Mother 3

This is the first JRPG I’ve ever actually beaten.

There, I admitted it. As many Final Fantasy titles and such that I’ve played, I’ve never before beaten a single JRPG in my life, except for the Pokémon titles, and I’m not so sure those count. It was on my list of things to do before I die, beat a traditional JRPG, and now I’ve done it with Mother 3.

So what led me to play this game to completion while I can’t beat a single Final Fantasy? A number of things, really.

Mother 3 is the third and possibly final title in the Mother series of RPGs made by Nintendo. The first game, on the NES, never came to America, but the second one is best known here in the west as Earthbound on the SNES. Mother 3 also was never released in America, it’s a Japan-only GBA game. Thankfully, a crack team of hardcore fans got together and translated the game into English for us to play with the magic of Not-Emulators. Because emulating games you don’t already own is illegal, kids!

I’d played a bit of Earthbound before out of curiosity, and it was quite charming, funny, and sometimes outright surreal, so I was hoping for more of that when I gave Mother 3 a spin, and I was not at all disappointed. The story goes as such: The little village of Tazmily is the happiest place around. Everyone is kind and there is no form of currency at all, you can just walk into the general store and take whatever you need. Yes, it’s the happiest little place around…until tragedy strikes a small family made up of a husband (I named him Warren), his wife (Leia…don’t look at me like that), Lucas (you know, from Super Smash Bros Brawl?) and his twin brother Claus, and their dog who I named Dude. I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say that the first half-hour or so of the game really messes with your emotions.



Lucas is the main character, as one would assume, but you don’t get to play as him for the first few hours of the game, instead controlling the father and a local thief (who I named Cage). The game is quite traditional as old-school JRPGs go; top-down view, turn-based battles, item management, leveling up, nothing you’ve never really seen before, but it has a few neat twists to it. There are no random encounters in the game, you see your enemies as they approach you to initiate the battles. Your HP counter is on a dial, so if you’re hit for massive damage, instead of instantly shaving off those HP and killing you, it rolls like a countdown, giving you a little bit of time to try to heal before you’re dead. It really makes those close battles thrilling, struggling to find the right item or attack to use before you’re snuffed out. And, thankfully, grinding doesn’t make up such a huge chunk of gameplay like it would in your typical Final Fantasy, so you don’t have to spend countless hours trying to level up just in order to face that one boss character who is an Arabian man with cybernetic parts and horns (as in the brass variety that play jazz music) coming out of his nose. It’s how he communicates, see, he plays smooth jazz music through those horns and a robot translates for him.

And that brings us to the main reason I loved this game and played to finish: there’s a lot of weird, quirky stuff and it’s very, very funny. Earthbound is rather infamous for its strange style and humor, and Mother 3 has it in spades. I mean come on, a major group of characters important to the game’s plot, the Magypsies, are drag queens with five-o’clock shadows! The ghosts in a haunted castle will trade you items for Rotten Eclairs, you have to fight monsters like a pile of lava wearing old grandma sunglasses with huge lips, and you spend a nice chunk of the game in disguise as members of the Pigmask army, the antagonists in the game who are responsible for all the horrible things going on. And yet, when you talk to them, they’re really not bad guys, kind of like Stormtroopers, only slightly more incompetent.



Oh, and the Mr. Saturns return, and it’s great.

So despite how it’s a bit easier than most hardcore RPGs tend to be, despite its simplistic graphics and gameplay, the story, the characters, the humor, the music, all of it wraps itself together in a unique little game that is equal parts surreal, uncomfortable, hilarious, and emotional. If only Nintendo would release it over here in America, yes?

[Brett]

Mechanical Violator Hakaider (1995)

Oh, Japan. You silly little guy, you. Just when we think we've seen it all, just when you get us believing that there aren't any more crazy, awesome, tripped out movies that you've been hiding up your sleeve, you wave your arm with a magician's flourish, and before us appears yet another hour and a half of WTFery.

This film, which is apparently a spinoff of the popular Kikaider series (which has seen treatment as an anime, manga, and tokusatsu live action series) stars the titular robot fighting against an evil, oppressive government which rules its citizens through the use of super-human cyborg-soldiers, and by robbing them of their emotions. It's a fairly straight forward plot, so I won't spend too much time commenting on it.

Apparently, the film was not well received by the Kikaider fanbase when it premiered in 1995. I'm not familiar with it personally, so I really can't comment. That's probably for the best, as I was able to take this film for what it is, and do so without any preconceptions or comparisons to the parent material.

This movie is insane. Persons familiar with the likes of Casshern, Kamen Rider and Garo will find themselves in familiar territory, but that's not to say that the movie is without it's own unique style and charm.

The movie kicks off showing a group of anonymous armed men running through dark, dank corridors. They find a locked door which they open with some weird electronic key, and inside they find a man chained to a wall. After yelling about how they had hoped to find treasure and not a person, the man in the chains looks up. Then they shoot him. A lot. They shoot him like you would shoot a skinless four headed dog, if it showed up in your bathroom and you just happened to have an assault rifle handy.
Suddenly the guy is neither in chains, nor is he a guy anymore. He's a heavily armored, heavily armed robot, and he kills everybody. He then spews some cliche, "WHO AM I I CAN'T REMEMBER" dialogue, and reclaims his motorcycle which nobody noticed before. It should be noted that the motorcycle was chained to the floor.
From here, Hakaider drives his newly liberated motorbike across an undefined distance to Jesus Town (it's actually called this, in both the Japanese original and translated version) where he fights guys in white robot suits and eventually liberates the people from their oppressive overlord, Gurjev (who wears a dead bird on his shoulder at all times).

I can say with relative confidence that any impressions you may have of Hakaider after reading the above summary are absolutely accurate. The movie is absurd on every level, and while one may find it somewhat more digestible if they are familiar with the Kikaider series, I suspect that bewilderment will follow a first time viewing of this film regardless of who's watching.

Over all, the movie is a lot of fun. The special effects are inventive, and include some early, and painfully obvious, CGI (it was 1995, after all). The action scenes are fairly well thought out, and the final battle between Hakaider and Michael (Gurjev's robot minion and the archetypal counterweight to our mechanical hero) is riveting. Fans of the Tokusatsu genre, wild Japanese cinema, and robots will find a lot to like here. I certainly did.