# love at the end of all things ## a review of MOTHER 3 / thoughts on the series #### 17 jan 2025 > [!warning] > Content warning for death. Additionally, this contains spoilers for all three MOTHER games. Do you believe in love? We all come to understandings throughout our lives of what love is, what love looks like. A feeling, an action, a look. Love is saying "I love you." Love is giving a gift to a friend, making a meal for a partner, kissing a lover, calling a parent, defending a sibling, raising a child. Love is the butterflies in our stomach and the birds in our head. Do you believe in love? Do you believe in what love can do? Probably a lot has been written about the MOTHER series; it's a curious kind of RPG with a setting I might best describe as "nostalgic." It's how we might imagine our childhoods to have been. For years, only one of its three entries--MOTHER 2, or Earthbound--had officially made its way out of Japan. In 2025, the series is fully playable in English thanks to the efforts of fan translators and one official translation, and it has inspired many other games. Individually, each game is a work of art; taken together, they compose a picture that rhymes itself, building upon the actions of the player and revealing the joy--and the pain--of love. ### take a melody: mother MOTHER (or Earthbound Beginnings, but I will refer to it as MOTHER) places us in the care of Ninten, an asthmatic young boy who, along with Ana, Loid, and Teddy, journeys across the world to remember the eight parts of a forgotten melody. The word "remember" is specifically used; Ninten is remembering this tune, as though it were one he heard a long time ago. It is a lullaby, similar to one a mother might sing to their child. To lull one's child to sleep with a soothing song is also love. Once Ninten has remembered all the pieces of the melody, he is confronted with the primary antagonist: Giygas (or Giegue), an otherworldly creature whom his great-grandmother cared for long ago. MOTHER begins its legacy of final bosses here; in the lead-up to this fight, the player has been fighting adversaries at every turn with force. Giygas requires a different touch. The lullaby--the symbol of a parent's love for their child--is what brings down Giygas. The player instructs Ninten, Ana, and Loid to sing of love, and Giygas screams for it to stop, pleads to make it stop, until he is defeated. He departs with these words: > [!quote] Giygas, MOTHER > Ninten! > We SHALL meet again! Giygas is undone by love. And his threats prove true, though not quite how we might expect. ## simple as can be: mother 2 Looking back, MOTHER feels almost revolutionary when compared against other heavy-hitting RPGs of the 80s that are well-known in the West. But MOTHER didn't actually leave Japan for many years. Five years after its release, its sequel, MOTHER 2, would be many people's introduction to the series in the form of Earthbound. MOTHER 2 is a curious game when set against MOTHER. I've mentioned offhandedly to others that it feels like the Rebuild of Evangelion, a game that is somehow both remake and sequel. Key elements and events of MOTHER 2 are simply rhymes of MOTHER: Ness (who looks startlingly like Ninten) travels the world with his pals Paula, Jeff, and Poo to locate eight melodies and bring an end to Giygas, a mysterious being threatening their world. One would be forgiven for wondering if they simply updated MOTHER for the Super FamiCom. And yet your father--never seen, only heard via the phone, as in MOTHER--seems like he might actually be Ninten. Ana's theme plays in Ness's home, suggesting that she might be his mother. Giygas's words come true, in a way: we have, indeed, met him again, just as he threatened. But Giygas has been driven mad--by what? What drove him mad? The conclusion I've drawn is that I, the player, did. I drove him mad by singing to him at the end of MOTHER 1, by steeping him so deeply in grief that all he can experience is pain. (I secretly hoped that Giygas would mention Ninten in the original text of the game, but as far as I can tell, that does not happen.) MOTHER 2 feels like a memory of MOTHER, distorted by time and the faults of the human mind, held together only by love. It feels *nostalgic*, like it's already longing for something in the past. It calls back to its parent game--the melodies, the brief dip into Magicant, Ness's very design, the return of Giygas--and loves it. But that love can hurt. Giygas is lost in grief, an overwhelming pain that only love can grant. ### give it some words and sweet harmony: mother 3 Grief is front-and-center in MOTHER 3 in a way it isn't in the previous games. We are forced to grapple with grief many times: the monstrously technological transformation of the Drago parent, and the child's grief as we must put the parent down by force; the abrupt (to us) development and abandonment of the quiet, idyllic Tazmily Village. The loss of our wife (for Flint) and mother (for Lucas and Claus). Can we grieve someone we do not love? Can we grieve something we never knew? I considered this as I played, watching the way Flint lashed out at the other townsfolk, the way Claus seems to vanish. I considered it as Tazmily is forcibly altered to be more "modern", more "civilized", and see the same things happening to the place where I live. I think about my own grief, my own loss. We all know that things change and end, that creatures die eventually. We know that loving them means one day grieving them. We choose it all the same. We choose to love others. But one character isn't granted that love. I avoided mentioning Porky in the MOTHER 2 section, but that is where we meet him, a young boy whose life is bereft of love. We will see him several times in MOTHER 2, where he eventually becomes an antagonist, but not one we defeat. Indeed, he taunts us to track him down, and that becomes our ultimate task in MOTHER 3. Would MOTHER 3 have even happened had we extended love to Porky while in Ness's shoes? Did we once again create the conditions of our own journey? I wondered about this as Hinawa died and Tazmily changed. I love where I live. I don't love the way in which it is changing. Despite not living here for long, I've somehow become nostalgic for how it used to be, before the ugly, cheap apartments went up and the forests were torn down, before the animals were forced to flee and the loud, toxic automobiles moved in. Places I loved continue to close their doors forever. MOTHER 3 itself is a change from how its predecessors were, but still has the space to let the player feel nostalgic for how it used to be. How it was in MOTHER and MOTHER 2. I will admit, I wasn't much affected by Porky's boat ride down the MOTHER 2 memory lane; it turns out MOTHER 2 might be my least favorite entry in the series. (It's still very good, but it didn't strike me quite as hard as the other two.) But that long hallway right before? The hallway with nothing except a long walk with the menu theme of MOTHER playing? That one got to me. I felt how far I had come in this series. I felt how far I had come in my life. I felt the way things had changed, sometimes for the better...and sometimes for the worse. I felt love for this series, tinged with the knowledge that it would soon end. MOTHER 3 closes, as the previous games did, with a battle that is less "epic final boss" and more "life-threatening puzzle" as you stare down the Masked Man. You keep Lucas, alone in this battle, alive and try to figure out what to do because you know, you *know*, even before the helmet is torn away, that the person standing before you is the brother you lost long ago. You win, not raising a hand to him, but by letting your love and your parents' love for him shine through, until at last he removes the helmet and the truth you've known is finally revealed. And then he casts a final PSI. The player knows immediately what will happen; it's already happened before. The Courage Badge found earlier was dutifully polished by the Mr. Saturns into a Franklin Badge, which has the ability to reflect PSI. As soon as you see the message, you know this PSI is about to rebound on Claus. And it mortally wounds him. > [!quote] Claus, MOTHER 3, end of Chapter 8 > Bye. > Thank you. > I'm sorry. > I'm sure we'll meet again. > The loss of my friend last December still weighs on me. It's a wound I don't think will ever fully heal. I thought of him saying these words in this moment. I wished so earnestly that I could speak to him once more. That grief exists because of love. I loved--love, present tense--my friend dearly. Claus's last words are imbued with so much love. The MOTHER series shows just how much love can do. Love can lead us home for our favorite meal. Love can stop a fearsome foe from hurting those who matter most to us. Love can cause the most exquisite anguish we might ever know. Do you believe in what love can do? #reviews #videogames