The Cavalry Arrives: Awesome?
I played Mother 3 via the fan translation a while ago. There were bits I liked, thing I had mixed feelings about, and a lot of it I didn't really 'get', but there was one thing that bugged me in particular:
The Cavalry Arrives
Note that I'm being a bit liberal with spoilers here, particularly in links. I'm keeping the worst of spoilers out of the post, but if you're wanting the full experience yourself, play the game first.
Mother 3 is, of course, a sequel to Earthbound, a classic SNES title that's actually the second entry in the Mother series. The first game didn't get released until recently, and Mother 3 still doesn't have an official release outside of Japan. So if you're confused by all this: yeah, fair enough.
Mother 3 has a band -as in a music band- as a recurring group of characters who show up as semi-relevant throughout much of the game. Most of the time they're supporting characters, but fairly late in the game they 'rescue' you from a 'hard fight' in what's probably intended to be a Crowning Moment of Awesome, doubling as a callback to a similar sequence from Earthbound.
You might notice I put 'rescue' and 'hard fight' in quotation marks. Yeah, therein lies the problem.
In Earthbound, here's what happens:
You get into a fight with a boss. The boss has a lot of HP for its area of the game, and overall is tuned to be a fairly hard fight if you're playing the game the way most people do. Even if your party is ahead of the curve, though, it really does have a lot of HP. When you're close to defeating it, the game announces that it 'eats a sandwich', restoring all its HP*. This is a disheartening thing to see, as most players are probably not entirely sure they've got the resources to actually beat the thing after how much it's chewed through. Even if your resources are fine, it's still a long, slow fight, and it's frustrating to think you're going to have to do it again.
Then the Runaway Five show up and turn the robot off. Oh thank goodness! It's genuinely a relief to see them show up, and most players probably felt a rush of gratitude, even if only at not having the fight dragged out. It's also just plain nice to have some NPCs actually do something useful for once, something that's rare in video games in general but especially in JRPGs in specific.
Okay, what about Mother 3?
You get into a fight. It's not against a boss. It's against a series of minor robots that like to suicide against you for massive damage, but that's the only remotely threatening thing they do, and for reasons I'll get to in a minute it's not actually that threatening. Mother 3 has a mechanic whereby only 3 enemies can be on the battlefield at a time, but the instant you defeat an enemy another one will drop in, until the queued-up waitlist runs out. So each time one of these robots explodes on you or is taken out by you, another one drops in. Normally when this mechanic crops up, it's because you 'pulled' too many enemies at once, and you know exactly how many enemies are patiently waiting their turn to be smashed into paste. This is a special scripted fight, however, and the game gives no indication of how many enemies are in the battlegroup. So you're not really sure how long the fight is going to go on, but the fight doing this per se isn't really notable at all.
After you've destroyed 9 of the robots, the DCMC show up and kill the last 3 robots. This is played like they did something important and special, rescuing you from an impossible fight, without any real explanation. The game doesn't imply they stopped new ones from being produced, or did something about how the robots have been arriving, or anything of the sort. They just... come in and kill the last 3 robots for you. Yay?
You might already have some inkling of the differences here, and why they're a problem, but let's go over things in detail anyway:
Difficulty Curve
Mother 3's suicide robots are not threatening. At all. In fact, due to Mother 3's mechanics, the fact that they're suicide attacks makes them un-threatening! Mother 3 -like Earthbound- has a 'rolling' HP mechanic, whereby when one of your characters takes damage, their health meter decrements one HP at a time, visibly. A lot of games use such an animation, but in Mother 3 this animation actually matters: until such time as your HP meter reaches 0? You're not dead. You can keep acting, and the game doesn't track your final HP into the negatives, so any further damage you take once your rolling toward 0 HP is actually completely ignorable. Not only that, but when a battle ends, your HP meter stops rolling and whatever number it's at is the HP you leave the battle with. As such, in Mother 3 you can take fatal damage and still end a fight with no casualties without even bothering with a heal.
So in the first place the suicide robots don't even hit that hard, not even with their suicide explosion, but in the second place it's actually possible to win the fight by simply mashing Defend until the robots have killed themselves on you, without ever bothering to heal or swing a stick or anything. They could do twenty times your HP in damage, and the fight would still be effortless. Nor is this a new concept to the player: the game has already had the player fight enemies that suicide for massive damage, often to the entire party, which are only not instant game overs due to the rolling HP mechanic. So the player knows the fight is a joke.
This is in stark contrast to the Clumsy Robot being a fairly notable challenge if you haven't ground up an unusually large amount of experience.
So the Runaway Five are helping the player with a tough fight, where the DCMC are stealing credit for 'saving' you from an easy fight.
Duration
The Clumsy Robot fight invokes that most dreaded of situations: the fight that never ends. How many times can the Clumsy Robot fully heal itself? You don't know. How likely is it to heal itself on any given turn? You don't know. Does it have any kind of limit? You really really hope so, but who knows?
Then the Runaway Five circumvent the whole thing by hitting a switch on the thing's back. Whew. Fight over, just as you were building dread about what was coming.
The stream of suicide robots seems to be imagined as invoking a similar idea, but the setup isn't there, nor is the payoff. Yes, each time you kill one of these enemies, a new one spawns in. Yes, you don't know how long this is going to last. Yes, killing 8 enemies without the stream of reinforcements stopping is unusual, as 4-5 is a far more typical overflow amount, resulting in 2-3 kills having reinforcements stop. No, the game doesn't really establish that this is an endless stream of reinforcements. Nor is the reinforcement mechanic new, to leave the player worrying. It's a tedious fight, but not anything to get worked up over.
And then the DCMC killing the last 3 isn't actually handled as saving you from a potentially-endless fight. They killed 3 robots, when you just got finished killing 9 of these robots. This is not impressive. In fact, the animation for them finishing off the robots probably takes longer than just beating them up yourself would take, so there's a very real sense that the game is wasting your time.
----------------------
The DCMC sequence looks very much to me, as a result, like the dev team was trying to recapture what made the Runaway Five swooping in awesome, with zero understanding of what made it awesome. You've got the maybe-endless fight, you've got a music band, you've got them ending the fight, you've got it being a fight against a robot (Only multiple, in Mother 3's case), but the things that made the Runaway Five jumping in a relief are just not there. Instead the DCMC come across like kill-stealing glory-stealing jerkfaces who want you to praise them for doing something you didn't need help with and that they barely contributed anything to.
Which would be fine, but there's no indication in how other characters react to suggest the dev team was aware that this was the experience they'd created.
It was a pretty jarringly wrong moment in a game I played through because so many people have indicated it's an excellent emotional experience, a masterpiece of storytelling, so it really stood out that the emotions I was experiencing were pretty much the opposite of the obviously intended feelings.
In my own case, I'd just started wondering how long the fight was going to go on when the DCMC cut in; if the game was going to try to get me concerned this would go on forever, it would've needed to double or so the number of robots I had to go through to trigger the DCMC 'rescue'... which still wouldn't have fixed the whole 'yeah, and all they did was come in at the end and kill 3 robots' thing. It would've made it worse, in fact, because now instead of them killing 1/3rd as much as I did, they'd have killed 1/6th or so, while still acting like they're important and accomplished. What jerks.
The game really ought to have done something like had the DCMC pop in, tell us to hold on for a few minutes while they went and stopped the robots at the source, and then swoop in and finish off the last few robots before telling us 'yeah, that's the last of them, we got them blocked off/stopped the production line/whatever'. The game wouldn't get the 'suckerpunch' it's clearly shooting for, but it's not getting it anyway, so that's no loss, and meanwhile the player would have a reason to feel like these NPCs Did Something Useful.
*I say 'announces' because mechanically nothing actually happens, and in fact it's possible to kill the Clumsy Robot 'for real', which gives you double the rewards because the game isn't killing it for you and then giving you standard battle rewards, it's terminating the fight and giving you a bonus in lieu of standard battle rewards. But while this is an interesting bit of technical information, putting it in the main of the post distracts from the core point.
The Cavalry Arrives
Note that I'm being a bit liberal with spoilers here, particularly in links. I'm keeping the worst of spoilers out of the post, but if you're wanting the full experience yourself, play the game first.
Mother 3 is, of course, a sequel to Earthbound, a classic SNES title that's actually the second entry in the Mother series. The first game didn't get released until recently, and Mother 3 still doesn't have an official release outside of Japan. So if you're confused by all this: yeah, fair enough.
Mother 3 has a band -as in a music band- as a recurring group of characters who show up as semi-relevant throughout much of the game. Most of the time they're supporting characters, but fairly late in the game they 'rescue' you from a 'hard fight' in what's probably intended to be a Crowning Moment of Awesome, doubling as a callback to a similar sequence from Earthbound.
You might notice I put 'rescue' and 'hard fight' in quotation marks. Yeah, therein lies the problem.
In Earthbound, here's what happens:
You get into a fight with a boss. The boss has a lot of HP for its area of the game, and overall is tuned to be a fairly hard fight if you're playing the game the way most people do. Even if your party is ahead of the curve, though, it really does have a lot of HP. When you're close to defeating it, the game announces that it 'eats a sandwich', restoring all its HP*. This is a disheartening thing to see, as most players are probably not entirely sure they've got the resources to actually beat the thing after how much it's chewed through. Even if your resources are fine, it's still a long, slow fight, and it's frustrating to think you're going to have to do it again.
Then the Runaway Five show up and turn the robot off. Oh thank goodness! It's genuinely a relief to see them show up, and most players probably felt a rush of gratitude, even if only at not having the fight dragged out. It's also just plain nice to have some NPCs actually do something useful for once, something that's rare in video games in general but especially in JRPGs in specific.
Okay, what about Mother 3?
You get into a fight. It's not against a boss. It's against a series of minor robots that like to suicide against you for massive damage, but that's the only remotely threatening thing they do, and for reasons I'll get to in a minute it's not actually that threatening. Mother 3 has a mechanic whereby only 3 enemies can be on the battlefield at a time, but the instant you defeat an enemy another one will drop in, until the queued-up waitlist runs out. So each time one of these robots explodes on you or is taken out by you, another one drops in. Normally when this mechanic crops up, it's because you 'pulled' too many enemies at once, and you know exactly how many enemies are patiently waiting their turn to be smashed into paste. This is a special scripted fight, however, and the game gives no indication of how many enemies are in the battlegroup. So you're not really sure how long the fight is going to go on, but the fight doing this per se isn't really notable at all.
After you've destroyed 9 of the robots, the DCMC show up and kill the last 3 robots. This is played like they did something important and special, rescuing you from an impossible fight, without any real explanation. The game doesn't imply they stopped new ones from being produced, or did something about how the robots have been arriving, or anything of the sort. They just... come in and kill the last 3 robots for you. Yay?
You might already have some inkling of the differences here, and why they're a problem, but let's go over things in detail anyway:
Difficulty Curve
Mother 3's suicide robots are not threatening. At all. In fact, due to Mother 3's mechanics, the fact that they're suicide attacks makes them un-threatening! Mother 3 -like Earthbound- has a 'rolling' HP mechanic, whereby when one of your characters takes damage, their health meter decrements one HP at a time, visibly. A lot of games use such an animation, but in Mother 3 this animation actually matters: until such time as your HP meter reaches 0? You're not dead. You can keep acting, and the game doesn't track your final HP into the negatives, so any further damage you take once your rolling toward 0 HP is actually completely ignorable. Not only that, but when a battle ends, your HP meter stops rolling and whatever number it's at is the HP you leave the battle with. As such, in Mother 3 you can take fatal damage and still end a fight with no casualties without even bothering with a heal.
So in the first place the suicide robots don't even hit that hard, not even with their suicide explosion, but in the second place it's actually possible to win the fight by simply mashing Defend until the robots have killed themselves on you, without ever bothering to heal or swing a stick or anything. They could do twenty times your HP in damage, and the fight would still be effortless. Nor is this a new concept to the player: the game has already had the player fight enemies that suicide for massive damage, often to the entire party, which are only not instant game overs due to the rolling HP mechanic. So the player knows the fight is a joke.
This is in stark contrast to the Clumsy Robot being a fairly notable challenge if you haven't ground up an unusually large amount of experience.
So the Runaway Five are helping the player with a tough fight, where the DCMC are stealing credit for 'saving' you from an easy fight.
Duration
The Clumsy Robot fight invokes that most dreaded of situations: the fight that never ends. How many times can the Clumsy Robot fully heal itself? You don't know. How likely is it to heal itself on any given turn? You don't know. Does it have any kind of limit? You really really hope so, but who knows?
Then the Runaway Five circumvent the whole thing by hitting a switch on the thing's back. Whew. Fight over, just as you were building dread about what was coming.
The stream of suicide robots seems to be imagined as invoking a similar idea, but the setup isn't there, nor is the payoff. Yes, each time you kill one of these enemies, a new one spawns in. Yes, you don't know how long this is going to last. Yes, killing 8 enemies without the stream of reinforcements stopping is unusual, as 4-5 is a far more typical overflow amount, resulting in 2-3 kills having reinforcements stop. No, the game doesn't really establish that this is an endless stream of reinforcements. Nor is the reinforcement mechanic new, to leave the player worrying. It's a tedious fight, but not anything to get worked up over.
And then the DCMC killing the last 3 isn't actually handled as saving you from a potentially-endless fight. They killed 3 robots, when you just got finished killing 9 of these robots. This is not impressive. In fact, the animation for them finishing off the robots probably takes longer than just beating them up yourself would take, so there's a very real sense that the game is wasting your time.
----------------------
The DCMC sequence looks very much to me, as a result, like the dev team was trying to recapture what made the Runaway Five swooping in awesome, with zero understanding of what made it awesome. You've got the maybe-endless fight, you've got a music band, you've got them ending the fight, you've got it being a fight against a robot (Only multiple, in Mother 3's case), but the things that made the Runaway Five jumping in a relief are just not there. Instead the DCMC come across like kill-stealing glory-stealing jerkfaces who want you to praise them for doing something you didn't need help with and that they barely contributed anything to.
Which would be fine, but there's no indication in how other characters react to suggest the dev team was aware that this was the experience they'd created.
It was a pretty jarringly wrong moment in a game I played through because so many people have indicated it's an excellent emotional experience, a masterpiece of storytelling, so it really stood out that the emotions I was experiencing were pretty much the opposite of the obviously intended feelings.
In my own case, I'd just started wondering how long the fight was going to go on when the DCMC cut in; if the game was going to try to get me concerned this would go on forever, it would've needed to double or so the number of robots I had to go through to trigger the DCMC 'rescue'... which still wouldn't have fixed the whole 'yeah, and all they did was come in at the end and kill 3 robots' thing. It would've made it worse, in fact, because now instead of them killing 1/3rd as much as I did, they'd have killed 1/6th or so, while still acting like they're important and accomplished. What jerks.
The game really ought to have done something like had the DCMC pop in, tell us to hold on for a few minutes while they went and stopped the robots at the source, and then swoop in and finish off the last few robots before telling us 'yeah, that's the last of them, we got them blocked off/stopped the production line/whatever'. The game wouldn't get the 'suckerpunch' it's clearly shooting for, but it's not getting it anyway, so that's no loss, and meanwhile the player would have a reason to feel like these NPCs Did Something Useful.
*I say 'announces' because mechanically nothing actually happens, and in fact it's possible to kill the Clumsy Robot 'for real', which gives you double the rewards because the game isn't killing it for you and then giving you standard battle rewards, it's terminating the fight and giving you a bonus in lieu of standard battle rewards. But while this is an interesting bit of technical information, putting it in the main of the post distracts from the core point.
Comments
Post a Comment