page_title: Mother (video game series)
section_title: Mother 3
hierarchical_section_title: Mother (video game series) / History / Mother 3
caption_attribution_description: 発掘した。
context_page_description: Mother is a video game series that consists of three role-playing video games: Mother for the Famicom, Mother 2, known as EarthBound outside Japan, for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance.
  Written by Shigesato Itoi, published by Nintendo, and featuring game mechanics modeled on the Dragon Quest series, Mother is known for its sense of humor, originality, and parody. The player uses weapons and psychic powers to fight hostile enemies, which include animated everyday objects, aliens and brainwashed people. Signature elements of the series include a lighthearted approach to plot, battle sequences with psychedelic backgrounds, and the "rolling HP meter": player health ticks down like an odometer rather than instantly being subtracted, allowing the player to take preventative action, such as healing or finishing the battle, before the damage is fully dealt. While the franchise is popular in Japan, in the Anglosphere it is best associated with the cult following behind EarthBound.
  While visiting Nintendo for other business, Itoi approached Shigeru Miyamoto about making Mother.
context_section_description: In 1996, Mother 3 (EarthBound 64 in North America), was announced. It was slated for release on the 64DD, a disk drive expansion peripheral for the Nintendo 64. Itoi's expansive ideas during development led the development team to question whether fans would still consider the game part of the series. The game entered development hell and struggled to find a firm release date and in 2000, despite its level of completion, was later cancelled altogether with the commercial failure of the 64DD.
  The project was reannounced three years later as Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance alongside a combined Mother 1 + 2 cartridge for the same handheld console. Itoi had been working on porting Mother and Mother 2 to the Game Boy Advance, and based on encouragement what he predicted to be further pressure, decided to release Mother 3. The new Mother 3 abandoned the Nintendo 64 version's 3D graphics, but kept its plot. The game was developed by Brownie Brown and HAL Laboratory, published by Nintendo, and released in Japan on April 20, 2006, whereupon it became a bestseller. It did not receive a North American release on the basis that it would not sell.
  Mother 1 + 2 was released in Japan on June 20, 2003. The combined cartridge contains both Mother and EarthBound. Mother uses the extended ending of the unreleased English language prototype, but is still only presented in Japanese.
  Unlike earlier games in the series, Mother 3 is presented in chapters. When the Pig Mask Army starts a forest fire and imposes police state-like conditions on a "pastoral forest village", a father, Flint, ventures out to protect his family (twin sons Lucas and Claus and wife Hinawa), but the rest of the world is eventually implicated in the plot. Lucas, the game's hero, does not become prominent until the fourth chapter. Along with his dog, a neophyte thief, and a princess, Lucas fulfills a prophecy of a "chosen one" pulling Needles from the Earth to wake a sleeping dragon and determine the fate of the world. The game features a lighthearted plot, with characters such as "partying ghosts" and "talking rope snakes". Mother 3 is a single-player role-playing video game played with two buttons: one for starting conversations and checking adjacent objects, and another for running. The game updates the turn-based Dragon Quest-style battle system with a "rhythm-action mechanic", which lets the player take additional turns to attack the enemy by chaining together up to sixteen taps in time with the background music. Apart from this, the battle system and "rolling HP meter" (where health ticks down like an odometer such that players can outrun the meter to heal before dying) are similar to EarthBound.
caption: A signed, boxed copy of Mother 1 + 2.
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