Mother 3: A second look
Dragonsphere Report
A long time ago, I wrote some cheeky and not very amusing nonsense about Mother 3. Having already done so, it seems I've been beaten to my usual niche by, of all people, myself. So I will limit this blog post to the core observations I am able to make about the game, without any elaborate interpretation. Spoilers follow.
Mother 3 is a very good game.
Its ending is analogous to the ending of Snowpiercer (which of course came after) and contains the same basic overtones.
The entire deal with the mystical egg seems underutilized, as it doesn't seem the egg is ever actually used for its intended purpose even though the conditions that should have triggered its use are realized.
There is some fridge horror about the thought of an entire community of people with false memories living and dying under primitivistic conditions (or any conditions really) without knowing who they really are or what is actually true.
Porky, as a character that was apparently banned from time, occupies that weird twilight of villains who are essentially sorcerers in technological clothing.
I still don't understand Porky as being a complete or sensible antithesis to Lucas or Tazmily. He is just too facile of a character.
It is a bit convenient to have some undefined mystery problem severe enough to justify primitivism and implanted false memories as a solution.
It is a bit convenient to have the counterpoint to Tazmily be without any virtue of any kind.
The bright-eyed Rousseauian view of the past as essentially ideal is very ungrounded in reality, and I still tend to see the Magypsies and their exclusion from Tazmily life as a statement on both settler dynamics and discrimination and anti-LGBT discrimination. I know that's not textual, but since the actual text is intending to make an argument about what's ideal, it's worth noting that this presented ideal doesn't include integration of the natives/queers.
Seven needles is conspicuously not eight needles in my mind, especially for a story written in Japan about a chain of islands and a primordial dragon.
Other than that, I have plenty of delusions of reference and so forth as usual. I could easily spin that into something, but I will opt not to do so in this particular post.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report