No fighting, now. The important thing is... the translation is finished! Woo! I remember hopping onto the fan translation site when I decided to give Mother 3 a go and saw that there were only a couple more things to sort out. Hope their testing goes well. I saw a webpage review that basically compared Mother 3 to a religious experience (not really, but it praised the game as perfect in every possible way), and it warned that an English translation would not be as perfect as the meticulously-crafted Japanese dialogue. That it would inevitably lose some of its power in the process.
Well forget that, I can't wait for the English version to come through, otherwise I wouldn't have much of a clue what was going on.
I played through and completed Mother 3 (using English guides along the way), playing it hour after hour after hour. My opinion is that it's a great Mother game, noticeably different from Mother 2 in several ways... but precisely because it's different from Mother 2, it's hard for me to shake that feeling that it's just missing something without Ness and company. I guess it's that thing where you'll either appreciate the new direction that Mother 3 goes in, or prefer the old ways of Mother 2. My only real complaint about Mother 3 is that the monsters don't seem quite imaginative enough. In Mother 2 we got demented speed limit signs and cranky old ladies and the dreaded Kiss of Death (and its stronger cousin, the French Kiss of Death). While there are a few gems in Mother 3's bestiary, many of them are just animal hybrids that don't seem as interesting as I thought they would be.
One new thing in Mother 3 I did really like, however, was that if you approached an enemy from behind so you got the advantage, you'll see a picture of the enemy turned around in battle. In your menus there's an option to look at every enemy you've encountered, and that includes whether you've seen their front or backsides. So if you're the sort that wants 100% completion, you may want to see the backsides of enemies so those graphics are filled in in the bestiary collection. It adds variety and it's a nice visual reminder that the enemy can't see you.
If you're interested in seeing that webpage review,
it's here. There may not be any spoilers, but there's a deep discussion on gameplay mechanics and how the game will basically unfold. Another thing that was praised about the game is how you can play it in multiple ways and that there's always a strong push of progression. In other words, you're going to get through the game one way or another, it's a question of when and how hard you make it on yourself. Me, I just played it in the traditional Mother 2 way, grinding like crazy and buying all the Bottle Rockets I could. New areas were usually stumbling blocks since the enemies would be very hard at first, but I managed.
By the way, I never got the hang of getting combos by fighting enemies along to the beat of the music. It's not necessary to do that to win the game, but if you can do it, the game will be a lot easier for you (and you won't have to level grind as much). And yes, a lot of stuff that was in the N64 version of Mother 3 is in here. If you ever wanted to play the N64 game, this is it in 2D form.
