The Mother Trilogy Explained: Part 2
But wait! Hope arrived in the form of the Nintendo DS. All the graphics from the N64 game were scrapped, but the story survived to be reincarnated version with graphics that stayed true to its 2D predecessors. Actually, the graphics surpass the original in a number of ways, mostly since sprites have come a long way in the past decade. For the full story on the Earthbound64 game-that-never-was, check out http://starmen.net/eb64/ .
Mother3 opens up over a hundred years after the events in Earthbound in a quiet little town on a quiet little island that happens to be made from a giant sleeping dragon with the power to destroy the entire world. Seriously though, you start out as the twins Lucas and Claus (Lucas is a character in Smash Brothers), who happen to be visiting a relative (I forget if it was the grandfather or uncle) at his dinosaur farm. Claus takes turns bashing into giant mother dinosaurs to knock them over, and then after some story scenes the prologue ends with their mother sending a letter by pigeon to their father, who is still away from home.
Night falls, spaceships appear, giant “Pigmen” appear, accompanied by a theme song for their Pig Army (it is the same tune played in New Pork City in Smash Brothers Brawl). They light the forest on fire, start doing genetic and cybernetic experiments. You start playing as the twins’ father, who is the coolest cowboy in ANY VIDEO GAME EVER. He realized his wife and kids aren’t home yet, heads off to find them, takes the dog along, finds the forest on fire, and finds that his wife has died. There is a scene when Flint (the cowboy father) finds out that his wife has just died, and it is one of the most touching and powerfully emotional scenes I have ever seen in a game that featured miniature 2D sprites. Soon after, the reckless child Claus goes after the dinosaur that killed his mother, and Flint has to go after him. The scene ends after Flint fights off an insane cyborg dinosaur and finds that Claus too has died and disappeared.
One thing I should mention, this game is done in Acts, somewhat like Dragon Warrior 4 was like, and although you play several main characters throughout the game, the final main characters do not come all together until much later in the game. Act 1 and the prologue is everything I have just described. Act 2 features a middle aged guy who is a professional thief… and rock star? Act 3 makes you into an enslaved monkey, forced to work both due to an electric collar and his mate being held hostage. One of your tasks as a monkey is to deliver “happiness boxes” to various people around town, the contents of which include things of technology, like televisions. Act 4 opens up in the same town 3 years later. Gone are the dusty paths and old-style taverns, here is a sudden and unnatural suburbia, with people slowly accepting the influence of the minions of the Pig Army, mostly because of all the technology it has brought them. Money is invented sometime in these 3 years, among other things.
The game REALLY starts in Act 4, when you can play as Lucas and begin to collect travelling companions. You receive help from several places throughout the game, but in the end you team up with your dog, the middle-aged thief named Duster, and a PSI-powered Princess… who is also part-ninja, whose name can be translated to “Bear Tiger”, and was raised by cross-dressing Magic Gypsies who are immortal so long as they stop the dragon that IS the island from ever waking up. That leads into the real story too. The sleeping dragon beneath the island is sealed asleep by 7 magical needles, which can only be pulled out by someone who wields the power of “PSI whatever-the-hell-you-chose-as-your-favorite-thing-when-you-started-the-game”… who currently appears to only be Lucas. If the needles are pulled out then the world will be destroyed when the dragon wakes up (KEEP THAT IN MIND AS YOU READ ON). However, the Pig Army has some kind of masked man with an insane lightning throwing sword and powerful PSI Powers who also is able to pull out the needles. Each of the Magical Gypsy people guards one needle, and their remaining existence is tied to that needle staying in place. As the masked man and the pig army invade and continue searching for each needle, he starts pulling out the needles and killing the “Magypsies.”
What can you do to stop this? Well somewhere along the line the logic becomes that if you pull out more needles than the masked man, then you will be stopping him from having too much power. The next several acts revolve around a complex and insane series of events revolving around the Masked Man, the needles, and the Pig Army (who turn out to be fat, ugly, normal humans wearing armor and pig mask-helmets). The final Act leads you to leave the islands entirely. You end up getting in a giant flying limo and being escorted to “New Pork City” (which looks remarkably similar to the background in the SSMB level), where all the rest of the residents of the island have been escorted. The city is more or less a giant amusement park for people to live in, and it was built by and has many statues dedicated to, you guessed it, Pokey. Although no one has ever seen Pokey in person, there are enough pictures, statues, and messages to leave no doubt that it is the same person.
At this point in the game Lucas has pulled out 3 needles, and the masked man has pulled out 3. The final needle belongs to a missing, possibly traitorous Magypsy, who it turns out is the one who told Pokey all about the islands and the needles and the dragon. The final needle can only be located by climbing Pokey’s tower and confronting Pokey himself. In doing so, you learn a lot about what happened to Pokey and what happened after the events of Earthbound. Pokey knew that even with his insane abuse of time travel and stolen technology from across time and space, he could never match Ness and his friends, so he waited until they were all dead and gone to launch his invasion.
After fighting through an army of Pokey Robot Clones the real Pokey comes out. The time-travel abuser has lived so long that he cannot even remember how old he is, and says he could be more than tens of thousands of years old. He only survives by being hooked into his technological rejuvenator bed, which conveniently hooks into the death-machines of his choice (the most famous of which is the spider-like contraption that you fight in Smash Brothers, but the giant statue that he inserts himself into in Smash Brothers is (if I remember correctly), only seen sitting inert in Mother 3. After beating the crap out of his machines he laughs and tells you how he cannot die so long as he has his machines. Then he pulls out a machine that he forced a genius inventor to create: a invulnerability pod. After losing his last fight he goes inside and wiggles around a bit, then sits and rests. The inventor then appears and says that Pokey ordered him to make an “Absolutely Safe Machine,” which he then built to his orders. Nothing can get in at Pokey, so he is absolutely safe. Likewise, Pokey can’t get out, so everyone else is safe from him. Absolutely Safe? Only a genius could have worked a double cross out so perfectly that not even he realized he was double crossing anyone.
So the immortal Pokey is locked in a pod for all time (except that the game ends with a question mark and the original subtitle was the “Fall of the Pig King,” only to have it removed later. There is also an image file hidden in the game if you hack it that shows a picture of the pod cracked open…), and you are free to hop in the elevator to go deep underground to find the cave with the last needle hidden there. When you arrive you encounter the masked man for the final time. The Franklin Badge, an item in all three Mother Games which deflects lightning completely, saves Lucas from being knocked out by the masked man’s sword, at which point you have a 1 on 1 final battle. This is a battle, like the previous games before it, where a direct fight will not help you win. After being weakened from reflected lightning blasts, and getting confused by a “strange connection” between Lucas and the masked man, the helmet shatters and the masked man is revealed to be Lucas’ twin brother Claus, whose dead or dying body was captured by the pig army and merged with cyborg parts to be part mind controlled, part insane, part super-powered robot, and part sad, lost little boy.
Once the mask shatters, and in front of both Lucas and Flint, the ghost of Lucas’ lost mother appears and talks to Claus, telling him everything is ok now and that he can rest now and come with her. Claus revives long enough to apologize for everything and then passes on. For the second time, Claus and Flint have to watch both their wife/mother and son/brother being taken from them. Finally, in front of his friends and his father, and the final needle holding the dragon, they ask Lucas what he thinks they should do. One needle alone is not powerful enough to keep the dragon sleeping, and already it is breaking through the seal. You are given the choice of whether to pull the final needle yourself, and put all of your hopes and dreams, and the hopes and dreams and faith of all of the world’s people into the act… or to leave it and hope for the best.
It doesn’t matter what you answer. In either case, the seal breaks. From far away, you watch as the dragon begins to awaken. Volcanoes erupt. Storms grow uncontrollably. Tidal Waves appear. The islands start to explode as the dragon awakens, and the world ends, fading to black with the word “End?” in the middle of the screen.
And that is the end of the Mother/Earthbound series. That’s right, the whole freaking world is destroyed and you are left with a black screen, sitting there and asking yourself “Wait, why the hell did I do that? What the fuck man?!?” After several minutes of silent of vocal swearing, you begin mashing buttons and find something unusual: you can control the word “End?” and make it move around the screen. After a little bit voices start to appear. Then things continue to be freaky. Some people claim that everyone is all right, because even though the final needle was pulled everyone is together and safe now… but if you think carefully about it, they could all be dead and in heaven, so it doesn’t really give you a clear idea what happened. To make it even better, at one point you hear the sound of a giant rocking orb with the Pig Army theme in the background, and the various people talking to you from whatever beyond you are in start calling you by name. No, not by the name Lucas, but by YOUR ACTUAL NAME. At one point in the game, as in all previous Mother/Earthbound games, you put in your real name. The characters inside the game thank you so much for everything, and even go so far as to ask you how things are going on your side of the (gameboy/DS) screen. Eventually you are thanked and said goodbye to by many many people, and the game is officially, completely over.
And that is the end of my incredibly long Mother/Earthbound series article for you all. I hope it inspires some of you to at least go back and play Earthbound, or if you can understand Japanese or have the incredible patience of following online translation scripts, you should play Mother 3 as well. The ending is just example of the unusual humor that the makers of the game had, and it extends to much more mundane things, like talking to frogs whenever you want to save your game, or opening a random present (aka treasure chest) only to have a tuba play a little tune for you and then have the message “You hear a song form a Tuba…. well then” come up. I never even had the chance to mention that among the secrets in this game is an extremely rare, randomly appearing enemy that runs across your screen in an area you have been to hundreds of times already and away leaving you thinking “What the hell was THAT?” Seriously though, there is a hidden enemy that can be defeated with one quick PSI attack early in the game, so early that the most experience you can hope for from an enemy is something like 200 exp, and if you kill this little black root-man-thing you get 32,000 experience! The first time I discovered this I was playing the game on the couch at work and had to stop myself from yelling in shock/confusion/surprise/joy.
As you can tell by the 6 ½ pages already written here, I could talk for hours about these games, but talk won’t be enough. Go and find a copy of Earthbound and start there. It came out in the US about a year after Final Fantasy 6 first did, and due to the coming end of the SNES era, unusual graphics scheme, and overly brief marketing scheme, it never came close to reaching the popularity level in the US as it had in Japan. I can guarantee you will play an extremely well developed and unique game with a great storyline and an even better sense of humor.
Post-note: Want to know the general situation on the status of the original Mother game, as well as Mother 3 coming to the US, this youtube April Fool’s Day interview sums up everything far more than I ever could: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRQkXJAcKHo
Click Here to Discuss The Mother Trilogy on The Message Boards