Mother 3: Impressionism
This post will be dealing with major spoilers for Mother 3. Some of these are things other people have had a big reaction to, so if you want to see the story for yourself and get the proper impact this is probably a post you should come back to later.
Ultimately, I didn't like Mother 3's actual story. I liked bits and pieces of background humor, the gameplay was serviceable overall, and there were some specific narrative-ish bits I liked the handling of, such as the Ultimate Chimera, but the actual primary plot left me... dissatisfied.
Story
The entire 'pulling the Needles/awakening the Dark Dragon' plotline is redundant, and has a bunch of problems attached to it, like how the Magypsies invoke destiny and so on with absolutely nothing to explain why they believe any such thing applies. There's no prophecy being quoted, no reference to a higher being passing down orders, no nothing. They just invoke standard fantasy tropes in a manner that doesn't fit in context, and the story moves on -which would be fine if the plotline was at least necessary.
By 'the Needles plotline is redundant', I mean the thrust of the overplot is that Porky is an evil fellow callously ruining the world for his own entertainment Because He Can, and our heroes are fighting back against this because, you know, That's Bad. The Needles plot doesn't add anything new to this: Porky is already effectively all-powerful for some reason, so him taking over the Dark Dragon isn't what would make him a threat. All the needles plot 'adds' is
-Providing a thin justification for throwing stuff at the player about how Lucas is Special and Chosen By Destiny (Except learning PK Love is already special, so it's redundant) and
-Ineffective Drama via the Masked Man getting 3 of the Needles. (Ineffective because it's obvious that the Masked Man can't actually win, at least not this early, because that would Bad End the story before it got anywhere. If you were living such events it would be dramatic, but as a story it doesn't work)
There's so much 'I can't care about this' attached to the Needles that it's just a tremendous drain on the story, and unlike most JRPGs the Needles plotline doesn't even get used to provide a predictable framework for the story to scaffold itself on. Instead the Needles are introduced late in the plot, you spend one chapter going through 6 of them real quick with no character development or events of narrative significance outside of the Needles being pulled, and then the final one gets pulled at the end of the game to kick off the baffling ending.
It's honestly just confusing that the game did this thing with the Needles at all, I have no idea what the impetus was.
Characters
Lucas
He has a claimed character arc of crybaby->no crybaby, but there's zero truth to it. 'Is a crybaby' is also pretty much the only character trait the story ever tries to imply, unless you count the related point that several people call him 'gentle'... uuuuh sure, the kid who bashes animal faces in with a stick and vaporizes people with the psionic manifestation of his love for his family is 'gentle'. If you say so, game.
I'm being completely serious there: it's not just the game mechanics are at odds with the claim, it's that the game has numerous opportunities to try to suggest gentleness as a part of Lucas' personality through his choices and behavior, and the only time it ever actually follows through is when you're forced into a one-on-one duel with his brother and Lucas absolutely refuses to lay a hand on his brother even though Claus is shooting him full of holes and tearing him apart with a lightsabre. Even then, there's so many other possible ways of taking the sequence, and it's so at odds with the entire rest of the game, that it comes across as one of those weird lies stories tell about their characters and inexplicably expect the audience to take the claim at face value even though it's so clearly a lie. It's also just such an artificial sequence that it's just... it should be a powerful sequence about two siblings tragically forced into a fight with each other and one of them refusing to give in and fight back because familial love and all, but it doesn't feel like an organic outgrowth of anything that's come before. It's a scene that is happening because the creators wanted it to happen, and the game doesn't put in the minimum effort to make it make sense to be happening, and I just can't find it in me to see tragedy when the story can't be bothered to get me to buy this happening in the first place.
Yes, I know there's 'in-story reasons'. I'm aware Claus is some weird mindslave of Porky's because cybernetic reconstruction, somehow. That Porky is having the fight happen because he's an evil monster blah blah blah.
You know what he could be doing? He could be having Claus pull the final Needle and win at everything! It's literally right there!
When it gets down to it, the fight is happening in contravention of everything the story has established, not because of the things the story has established, so there's no emotional investment. I was expecting for much of the game to get such a final confrontation, and I even figured it would involve Lucas trying to redeem/bring back Claus, but I was expecting these events to make sense in context, not demand you ignore context.
Lucas' status as a silent protagonist doesn't help, since personality and values are largely left undefined or to be inferred if you've got a silent protagonist at all, but there's plenty of silent protagonists who have some personality fairly strongly defined from right out the game. Lucas... we get told he's a gentle crybaby. That's his character: things other people believe of him for no apparent reason, in contradiction of everything the audience ever sees. Lucas cries twice in the entire game: once when his mother has died and he's at her grave, and the second time while fighting his zombie-cyborg-mindslaved brother. I realize this game comes from Japan, where stoic is the default, but this metric places anything less than a complete unfeeling stone as a crybaby!
There's a broad, implied theme with Lucas' story being about familial relationships, if you look at things from a certain angle, but it's... not really there. Where Ness in Earthbound had a good relationship with his parents, whom were a fairly stereotypical (Particularly from a Japanese perspective) stay-at-home-wife/mom and working-stiff-husband/dad and they're just nice and supportive of Ness, Lucas is clearly intended to be close to his family and essentially loses them all: his mom dies, his brother vanishes early in the game and ultimately dies in front of Lucas, and his father is so broken by his mother's death that the man is clearly barely present in any meaningful sense. That's all very tragic-sounding, but somehow it feels more empty and pointless than Ness' blandly supportive family.
It feels like the creators were going somewhere with Lucas' story, and then never got around to putting it into the actual game. I'm not sure if it's just a cultural gap throwing me or if there's genuinely something missing or what, but the overall result doesn't really work for me.
There's a bit of an exception on the 'gentleness' point worth mentioning, but I'll get to it when talking about Kumatora.
Duster
He gets a decent amount of screentime, with two arcs notably dealing with him (His mission to get the Egg, retrieving him from the DCMC), but neither of these really does anything with him as a character. In the first case, he's just an agent of another, working toward ends he doesn't know and doesn't seem to care about, his skills being what matters. In the second case, the rest of the party is trying to retrieve him because he should know where the Egg was hidden and they're on a mission to retrieve it, and talking him into leaving his new life is just an obstacle to success.
His father is basically abusive, Duster takes it, but we never get an inkling of why. This is particularly troubling given Duster has a limp: these things could be completely unrelated, but the proper narrative thing to do if that's the intention is to spell out that they're unrelated. Otherwise it looks like you're hinting that the abuse is so extreme that at some point Duster ended up with a broken leg or something -especially since what we see him suffer actually fails to cross over into comedic exaggeration.
As 'Lucky' the opportunity to develop his character gets outright trashed, with him ultimately coming with you being reduced to pure chance/video game railroading/the DCMC 'boss' deliberately throwing the rock-paper-scissors match, removing his agency. This could have been a moment to establish that Duster has a strong sense of justice, or feels an obligation to see his mission through, or something that actually says something about him, but the closest the sequence comes to any of that is implying that he feels a similar amount of loyalty to both his new and his old friends. For... no obvious reason, in the case of his old friends, given he barely got any chance to interact with Kumatora etc.
In practice Duster is largely reduced to being a tool in the most literal sense. Even when we get the big backstory dump about the (utterly baffling) memory wipes, where the explanation tells us that most people actually picked the basic shape of what we see of their lives and thus implies something about them as a person, even if it's not clear what in any given case, in Duster's case we're explicitly told he was programmed along with his father to want to steal the Egg as a failsafe if things went off track. We're never told that, say, Duster volunteered for this role, and in fact the general implication is that it's his skills that were why he was chosen. So that's another moment the game could've given Duster some character that is very deliberately trashed by the game.
I do like how Duster has a limp and the game doesn't make a big deal out of it, but that's really the only narrative thing about Duster that I like. And the way it ties into his relationship with his father makes even that a bit icky.
Boney
Lucas' dog. Zero character development. Makes sense, but given most of the other characters are barely better I don't think it's really because he's a boy's dog. Even aside how many authors have made pets memorable and distinctive people in their own right.
The only actually memorable moment with Boney is a silly sequence where Boney gets dressed up in a t-shirt and beany and this somehow convinces other people that he's a regular kid with a condition rather than, you know, a dog. It's... evoking humor more than being humorous, an example of how Mother 3's world is strange and willing to divorce itself from reality and yet it rarely feels purposeful. This could have been funny. I'd even say it should have been funny. Instead it's just... okay? Why did this get done, exactly? It's not like the game had to address the question of Lucas bringing his dog in, let alone come up with a weird solution.
Boney just ends up feeling like another set of missed opportunities.
Kumatora
Starts the game with an implied character arc, with how she's a princess who doesn't dress or act like a princess. There's a bunch of obvious ways that could go; Kumatora could come to realize her position genuinely calls for more decorum, she could convince other people to back off because being proper and girly isn't important to her job as a princess, she could escape the responsibilities of her position entirely... instead, the entire thing is ignored, and we ultimately have her implied character arc negated, by the reveal that she was made the 'princess' of this fake world because for no explained reason the citizens agreed they needed a 'princess', and there's no replacement character arc.
This could have been a story about Kumatora as a little girl wanting to be a princess, and then finding out that in reality it's not all that it's cracked up to be, which would have been nice and characterful. Instead, the fact that she's so far removed from princess-ness is just another example of how the fake world doesn't really add up, saying nothing about Kumatora herself. Just like Duster, the game goes out of its way to erase character implications when it has a natural opportunity to add them in with no additional effort.
I want to like Kumatora just because she's so unapologetically Not Girly, with the story making no judgment about it and only drawing attention to it one time (When she's dressed up in a girly uniform because, you know, job), and I probably would like her in a different story, but in Mother 3 it just feels like a bunch of missed opportunities. It doesn't help that she doesn't get much dialogue and who she is as a person isn't really a factor in the plot -Boney is the only party member that's worse than her about being primarily relevant as a gameplay piece rather than contributing anything to the story, and he's literally Lucas' dog so that's a really low bar to hurdle. The last time she has much of anything to say is fairly late in the plot, but that's misleading because of how long it takes for the plot to get to her: in a game that frames itself as 7-ish chapters long, she only really participates in a remotely substantive way in two of them.
Ultimately, I couldn't spontaneously name even an impression of a character trait other than 'not girly' she has. She's just... there.
I do like how the game is a bit subversive on the gameplay level, though: you might expect Kumatora to be your White Mage sort of character, just because she's your second psychic character and she's a girl, particularly if you played the previous game where your psychic female party member was your best healer and all, but Kumatora is actually pretty much purely about vaporizing people using her brains. Lucas is your primary healer, with Boney being effectively a secondary healer because he's a good choice for tossing out items for various reasons. While Lucas has better burst damage than Kumatora due to his access to PK Love, it eats a lot of PP and he's so good at bashing things in with sticks that you should usually conserve his PP for healing/support effects and mostly break out PK Love for breaking through tough fights in specific, where Kumatora can comfortably fling psychic death basically all day.
I actually really like the intersection of (attempted) story and gameplay here: if the game was either lighter on plot overall or had done a better job of selling the idea that Lucas is gentle within the plot, this would actually be pretty much perfect. We've got the un-girly girl who breaks from traditional gender roles by eschewing supportive options in favor of More Dakka, and she's not even defensive about it, it's just how she is, and we've got the gentle boy who's closer to traditional feminine models by covering your supportive healer role. (Though still masculine enough to beat fuzzy animals to death with a stick)
While I'm not moved by the game the way a lot of people are, this bit is genuinely wonderful.
Flint
Wife dies, he turns violent in grief, then disappears into the mountains to look for Claus for most of the rest of the game. His characterization is consistent, but it doesn't really go anywhere. He cares about his family, he neglects his one surviving/present son in favor of his missing son, that's all there is to him.
It's workable, which is all we really need from a prologue character who's not a real part of the party.
The problem is from the part where he's well ahead of almost every other character in terms of having actual character, definition, a story.
Salsa
Cares a lot about his girlfriend, enough so to put up with suffering that drives him to tears. That's more characterization than any other party member except Flint, and it's not even Salsa's only characterization, it's just his most obvious and compelling.
From the monkey.
I wish I were joking.
Don't get me wrong, Salsa's portion of the story is probably the most effective portion of the entire game as a story so long as you're willing to accept the basic weirdness of a human being expecting to coerce a monkey into doing what he wants by kidnapping its girlfriend and then telling it what he wants it to do, it's just... this should not be head and shoulders above Lucas' fight with Claus, yet it is.
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You might notice I've talked more about the characters than the plot. That's because, when it gets down to it, Mother 3's story is much more about impressions than particulars. It's a story about modern, big city life encroaching on rural life, where it doesn't matter what is being shown on not-TVs, because TV proliferating is just part and parcel of that experience. The goofiness of the introduction of money to Tazmily is unimportant, because the story is pretty much a goofy sketch rather than a gritty story. I could complain about 'plot holes', but as ridiculous as it is for the Ultimate Chimera to somehow end up in a bathroom well up a skyscraper without having eaten anyone it's not important to the picture the game is painting, nor is pretty much anything else jarring or weird, even leaving aside the amount of deliberate weirdness that fills the game.
It's an impression that doesn't really resonate with me, as it happens. The rustic charm of the great outdoors is something I've lived in, and it holds no special appeal to me. Mother 3 sometimes seems to be merely mourning the loss of simpler times and so on, and yet other times it comes across as actively demonizing modern technology of pretty any stripe. The latter always annoys me coming from a video game, which as an art form is so young that if it were human it probably wouldn't have keeled over of old age by now, and Mother 3 doesn't really do anything to soften that irritation.
Further, Mother 3 feels very superficial to me. It comes across less like a story painting general impressions and allowing its audience to fill in fiddly little details with their mind and more as a story that has tremendous gaps in key aspects of its design. The inexplicable pointlessness of the Needles plot is a hole too basic and vital to be shrugged off as 'the details don't matter', something beyond focusing on the big picture over the details that make up that picture, and it's not the only odd gap in the story's foundations.
By a similar token, the characters are very basic sketches of characters, which is fine except so little is done with these sketches that it's less an impression of a character and more an impression of a perception of a character, a step too far removed from a person-like entity. I don't even mind that we never find out where Kumatora was living when you first met her, or how she was surviving, even though it's technically a pretty major gap in the story, or any number of other questions that could be asked about her situation -but almost nothing is done with her, and I'm just left going 'well, it's nice to see media presenting a non-girly girl without making a big deal out of her status. I guess.' If you asked me what her role in the story was as far as affecting it, I couldn't tell you. Kumatora has a particularly poor showing here, as I said earlier, but Duster is only barely better, and Lucas is important to the narrative less for anything he does and more because the plot informs us that only he and Claus can pull the Needles, special child of destiny, etc. (Though at least the fight with his brother is trying to do a story beat that is actually about Lucas as a person...)
Stories seeking to be impressions rarely land well with me regardless, but Mother 3's was particularly disappointing between how much other people had built it up before I played it and the fact that I already had familiarity with Earthbound and the original Mother. I like both of those games. There's some oddities I don't really get about them, but I think they both have a good core of a story. Each of your party members in those games is reasonably well-defined in those two games even though they really don't have much dialogue or interact with many plot beats, and the main character is fairly closely tied to the story even if some individual elements are a bit weird or awkward. I was expecting Mother 3 to be similar, or perhaps more ambitious. I even kind of liked the first 20 or 30% or so of the story, when I was under the impression it was a prologue to a notably lengthy story -the first 5% of the story, say. Looking back, though, while it's a solid sequence in its own right it doesn't actually add a lot to the rest of the story, which simply doesn't have enough real estate to afford that kind of expenditure of time and resources. That the Needles plotline is fairly empty compounds this issue, leaving the overall structure of the story jerky and unsatisfying.
I still think the gameplay is solid enough to check out for its own sake, but I dunno outside of that. Maybe you'll love the game the way so many others have, or maybe like me you'll find yourself dissatisfied and wondering what went wrong when you're done.
And this will probably be my final post talking about Mother 3. I dunno, I sort of intended to talk about how the Ultimate Chimera is actually handled well, maybe I'll get to that someday, but beyond that I don't think there's a lot else to talk about.
Ultimately, I didn't like Mother 3's actual story. I liked bits and pieces of background humor, the gameplay was serviceable overall, and there were some specific narrative-ish bits I liked the handling of, such as the Ultimate Chimera, but the actual primary plot left me... dissatisfied.
Story
The entire 'pulling the Needles/awakening the Dark Dragon' plotline is redundant, and has a bunch of problems attached to it, like how the Magypsies invoke destiny and so on with absolutely nothing to explain why they believe any such thing applies. There's no prophecy being quoted, no reference to a higher being passing down orders, no nothing. They just invoke standard fantasy tropes in a manner that doesn't fit in context, and the story moves on -which would be fine if the plotline was at least necessary.
By 'the Needles plotline is redundant', I mean the thrust of the overplot is that Porky is an evil fellow callously ruining the world for his own entertainment Because He Can, and our heroes are fighting back against this because, you know, That's Bad. The Needles plot doesn't add anything new to this: Porky is already effectively all-powerful for some reason, so him taking over the Dark Dragon isn't what would make him a threat. All the needles plot 'adds' is
-Providing a thin justification for throwing stuff at the player about how Lucas is Special and Chosen By Destiny (Except learning PK Love is already special, so it's redundant) and
-Ineffective Drama via the Masked Man getting 3 of the Needles. (Ineffective because it's obvious that the Masked Man can't actually win, at least not this early, because that would Bad End the story before it got anywhere. If you were living such events it would be dramatic, but as a story it doesn't work)
There's so much 'I can't care about this' attached to the Needles that it's just a tremendous drain on the story, and unlike most JRPGs the Needles plotline doesn't even get used to provide a predictable framework for the story to scaffold itself on. Instead the Needles are introduced late in the plot, you spend one chapter going through 6 of them real quick with no character development or events of narrative significance outside of the Needles being pulled, and then the final one gets pulled at the end of the game to kick off the baffling ending.
It's honestly just confusing that the game did this thing with the Needles at all, I have no idea what the impetus was.
Characters
Lucas
He has a claimed character arc of crybaby->no crybaby, but there's zero truth to it. 'Is a crybaby' is also pretty much the only character trait the story ever tries to imply, unless you count the related point that several people call him 'gentle'... uuuuh sure, the kid who bashes animal faces in with a stick and vaporizes people with the psionic manifestation of his love for his family is 'gentle'. If you say so, game.
I'm being completely serious there: it's not just the game mechanics are at odds with the claim, it's that the game has numerous opportunities to try to suggest gentleness as a part of Lucas' personality through his choices and behavior, and the only time it ever actually follows through is when you're forced into a one-on-one duel with his brother and Lucas absolutely refuses to lay a hand on his brother even though Claus is shooting him full of holes and tearing him apart with a lightsabre. Even then, there's so many other possible ways of taking the sequence, and it's so at odds with the entire rest of the game, that it comes across as one of those weird lies stories tell about their characters and inexplicably expect the audience to take the claim at face value even though it's so clearly a lie. It's also just such an artificial sequence that it's just... it should be a powerful sequence about two siblings tragically forced into a fight with each other and one of them refusing to give in and fight back because familial love and all, but it doesn't feel like an organic outgrowth of anything that's come before. It's a scene that is happening because the creators wanted it to happen, and the game doesn't put in the minimum effort to make it make sense to be happening, and I just can't find it in me to see tragedy when the story can't be bothered to get me to buy this happening in the first place.
Yes, I know there's 'in-story reasons'. I'm aware Claus is some weird mindslave of Porky's because cybernetic reconstruction, somehow. That Porky is having the fight happen because he's an evil monster blah blah blah.
You know what he could be doing? He could be having Claus pull the final Needle and win at everything! It's literally right there!
When it gets down to it, the fight is happening in contravention of everything the story has established, not because of the things the story has established, so there's no emotional investment. I was expecting for much of the game to get such a final confrontation, and I even figured it would involve Lucas trying to redeem/bring back Claus, but I was expecting these events to make sense in context, not demand you ignore context.
Lucas' status as a silent protagonist doesn't help, since personality and values are largely left undefined or to be inferred if you've got a silent protagonist at all, but there's plenty of silent protagonists who have some personality fairly strongly defined from right out the game. Lucas... we get told he's a gentle crybaby. That's his character: things other people believe of him for no apparent reason, in contradiction of everything the audience ever sees. Lucas cries twice in the entire game: once when his mother has died and he's at her grave, and the second time while fighting his zombie-cyborg-mindslaved brother. I realize this game comes from Japan, where stoic is the default, but this metric places anything less than a complete unfeeling stone as a crybaby!
There's a broad, implied theme with Lucas' story being about familial relationships, if you look at things from a certain angle, but it's... not really there. Where Ness in Earthbound had a good relationship with his parents, whom were a fairly stereotypical (Particularly from a Japanese perspective) stay-at-home-wife/mom and working-stiff-husband/dad and they're just nice and supportive of Ness, Lucas is clearly intended to be close to his family and essentially loses them all: his mom dies, his brother vanishes early in the game and ultimately dies in front of Lucas, and his father is so broken by his mother's death that the man is clearly barely present in any meaningful sense. That's all very tragic-sounding, but somehow it feels more empty and pointless than Ness' blandly supportive family.
It feels like the creators were going somewhere with Lucas' story, and then never got around to putting it into the actual game. I'm not sure if it's just a cultural gap throwing me or if there's genuinely something missing or what, but the overall result doesn't really work for me.
There's a bit of an exception on the 'gentleness' point worth mentioning, but I'll get to it when talking about Kumatora.
Duster
He gets a decent amount of screentime, with two arcs notably dealing with him (His mission to get the Egg, retrieving him from the DCMC), but neither of these really does anything with him as a character. In the first case, he's just an agent of another, working toward ends he doesn't know and doesn't seem to care about, his skills being what matters. In the second case, the rest of the party is trying to retrieve him because he should know where the Egg was hidden and they're on a mission to retrieve it, and talking him into leaving his new life is just an obstacle to success.
His father is basically abusive, Duster takes it, but we never get an inkling of why. This is particularly troubling given Duster has a limp: these things could be completely unrelated, but the proper narrative thing to do if that's the intention is to spell out that they're unrelated. Otherwise it looks like you're hinting that the abuse is so extreme that at some point Duster ended up with a broken leg or something -especially since what we see him suffer actually fails to cross over into comedic exaggeration.
As 'Lucky' the opportunity to develop his character gets outright trashed, with him ultimately coming with you being reduced to pure chance/video game railroading/the DCMC 'boss' deliberately throwing the rock-paper-scissors match, removing his agency. This could have been a moment to establish that Duster has a strong sense of justice, or feels an obligation to see his mission through, or something that actually says something about him, but the closest the sequence comes to any of that is implying that he feels a similar amount of loyalty to both his new and his old friends. For... no obvious reason, in the case of his old friends, given he barely got any chance to interact with Kumatora etc.
In practice Duster is largely reduced to being a tool in the most literal sense. Even when we get the big backstory dump about the (utterly baffling) memory wipes, where the explanation tells us that most people actually picked the basic shape of what we see of their lives and thus implies something about them as a person, even if it's not clear what in any given case, in Duster's case we're explicitly told he was programmed along with his father to want to steal the Egg as a failsafe if things went off track. We're never told that, say, Duster volunteered for this role, and in fact the general implication is that it's his skills that were why he was chosen. So that's another moment the game could've given Duster some character that is very deliberately trashed by the game.
I do like how Duster has a limp and the game doesn't make a big deal out of it, but that's really the only narrative thing about Duster that I like. And the way it ties into his relationship with his father makes even that a bit icky.
Boney
Lucas' dog. Zero character development. Makes sense, but given most of the other characters are barely better I don't think it's really because he's a boy's dog. Even aside how many authors have made pets memorable and distinctive people in their own right.
The only actually memorable moment with Boney is a silly sequence where Boney gets dressed up in a t-shirt and beany and this somehow convinces other people that he's a regular kid with a condition rather than, you know, a dog. It's... evoking humor more than being humorous, an example of how Mother 3's world is strange and willing to divorce itself from reality and yet it rarely feels purposeful. This could have been funny. I'd even say it should have been funny. Instead it's just... okay? Why did this get done, exactly? It's not like the game had to address the question of Lucas bringing his dog in, let alone come up with a weird solution.
Boney just ends up feeling like another set of missed opportunities.
Kumatora
Starts the game with an implied character arc, with how she's a princess who doesn't dress or act like a princess. There's a bunch of obvious ways that could go; Kumatora could come to realize her position genuinely calls for more decorum, she could convince other people to back off because being proper and girly isn't important to her job as a princess, she could escape the responsibilities of her position entirely... instead, the entire thing is ignored, and we ultimately have her implied character arc negated, by the reveal that she was made the 'princess' of this fake world because for no explained reason the citizens agreed they needed a 'princess', and there's no replacement character arc.
This could have been a story about Kumatora as a little girl wanting to be a princess, and then finding out that in reality it's not all that it's cracked up to be, which would have been nice and characterful. Instead, the fact that she's so far removed from princess-ness is just another example of how the fake world doesn't really add up, saying nothing about Kumatora herself. Just like Duster, the game goes out of its way to erase character implications when it has a natural opportunity to add them in with no additional effort.
I want to like Kumatora just because she's so unapologetically Not Girly, with the story making no judgment about it and only drawing attention to it one time (When she's dressed up in a girly uniform because, you know, job), and I probably would like her in a different story, but in Mother 3 it just feels like a bunch of missed opportunities. It doesn't help that she doesn't get much dialogue and who she is as a person isn't really a factor in the plot -Boney is the only party member that's worse than her about being primarily relevant as a gameplay piece rather than contributing anything to the story, and he's literally Lucas' dog so that's a really low bar to hurdle. The last time she has much of anything to say is fairly late in the plot, but that's misleading because of how long it takes for the plot to get to her: in a game that frames itself as 7-ish chapters long, she only really participates in a remotely substantive way in two of them.
Ultimately, I couldn't spontaneously name even an impression of a character trait other than 'not girly' she has. She's just... there.
I do like how the game is a bit subversive on the gameplay level, though: you might expect Kumatora to be your White Mage sort of character, just because she's your second psychic character and she's a girl, particularly if you played the previous game where your psychic female party member was your best healer and all, but Kumatora is actually pretty much purely about vaporizing people using her brains. Lucas is your primary healer, with Boney being effectively a secondary healer because he's a good choice for tossing out items for various reasons. While Lucas has better burst damage than Kumatora due to his access to PK Love, it eats a lot of PP and he's so good at bashing things in with sticks that you should usually conserve his PP for healing/support effects and mostly break out PK Love for breaking through tough fights in specific, where Kumatora can comfortably fling psychic death basically all day.
I actually really like the intersection of (attempted) story and gameplay here: if the game was either lighter on plot overall or had done a better job of selling the idea that Lucas is gentle within the plot, this would actually be pretty much perfect. We've got the un-girly girl who breaks from traditional gender roles by eschewing supportive options in favor of More Dakka, and she's not even defensive about it, it's just how she is, and we've got the gentle boy who's closer to traditional feminine models by covering your supportive healer role. (Though still masculine enough to beat fuzzy animals to death with a stick)
While I'm not moved by the game the way a lot of people are, this bit is genuinely wonderful.
Flint
Wife dies, he turns violent in grief, then disappears into the mountains to look for Claus for most of the rest of the game. His characterization is consistent, but it doesn't really go anywhere. He cares about his family, he neglects his one surviving/present son in favor of his missing son, that's all there is to him.
It's workable, which is all we really need from a prologue character who's not a real part of the party.
The problem is from the part where he's well ahead of almost every other character in terms of having actual character, definition, a story.
Salsa
Cares a lot about his girlfriend, enough so to put up with suffering that drives him to tears. That's more characterization than any other party member except Flint, and it's not even Salsa's only characterization, it's just his most obvious and compelling.
From the monkey.
I wish I were joking.
Don't get me wrong, Salsa's portion of the story is probably the most effective portion of the entire game as a story so long as you're willing to accept the basic weirdness of a human being expecting to coerce a monkey into doing what he wants by kidnapping its girlfriend and then telling it what he wants it to do, it's just... this should not be head and shoulders above Lucas' fight with Claus, yet it is.
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You might notice I've talked more about the characters than the plot. That's because, when it gets down to it, Mother 3's story is much more about impressions than particulars. It's a story about modern, big city life encroaching on rural life, where it doesn't matter what is being shown on not-TVs, because TV proliferating is just part and parcel of that experience. The goofiness of the introduction of money to Tazmily is unimportant, because the story is pretty much a goofy sketch rather than a gritty story. I could complain about 'plot holes', but as ridiculous as it is for the Ultimate Chimera to somehow end up in a bathroom well up a skyscraper without having eaten anyone it's not important to the picture the game is painting, nor is pretty much anything else jarring or weird, even leaving aside the amount of deliberate weirdness that fills the game.
It's an impression that doesn't really resonate with me, as it happens. The rustic charm of the great outdoors is something I've lived in, and it holds no special appeal to me. Mother 3 sometimes seems to be merely mourning the loss of simpler times and so on, and yet other times it comes across as actively demonizing modern technology of pretty any stripe. The latter always annoys me coming from a video game, which as an art form is so young that if it were human it probably wouldn't have keeled over of old age by now, and Mother 3 doesn't really do anything to soften that irritation.
Further, Mother 3 feels very superficial to me. It comes across less like a story painting general impressions and allowing its audience to fill in fiddly little details with their mind and more as a story that has tremendous gaps in key aspects of its design. The inexplicable pointlessness of the Needles plot is a hole too basic and vital to be shrugged off as 'the details don't matter', something beyond focusing on the big picture over the details that make up that picture, and it's not the only odd gap in the story's foundations.
By a similar token, the characters are very basic sketches of characters, which is fine except so little is done with these sketches that it's less an impression of a character and more an impression of a perception of a character, a step too far removed from a person-like entity. I don't even mind that we never find out where Kumatora was living when you first met her, or how she was surviving, even though it's technically a pretty major gap in the story, or any number of other questions that could be asked about her situation -but almost nothing is done with her, and I'm just left going 'well, it's nice to see media presenting a non-girly girl without making a big deal out of her status. I guess.' If you asked me what her role in the story was as far as affecting it, I couldn't tell you. Kumatora has a particularly poor showing here, as I said earlier, but Duster is only barely better, and Lucas is important to the narrative less for anything he does and more because the plot informs us that only he and Claus can pull the Needles, special child of destiny, etc. (Though at least the fight with his brother is trying to do a story beat that is actually about Lucas as a person...)
Stories seeking to be impressions rarely land well with me regardless, but Mother 3's was particularly disappointing between how much other people had built it up before I played it and the fact that I already had familiarity with Earthbound and the original Mother. I like both of those games. There's some oddities I don't really get about them, but I think they both have a good core of a story. Each of your party members in those games is reasonably well-defined in those two games even though they really don't have much dialogue or interact with many plot beats, and the main character is fairly closely tied to the story even if some individual elements are a bit weird or awkward. I was expecting Mother 3 to be similar, or perhaps more ambitious. I even kind of liked the first 20 or 30% or so of the story, when I was under the impression it was a prologue to a notably lengthy story -the first 5% of the story, say. Looking back, though, while it's a solid sequence in its own right it doesn't actually add a lot to the rest of the story, which simply doesn't have enough real estate to afford that kind of expenditure of time and resources. That the Needles plotline is fairly empty compounds this issue, leaving the overall structure of the story jerky and unsatisfying.
I still think the gameplay is solid enough to check out for its own sake, but I dunno outside of that. Maybe you'll love the game the way so many others have, or maybe like me you'll find yourself dissatisfied and wondering what went wrong when you're done.
And this will probably be my final post talking about Mother 3. I dunno, I sort of intended to talk about how the Ultimate Chimera is actually handled well, maybe I'll get to that someday, but beyond that I don't think there's a lot else to talk about.
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