Mother 3’s final battle
This post contains a detailed description of Mother 3’s final battle, and also contains an EarthBound spoiler.
After breezing through a few of these posts, I’ve gotten hung up on trying to condense my thoughts on Mother 3’s theme and plot. Rather than rely on general platitudes, I thought I’d try giving a specific example of what the game does well.
Since finishing Mother 3 I’ve loaded the game from the last save point and played the endgame about half a dozen times. I think the final battle is easily the best-written part of the game, and perhaps one of the best-written parts of any game. To explain why, though, I first need to explain a few things about how battles work for the uninitiated.
- Though it’s fundamentally turn-based, the Mother 3 battle system does keep EarthBound’s real-time quirk: the HP meter gradually “rolls down” like an odometer when your character gets hurt. In other words, even when you’ve been hit for mortal damage you can stave off defeat by healing before the meter reaches zero.
- As the battle rages, a colorful psychedelic background swirls and pulsates behind the enemy’s sprite. Meanwhile, a text box at the top of the screen displays information about what’s going on: “Kumatora tried PK Starstorm!” “The Mole Cricket used a biting attack!” “Boney couldn’t stop crying!” “Duster ate the Cup of Lifenoodles!”
- One of the special powers that Lucas and Kumatora possess is “PSI,” psychokinetic abilities which are roughly analogous to magic in other RPGs. (If you’ve ever played a Super Smash Bros. game and heard Ness or Lucas shout “PK Fire,” you’ve seen PSI in action.) PSI powers come in varying intensities, denoted by the Greek letters α, β, γ, and Ω. New powers are “awakened” not only by leveling up, but at specific plot points throughout the game.
During the last battle, the game plays upon our expectations and leverages all of these elements to great effect.
The final boss is Lucas’s brother Claus, who goes missing early on in the game and makes a very obviously foreshadowed appearance as “The Masked Man.” Before the battle begins, he knocks out the other three characters with a lightning bolt. (Lucas had earlier obtained a “Franklin Badge,” which reflects lightning attacks.) The battle begins as a one-on-one fight.
Attempting to strike at Claus does no damage. Instead, a battle text message appears: “For some reason, Lucas couldn’t attack.” Claus then pummels Lucas to within a few hit points of his life.
There are several things going on here. First, we see the first signs of battle text abstraction. The message is not one that we have seen before; Lucas has never decided not to attack anyone. (He even previously fought the Masked Man, who makes an earlier appearance before it is revealed that he is Claus). Also, there is no reason given for why Lucas cannot attack; whereas most battle text messages are unambiguous, here we have to fill in details from the plot.
Second, the text does not appear at a constant speed. (While it occasionally happens during dialogue, this is the only time that feature is found in battle text.) You can speed through most of the game’s battle text as fast as you want, but not here; the last part of the battle text message, “couldn’t attack,” only appears after a slight pre-programmed delay. This is an indication that the final battle has narrative ambition outside of “You killed the end guy” — even the pacing is significant.
Third, from a gameplay perspective, we’re seeing a breakdown in combat conventions. How does one win without attacking? In EarthBound, the final boss Giygas could only be defeated by praying until he was literally destroyed by sheer force of will. Veterans of the series will be looking for a similar solution, while newcomers probably have panic set in once they see the strength of Claus’s attacks and the impotence of Lucas’s.
Meanwhile, Claus continues to wail away, occasionally using a devastating PSI attack that only he and Lucas can perform called PK Love. Lucas must heal almost every turn just to stay alive, and there is an endless race to beat the HP odometer.
The “fight” progresses in this manner for several turns until, suddenly, everything stops. The screen dims, the music changes and grows quiet, and a message appears very slowly, superimposed in white text over the middle of the battle screen: “Lucas…”
…And that’s all. As the music and screen brightness return, a battle text message appears. “From somewhere, you heard someone call your name.” The fight continues.
After a few more turns, it happens again; game stops, screen dims, music lowers. “Claus…”
Another battle message: “It was Hinawa’s voice. It failed to reach the Masked Man.” There is a long pause before “Hinawa’s” appears on the screen.
At first these messages do nothing but provide brief, mysterious distractions from the battle. Soon, though, they become more involved: “Claus… Stop this…” “You aren’t Porky’s robot. You’re our son!” They also begin to elicit responses from Claus, delivered via the battle text box: “The Masked Man looked around.”
Then, for the first time in the game, the background begins to change. As Hinawa’s voice begins to reach him, the sharp diamond-shaped figure surrounding the Masked Man becomes fuzzy and elements of the design are gradually stripped away. His attacks also become weaker; suddenly he won’t use PK Love Ω anymore and relies on γ, and then β…
At one point, the battle text announces that Flint has jumped in front of a PK Love attack, absorbing the hit. “Flint suffered major damage,” it then reports. “Flint couldn’t stand up.” That’s the last we hear from him in the battle.
After more messages from Hinawa and further weakening of Claus, a cutscene featuring two cribs displaces the battle screen, and the sentimental “love” theme, featured throughout the game, replaces the music. Flint and Hinawa, off-screen, discuss their new children, hoping that they grow up to be kind.
By this point the battle is essentially over; the fight continues, but it’s largely a charade. Claus’s attacks do negligible damage, and the background is now almost completely black. The music has changed to the “love” theme, though it sounds somewhat demented because it’s still using the electro-industrial palette of the Masked Man’s battle theme. Meanwhile, the battle text window fills with somber messages and pregnant pauses. “The Masked Man looked around, as if searching for something.” “Lucas isn’t sure what to do anymore.” “The Masked Man gazed at Lucas.” “Lucas wanted to cry.” The music gradually shifts into normal instrumentation.
One last message from Hinawa appears, with what is probably the saddest line in the game: “Claus… Come to your mother. You must be so exhausted. Come here, Claus.”
Claus’s sprite changes and the battle text window takes us through to the end, the hesitations in the text dramatically longer.
“The Masked Man removed his mask. His face looked just like Lucas’s. It was Claus.”
“Claus fired an intense bolt of lightning!”
“Lucas’s Franklin Badge reflected the lightning back!”
“Claus took mortal damage!” (Note that everywhere else in the game, this message appears when someone in your party is dealt mortal damage, not an enemy.)
The screen fades to white, but messages continue to appear via the the battle text window — still in the same declarative format, even, although the pretense of a battle has long been abandoned. “Claus staggered toward Lucas.” “Claus embraced Lucas.” “Lucas remembered Claus’s smell.” And with that, the fight is over.
In a genre known for stark disconnects between gameplay and plot, Mother 3 gives its ending staggering emotional impact by integrating everything into the gameplay: instilling fear through Claus’s relentless mortal attacks, repurposing the battle text for more abstract events, giving the background unexpected significance, representing the progression of the battle through music, tying Claus’s PSI power to his emotional state. In a word, the final battle feels meaningful — it’s not a fight against an arbitrarily powerful enemy, but a logical consequence of the story that nonetheless feels faithful to the game mechanics.
There may be a game with a better final boss battle, but I haven’t played it.
I loved every minute of it though. At the end of the fight I was downright crying (your post had tears coming to my eyes just remembering the fight) for the first time is years. I was playing next to my family and they all looked over and thought I was downright insane.
But yeah it was an epic. I’m sad that it’s over, but happy that something that amazing and emotional responding could be made.
Hi, I’m a new reader. Came across this post from Brainy Gamer. I liked the cut of your jib, so I went through the archives. Just got caught up a few moments ago. You run a good blog.
Anyway, my response to this specific post:
While I loved the last boss battle/ending (in fact, Chapters 7 to 8 kinda redeemed the entire game for me as I thought that, although MOTHER 3 was a good RPG, it was an awkward MOTHER game — but that’s another conversation entirely), I think the dialogue went on for a tad too long. I can’t pin the exact moment, but it happened some time after the especially heart-wrenching line that you mentioned in your post: “Claus… Come to your mother. You must be so exhausted. Come here, Claus.” After that point, Claus said a few too many lines in my opinion, and then Flint said some words too that seemed to devalue the moment. Maybe I’m just being picky, but hopefully I’m making some kind of sense. The ending is brilliant, but what little flaws it has stand out to me in light of the quality of the “beginning of the end”.
Again, hopefully I made sense. =P
Thanks for coming by, guys — I’m glad you enjoy the blog!
The Unknown, I think I know which part you were unhappy with: the section between the final battle and the pulling of the final Needle. As he lays dying in Lucas’s arms, Claus has a long string of terse apologies and goodbyes; after he’s gone, Flint offhandedly dismisses Claus’s mistakes as “hasty.” It’s a rather unsettling contrast with the things that are happening on the screen.
While I can see where you’re coming from, I will cheerfully disagree. I think that undercutting serious situations with humor and flippancy is characteristic of Mother 3 (and to take up your other point, the Mother series in general). Remember the early scene where Bronson tells Flint that he has “good news and bad news” about Hinawa, and the good news is that he found a cool fang that can be fashioned into a weapon? That was one of my favorite lines in the whole game. It encapsulates the uneasiness that, in my opinion, Mother 3 thrives on.
(If you haven’t seen it before, I recommend this extensive interview with Shigesato Itoi. It actually covers this very issue.)
Hey bro,
I gotta play the devil’s advocate and disagree.
Why, well they completely broke the gameplay mechanic at the end of the game, tossing your hours of level grinding out the window. Its the type of game scenario similar to ” You MUST lose this fight to progress” which frequently pissed off regular players for lack of control of the situation.
A game that saved and countered that system is the first Tales of Destiny which forced you to fight an extremely overpowered Leon yet he COULD still be beaten and the player would be rewarded with an alternate ending for conquering such a task. Even though they had to lose to progress.
But at least, the player had entire control on either it happening or not, their choices weren’t “DENIED”.
I do agree that it is one of those rare type of final battles with a unique twist of its own. But i don’t really see it as greatness, simply because they dramatically reduced your range of actions toward the end of the game. Kinda forcing you to follow certain script to the letter.
On a side note, it is extremely hard to integrate that kind of system in current rpg final battles while still keeping it successful, looking at chrono cross, the battle with the time devourer brought up this interesting feeling of Grand Showdown, as you fight this wickedly huge beast while the environment races through time and space bringing you to past terrains (or previous boss battle areas)) with a very epic medieval type of soundtrack…until you get to fight the REAL final boss where you have to do a crytic color combination with magic to get the real game ending, where AGAIN, the gameplay is locked down to a certain level and the player HAS to do this specific magic combination WITH the boss AI in order to get the GOOD ending, if the player acts naturally and simply kills the beast, BAM, Bad ending, go home.
Or final fantasy 10 which had you killing your beloved summons, one by one, before moving on to the final boss. Now that had me emotionally messed up. I had to kill my precious allies, which helped me fight previous bosses and saved my hide more times than plain level grinding. That hurts, yet the follow up boss was just a joke which killed the whole mood. :S
Kingdom hearts 2, had an interesting twist, the gameplay CHANGED multiple times through the various phases of the final boss. Good and possibly bad at the same time: You do get to shoot bad guys in some kind of space vehicle, your main character gets trapped many times during the fight, spontaneously throwing you in the shoes of a character that recently joined your team to quickly adapt to his different gameplay style. ((A real mind bender.)) And the last phase has you jumping from platforms to platforms to reach the final boss and dig some damage. Odd but unexpected and different from the previous games in its genre.
Its odd, as if we had 2 choices:
-Molding and forcing a certain situation on the player to emphasize on an emotion that MUST be brought out.
or
-Radically changing the gameplay rules to give the player a different kick at the last mile of the stage.
What do you think?
What would be your suggestion for future RPGs.
Ps: I hope i don’t sound to aggressive, english isn’t my first language and im typing as fast as 2 cup of expresso in the morning. :)
Thanks for your comment, Mokuu.
I think we want different things out of our RPGs, and that may be an irreconcilable difference here. While the Mother series’ heritage is the traditional JRPG, it’s also well-known for subverting the tropes of its own genre; in fact, the previous games in the series had similarly anticlimactic final battles that hinged on some plot element rather than a culmination of the mechanics. Or, put another way: it’s not about the gameplay.
I’m intrigued by your displeasure upon losing your “hours of level grinding.” I actually found Mother 3 to be incredibly light on difficulty (perhaps because I got really into the rhythm combo system) and certainly never felt as though I was grinding for levels. But even so, I did not think of leveling as a means to the end of defeating a larger monster; while that’s obviously the immediate gameplay function, I was more interested in driving the plot. Again, I think this is just a fundamental difference in how we play; I definitely understand how you can feel short-changed after not getting an ultimate test of your skills.
It also seems like you’re a bit frustrated by the lack of choice in the game overall. I can’t argue there; it’s a very linear affair, often aggressively so (I particularly enjoyed one early scene where Lucas can’t wander away from Alec’s house because there are ants at his feet, and he wouldn’t want to step on them.) I don’t see linearity as a fault, though. I certainly enjoy the ability to earn multiple endings in Chrono Trigger or forge my own path in Oblivion, but I’m more than willing to follow along on rails if that’s what the game designer intends. That, I think, is my suggestion for future RPGs: don’t conform to the prevailing standard, whether it be linearity, player autonomy, or big final boss battles. There are good games to be played, and good stories to be told, with all of those mechanics.
Well, now to respond to your response. =P
Yes, the “undercutting serious situations with humor and flippancy”, as you put it, was a big part of MOTHER 3, and I understand that. And although seriousness and humour go hand in hand in the other MOTHER games, I still think maybe MOTHER 3 went a little too far. MOTHER was pretty lighthearted, but still felt, in my mind, backed by something serious and important (the last battle with Giegue, although singing was a major element of it and thus some might call it silly, still felt serious to me in the context of the game/series). MOTHER 2 followed suit, but to me felt to go even farther in that what was serious was even more so, and thus that much more important (scenes that will never escape my mind both highly serious and disturbing: Poo’s Mu Training and the battle with Giygas). While the final battle in MOTHER 3 has the same levels of seriousness, I think it’s the worst offender of using its humour, and unlike most parts in the MOTHER series, the humour feels unwelcome. Also, since you mentioned it, the “good news, bad news” line also felt too lighthearted for the scenario, and the scene where Alec trying to cheer Flint up while looking for Claus felt just as bad.
But then again, it is to make things awkward. I will agree with you that MOTHER 3 strives for that, and succeeds. But the other MOTHER games, in my eyes, use humour, but know when to be serious. I felt the idea of “knowing when to be serious” was kind of lost in MOTHER 3, and thus in comparison to my views of the other games in the series, it felt out of place.
Then again, I may just be looking upon MOTHER and MOTHER 2 with rose-coloured glasses. MOTHER 2 especially. Damn that game was good. =P
Oh, and I forgot to mention, yes, I have seen that interview before, though only in parts (I haven’t sat down to go through all of it yet). I read the part you highlighted, though, and it is interesting to see that my mixed feelings were exactly what Itoi was going for. But again, MOTHER 3 still seems a tad out of place to me in comparison to the other games in the series.
(Sorry for double posting; If there was an edit feature, I would have used it. =P )
I found Mother 3 to be much darker than EarthBound, to the point where some scenes (like the ones mentioned above) are essentially black comedy. Even at its most serious, I never got that vibe from EarthBound. It’s certainly a change, but for me a was a welcome one, and seemed in the spirit of the series. (I didn’t get very far into the original Mother, though, so I’ll reserve my full judgement until this is finished!)
We definitely agree on at least one thing, though: EarthBound was a fantastic game. :)
Also, you might appreciate these comics (spoilers), which really throw the serious/lighthearted conflict into sharp relief. :)
Oh, I hope I didn’t accidentally ruin MOTHER for you with my little spoiler. Sorry! My bad. I had assumed that you played it, but like always, assuming proves never to be a good thing. =P
And yes, EarthBound was SPECTACULAR.
And yes, I have seen that comic, and it made me laugh quite wholeheartedly. =)
Hey,
I see the story and plot aspect, yet the gamble they took by breaking the usual final battle in such ways didnt really cut it for me.
Similar to Lunar 1’s amazing backstab at the end of the game:
You have your epic battle with the villain which lasts a long, loooooong time due to enemy LV raising with yours. Then there is this scene where you advance up a stair to reach one of your characters who seems to be brainwashed. As you move, you dodge her lightning bolt automatically, then you get near her, she shoots a lightning bolt and you die.
GAME OVER.
Wait what? Oh yeah you had to have the instinct to bring out this item you never used during the whole game, a step before the location triggering the lighting bolt that kills you.
Again, interesting concept, but breaks one of those silently established rpg rules which grew on us over the years.
A game that i can recall, patching up their “breaking- of the rules” in a very simple way, was Valkyrie Profile’s A ending path.
-Spoiler-
You fight the final boss valiantly and find out that you arent doing any damage, as hard as you try to attack it.
A cut scene passes, he causes Ragnarok but you main character miraculously acquires the power of creation and survives Ragnarok with the whole party, then you start dealing some damage as the fight starts again and your super move is extended.
Xenogears had an interesting final battle setup where you had to destroy “pods”/sub bosses around the final boss, fueling its power and you had to plan, which party would be sent to which pod to takeout specific abilities and all that keeping your main character’s party healthy enough to fight the final boss. Crazy process and a level up from the “Savor-Sephiroth” 3 party battle from FF7.
The thing with these exemples is that they attempt to break the monotone straight on final battle of hell :D
The Unknown: Don’t worry about spoilers. I’ve read more than is probably healthy about the Mother series, so you haven’t ruined anything for me. :)
Mokuu: There are certainly a number of ways to handle a final battle so that it stands out, but I don’t see why Mother 3’s is any less legitimate than your other examples. Why make the ending into an epic confrontation if that doesn’t fit with the game you want to write? I’m reminded of the love stories that are tacked on to so many garden-variety blockbuster movies — while it’s a valid (and popular) way of telling a story, it shouldn’t be the only way.
Thanks for your comments, guys — it’s great to hear other perspectives on this.
Dan Bruno: Ah, well that’s good to hear. =P