Mother 3‘s battle music
January 13, 2009
In the last post I explained the premise of Mother 3‘s rhythm battle system — you can score combos by hitting the attack button in time with the background music. Now we’re going to look at why that’s so interesting.
The hardest part of the battle system is that the timing window for a successful “hit” is unusually small. Rhythm game stalwarts may find themselves choking on quarter notes, and the software delay on certain GBA emulators is reportedly enough to ruin your chances. Certainly, a 16-hit combo is never a guarantee — which is as it should be; if you want your characters to be twice as powerful, you should have to earn it!
Additionally, the definition of “in time with the background music” changes from one song to the next. There are dozens of different battle themes, and the subtle variations are enough to keep even seasoned musicians on their toes.
Let’s look at some examples. Here’s a simple battle song, “Tragic Reconstruction”:
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To learn the rhythm for a combo you must use the Hypno-Pendulum, an item obtained early in the game that allows you put most enemies to sleep. Sleeping enemies emit a “heartbeat,” which manifests as an audio track layered on top of the background music that reveals the rhythm you need to tap.
Here is “Tragic Reconstruction” again, with its heartbeat track:
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As you can hear, all that’s required for this song is slow, metronomic tapping. (Indeed, the majority of Mother 3‘s heartbeat tracks are nothing more than steady quarter note pulses. I’ll skip most of those.)
Here’s another battle song, “Fate”:
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Though it’s also a simple 4/4 tune, this theme requires attacking in time with the bass. Here’s “Fate” with its heartbeat track:
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Not too tough yet, but we’re getting somewhere.
This battle theme, appropriately titled “Accelerando,” requires you to match a changing tempo:
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Here’s “Accelerando” with its (fairly obvious) heartbeat track:
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It’s a simple piece, but “Accelerando” is one of the more difficult songs in the game to combo because of the small timing window.
This is where things begin to get complicated. Many battle themes appear twice in the game: once in a “easy” version, and again later on with some minor rhythmic variation. The latter plays upon your expectations of the former for the explicit purpose of ruining your combos.
Listen to “Cumbersome Guys,” an easy battle theme with a steady quarter note heartbeat:
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Now listen to “More Cumbersome Guys,” a variation:
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Did you catch that? Every few bars there is a brief glitchy break that throws the rhythm out of whack. Here’s the new heartbeat track:
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There’s a very similar hesitation added to the battle song “Troublesome Guys.” Here’s the original version, again featuring a quarter note heartbeat:
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And here’s “More Troublesome Guys”:
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Incidentally, fans of the series might recognize the “short, glitchy break that messes up the meter” motif from this EarthBound battle song:
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Of course, there wasn’t a rhythm battle system in EarthBound so it wasn’t as problematic there!
Some battle songs have other ways of messing with your head. Here is a theme called “Astonishing March”:
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And here’s “Toppling March,” its evil cousin:
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“Toppling” is certainly the right word for this one. During the A section there are a bunch of extra beats, and in the B section there are some beats missing. Here’s the heartbeat track:
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Here’s a bare-bones transcription featuring the melody and the heartbeat track. Note how the 2/4 measures don’t have any taps, and that the 7/4 measures still have eight taps. I suspect this version of the song was created by messing with the tempo track.
Two more. Here’s “Back Beat Battle”:
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I found this to be a fairly tricky song on its own, actually — though its heartbeat track features straight quarter notes, the unusual accents in the melody made it somewhat difficult to internalize the rhythm. I did better once I ignored the melody altogether and focused on tapping in between the guitar strums. Here’s “Back Beat Battle” with its heartbeat track:
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Got that? “Back Beat Battle – Hard”:
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For my money, this is the most difficult song in the game to combo. Not only do you have to ignore the offbeat accents, but the rhythm changes at seemingly random times because some measures have an extra eighth note. Here’s “Back Beat Battle – Hard” with its heartbeat track:
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And here’s a transcription:
If you’re at all like me, you’ll still have trouble following along even with the sheet music!
Finally, here’s “Strong One,” the pièce de résistance:
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“Strong One” doesn’t appear until very late in the game. Even though it’s ostensibly the basic version of the song, it has an irregular meter (15/8) and a very strange heartbeat track. Have a listen:
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I’ve transcribed that so you can get a better look at the rhythm:
It’s messy, but doable.
Of course, that was the easy version; here’s “Strong One (Masked Man)”:
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Did you notice the difference? Every measure is missing half of a beat. Since 14.5/8 isn’t really an option, that leaves us with the decidedly spicy time signature of 29/16. Not only that, but there are also 3:5 tuplets — that is, there are three notes divided evenly into the last five beats of each measure.
Remember how I said that the timing window is very small? This is where that comes into play. In your average rhythm game, being late by a sixteenth note at this speed (8th = 253 bpm, if you’re curious) would be well within the acceptable range. Not so with Mother 3. If you try to play this track like the easier “Strong One,” your combo will get buried.
There’s no heartbeat track available for “Strong One (Masked Man)”, unfortunately, but I’ve transcribed the pattern and added a sixteenth-note hi-hat to make the rhythm more obvious:
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As I’ve transcribed it, the meter is subdivided into six groups of four 16th notes followed by one group of five 16th notes. In other words, it would make Dave Brubeck cry.
And that, my friends, is why Mother 3‘s rhythm battle system is worth playing.
31 comments
All the work you put into this post was well worth it Dan, what a fascinating dissection of the battle system!
by Matthew Gallant on January 14, 2009 at 1:47 am #
Fantastic! That helps a great deal in the processing and execution. It is a little unfortunate that a few more npc’s didn’t allude to the mechanism in more detail. Thanks for that.
by Evan on January 14, 2009 at 10:13 am #
Hah! I thought I had known the ins and outs of the beat system until this post. While I was playing, I thought that each song had a consistent beat of its own. I didn’t know that, within the song itself, the beat required for button presses could change, even though I knew the beat of the music would. This explains why I seemingly lost some combos “for no reason”. Thanks for clearing that up. This makes the system highly more interesting than I initially thought.
Also, since you brought up the fact that this music battle system is not present in EarthBound, I pose this question: if you could somehow change the past, would you use the music battle system found in MOTHER 3 in EarthBound? It would be interesting, to say the least. Personally, I dunno if it would fit the game’s tone as well as the music battle system fit MOTHER 3, but who knows? Maybe some resourceful hacker should get something going… =P
by The Unknown on January 14, 2009 at 11:53 am #
I was linked to this by a post made on ShackNews. Thanks for writing it! Extremely thoughtful and informative… down to the sheet music.
Very cool. I’m going to have to play Mother 3 now :D
by Jeff on January 14, 2009 at 2:54 pm #
just so you know, this convinced me to get the game.
by John on January 14, 2009 at 4:56 pm #
Wow, awesome work :D I’d always hoped someone would dissect the music system like this someday, I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon!
I actually know where the combo/beat data in the ROM is from all the time I spent hacking the thing up (though I don’t know how it’s laid out at all) so I also had/have hopes for someday making like a flash app for my site where people can practice the combos and maybe have visual clues to help them out. and master them. I dunno if I’ll ever have the time to actually do all that, though.
Anyway, awesome stuff! I’ll be sure to add a link to this on the online readme to help players out!
by Tomato on January 14, 2009 at 6:46 pm #
That’s insane, dude. I used to enjoy composing 12 tone pieces in odd time signatures, if not just to confuse the primadonna’s at uni but I think I might find a hole to crawl in now …
by Daniel Purvis on January 14, 2009 at 7:18 pm #
This is interesting… It reminds me of the discussion we had back in your Zelda series about the Epona song and the “impossible” guitar chords. Are you going to write anything about the composer and whether or not he/she was a virtuoso or a “random” composer?
by Ben Abraham on January 14, 2009 at 8:14 pm #
I’m not really sure why, but I actually found Accelerando (and the hard version, Stringendo) to be probably the easiest track to get a max combo on, even moreso than the easy 4/4 quarter note tempos. I figured the timing must have been looser for that track for me to be able to get 16′s pretty much every time.
Strong One (Masked Man), though. I hadn’t even really figured out the pattern for Strong One and along came this monstrosity. I wept openly.
by CHz on January 14, 2009 at 11:14 pm #
Wow. I’m floored by the reaction to this post. Thanks so much to everyone who read it and left me nice comments — especially Tomato, without whom the past three months would have been pretty quiet around these parts! I’m especially glad that I’ve encouraged more people to try out the game; I can’t think of a more flattering response.
The Unknown: I agree that the rhythm battle system is a uniquely Mother 3 thing — I wouldn’t want to retrofit it into EarthBound, even if it were possible. That game is perfect in its own way. :-)
Tomato: I owe you an enormous debt of gratitude for taking on the translation project. You really did a fantastic job. Your Flash app idea sounds really cool too; if it ever materializes, let me know if you want any help. I’d be happy to work on some more detailed transcriptions.
Ben: I hadn’t thought of these from a compositional standpoint yet, to be honest. (I know, quite a shift!) Some of the more complicated tracks, like “Strong One (Masked Man),” sound like they were created by just messing with the tempo. Either way, rest assured that there is another Mother 3 music post coming!
CHz: Very interesting! I’ll have to check whether the timing window is different per song. It may well be that I’m just bad at accelerandos, of course. :-)
by Dan Bruno on January 15, 2009 at 12:02 am #
Great article, thanks for writing it! I have tremendous trouble with the “harder versions” of a few of the easier songs. I hate that the game tries to trick me! But then I also love that it spices things up and keeps it entertaining. It’s a love/hate relationship, I guess.
I look forward to your future M3 posts!
by Poe on January 15, 2009 at 3:00 pm #
Thanks Dan for your lucid discussion. You have inspired me to try the game.
FB
by Final Barfman on January 16, 2009 at 10:17 am #
Thank you for the great article! I ran into your blog via a link in Tomato’s site, and I just had a blast reading your analysis of the Zelda music too. Consider me a new regular reader!
Looking forward to the new posts too, of course. :D
by Pishi on January 19, 2009 at 12:57 am #
Phew, 29/16…The composer doesn’t happen to have a bit of Bulgarian in him, does he? Kidding aside, It reminds me a lot of Bulgarian folk dance music, although those tunes “groove” a bit more, as here the intent for the odd compound time was to make the bars seem too long or short. Nevertheless, brilliant post, as was your LoZ:OoT series—terrific, terrific stuff!
by Sam on January 19, 2009 at 3:03 am #
Hope this doesn’t count as advertisement…
I’m planning to upload various a 16-hit for every single song in the game (barring three: the Drum enemy’s two alternate hits [I always end up killing him] and the final boss battle.)
by Akvo on January 23, 2009 at 11:25 pm #
This is absolutely one of the most intriguing posts I’ve ever read, and definitely on par with your Ocarina of Time’s musical analysis series. My interests to play the game has sky-rocketed, due to your well-explained, informative, and illustrious post.
Thank you, sir.
by Angelo on January 25, 2009 at 2:57 pm #
Great Work! My english is not good. But I can get the main idea in this post. Your analysis give me a more clear view of Mother 3′s battle system! I am very appreciated for your great work! Thank you!
by Recko on February 12, 2009 at 12:49 am #
Pata Pata Pata Pon!
by Celina Nunes on February 27, 2009 at 9:38 am #
could u add Mr. Passion and Lord Passion’s music?
by Robert on April 8, 2009 at 8:15 am #
This help is spectacular, surely better than my english… Anyway, thanks a lot, thanks :D.
by Almost Thursday on April 13, 2009 at 12:08 am #
Man, this is what i was looking for !
Thanks a lot budy !
by Sebastien D on May 27, 2009 at 4:57 pm #
This is why I love the Internet. Thanks.
by Revin on July 2, 2009 at 3:48 pm #
I never noticed that ‘Strong One (Masked Man)’ was in 29/16! Crazy.
I don’t think it’s all that difficult, even so; maybe just because it actually follows the melody unlike ‘Back Beat Battle (Hard)’.
by Anders on July 2, 2009 at 5:59 pm #
When I’m playing on an emulator I just mash the A button while attacking.
I often get 2 or 3, sometimes up to 6 hit combos with this method.
by LandStander on July 6, 2009 at 4:17 am #
Oh my, thank you so much for this. Ugh I confess… I used a gameshark cheat on my GBA to make sure I always get at least 10 combo’s in. I actually didn’t realize that the sleep status revealed the heartbeat of the music. I am starting clean now at least! I am actually one of those fools who bought the M3 Micro box set, and rom dumped it with my NDS flash… at least now I can start over again and actually do stuff like kill a soot dumpling with Flint alone. Emulating kills the sound synch or gives an odd music speed up when using the menu…
Highest combo so far, 13!
by Miksoph on July 17, 2009 at 7:44 am #
Good job on posting this, but I am SO FRUSTRATED!!!! I can’t get the combos!! I can only get 2 at the max. I make them sleep and listen to the beat and do exactly what it’s telling me to do and it doesn’t work!!! I’m even a musician and I know everything about music and it frustrates me that I can’t it right. I want to know what time you actually start the count. When it says your character attacks, then start it? Does anyone have any tips? The heart beat it gave me didn’t work so I tried a beat I heard in the song and got a 2 hit combo. I’m confused.
by Geoff on October 6, 2009 at 12:08 pm #
the game never explained this very well… thanks!
by calebmon on March 11, 2010 at 4:13 pm #
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!! You are so awesome. This makes me so happy I can’t even tell you!
by captain-murphy on April 6, 2010 at 8:39 pm #
Outstanding! Bravo!
A tip for those who use Visual Boy Advance as emulator:
Options: Frame Skip: 0
Put the frame skip in zero helps, and A LOT!
by Blah on April 10, 2010 at 4:42 pm #
And what about Tough Zombeat? That is really the hardest song in the game.
by pollo on April 10, 2010 at 8:23 pm #
Besides the tricky battle combos, I’ve also noticed that a lot of the battle music in Mother 3 is just really GOOD. Back Beat Battle is a great example. That one is really funkin’ it up.
by spork on July 20, 2010 at 1:54 pm #