me pick up Undertale

play undertaaaaaale

Undertale disappointed me, it has some truly funny moments but the overall vibe for me felt try-hard and too impressed w itself

I GUESS

We don't have an Undertale thread?

I've picked it back up after feeling similar to Stevie D(eux) upthread: Fun, but a little tedious and gratingly try-hard in places.
But I was filled with determination and managed to complete it. Once I was in the swing of it, it really came into its own.
It did start off like a lol pastiche of Earthbound-style RPGs, which felt a bit futile considering Earthbound is a pastiche in its own right.
But there's a LOT more to Undertale than mere wacky laffs. Toby Fox has thought it through and put in a lot more love and care into the lore, the plot and the playability than first meets the eye.
And yes, it can be frustratingly slow-going at first, but *SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS* once I played it through, I was hooked enough to go right through and play it again (TWICE!). In fact successive playthroughs are much more fun: I found faster workarounds, tons of Easter Eggs (anyone else discovered 'Hard Mode' yet?) and the plot makes a lot more sense and is actually very touching.

It’s a pretty quick game that you’re supposed to play through a few times, right?

yes, relatively quick. I did stumble a couple of times and gave up the first play through. I guess it's no big secret that it can be played in different ways and that the story alters not just according to the decisions you make, but how many times you've played it. For example *minor spoiler*, the third time through, one of the characters launches into his usual spiel before stopping and saying 'Wait, you're looking at me as though you've heard this all before...'. It's done in quite a knowing way, but it's genuinely amusing and unsettling at times. I even heard that it is smart enough to know when a player is trying to 'game' the system by doing crafty resets. There are loads of guides online on how to get past some of the more tricky puzzles and enemies if it does get too tedious

And as I say, the different styles of play-through depend on different playing styles. So, one style depends very much on logical decisions whereas another depends almost entirely on arcade-style reflexes.

i have only ever played/finished the game on pacfist mode, i cannot bring myself to hurt the monsters out of solidarity