Cruise Elroy

This post contains major Mother 3 spoilers.

If EarthBound was about friendship, Mother 3 is about family. Claus’s disappearance and Hinawa’s death are not merely plot events; they permeate the game’s psyche and lay the foundation for scenes like the poetic “Sunflower Fields” chapter. The saga of Lucas’s family provides both a framework for characterization and the game’s strongest narrative hook.

That said, I think there is something else going on too, as Mother 3 seems to have a curious obsession with purity and purification.

Early in the game, Flint and Duster come across a “Pig Mark Notebook” featuring this missive from Porky:

All the creatures around here suck. We need to make ‘em cooler. So the theme will be:

• Tougher!
• Rougher!
• Badder!

We’ll mix and match this and that to create whole new things no one’s ever seen before! I dub it the “Fascinating Chimera Project”. Let’s reconstruct and modify stuff slowly and steadily.

Many of the game’s enemies are the result of this project. Some, like the Cattlesnake, have lighthearted names and appearances; others, like the Mecha-Drago that kills Hinawa, are significantly creepier. All, of course, are unnatural.

Similarly, all three of the game’s major antagonists (Fassad, Porky, and Claus) are cyborg-like beings. As enemies, they are somewhat soulless, as though they’ve lost some of their human identity, but when they are defeated — Claus in particular — their personalities return and their emotions come through again. It is as though the player cures them of their mechanical infections.

The purification theme is reflected in the gameplay as well. The majority of the game’s healing points are not inns but hot tubs and springs. To activate one of these, you must walk your characters inside and wait for several seconds, presumably while the grime of battle washes away. Meanwhile, relaxing music and bubbly sound effects play, and a thin white film covers the screen. It’s a minor thing, but it makes healing feel more tangibly cleansing than selecting “Sleep” from a menu.

Before Porky’s influence, the Nowhere Islands are a utopia. (Is this an etymological reference? I don’t know, but I like to think so.) Lucas’s pastoral hometown, Tazmily Village, is something of a socialist paradise. Goods and services are freely offered; crime, greed, and money are foreign concepts. No one wants for anything.

The arrival of the Pigmask Army brings capitalism, technology, and corruption. A system of currency is introduced, and suddenly stores begin selling things instead of simply giving them away. People become suspicious and greedy. Porky’s minions install television-like “Happy Boxes” in people’s homes, brainwashing the townsfolk into materialism. And all of this conflict plays out inside of an electronic video game!

(Interestingly, while the plot is telling us how modernization is an obvious detriment to society, the gameplay mechanics are telling us otherwise. Things get much easier to manage after the Pigmasks arrive. Greed and money are useful concepts in RPGs; stocking up on food items, though lampooned by one of the NPCs, is a key strategy in surviving difficult battles. The ability to purchase new weapons and items instead of relying on treasure hunting and random drops means a more regular upgrade schedule for your characters’ stats. When Lucas and friends travel to the metropolitan New Pork City, items are even easier to come by; vending machines and shops litter the map. As far as the player is concerned, there are clear upsides to this new socioeconomic system.)

How did this corruption come about? Towards the end of the game, a character called Leder gives a long speech that reveals much of the backstory. After humans destroyed the world with an unspecified cataclysmic event, a group of survivors had their memories erased and were sent to the Nowhere Islands to begin anew. “In short,” Leder says, “everyone would play out the ideal ‘story’ that they had come up with. The people would restart their lives in a simple, peaceful village, in the kind of place they wished they had grown up in.”

It was not quite a tabula rasa, however. Leder explains that the bell he rings throughout the game is “to keep everyone’s fabricated memories from reverting,” and the ruins of Osohe Castle, a relic from a past civilization, had to be worked into their story somehow (Kumatora was made its princess). The imperfections could not be hidden forever, though; Porky got beneath the surface, and all was nearly lost.

The inscrutable endgame sequence, then, is Mother 3‘s ultimate act of purification. After defeating Claus, Lucas literally destroys the world by pulling the last of a series of mystical Needles from the ground, and everyone is rebirthed in darkness. Only here at the end of all things can there be a fresh start. The game’s logo, which appears on the title screen as an unsettling amalgam of wood and metal, appears again after the credits in an all natural form, symbolically exorcising the world’s imperfections. And with that, the story closes.