Mother 3 Chapter 2 Analysis

Hello and welcome to a multi-part series where I dissect each chapter of Mother 3. Please be sure to check out previous entries! Also, I will be spoiling. Last part here.

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Any reasonable consumer of media would rightfully assume that after the tragic events of Chapter 1, that Chapter 2 would pick right where we left off. Since we already had our POV shift from Lucas to his father Flint, it’s no surprise that it shifts again. But to who? Claus, the boy who just lost his mother and ran away from home to avenge her? No. Back to Lucas, the known protagonist of the game? No.

We shift our POV to…Duster.

Duster was a side character in Chapter 1 who helped Flint out for a little bit. We get a small hint that he isn’t an average joe. For one, he’s able to use wall staples to climb up walls otherwise impossible. Secondly, he has a previous injury which causes him to limp. There’s more than meets the eye with Duster.

While I do think it’s a bit of intentional narrative blue-balling to shift us away from Flint and his sons, I can’t help but like Duster. His father constantly berates him. He has a limp which is elegantly animated in his walk/run cycle. The game even calls him a “kind, yet strange man.”

During Chapter 1, a curious player can bring Flint to a drawbridge with a sign next to it. The sign reads “Osohe Castle”. That’s it. Nothing else.

Chapter 2 allows us to sneak into Osohe Castle as Duster, a thief in training. He’s been tasked by his dad to retrieve an item. His father Wess seems to have retired from his thieving life, and given his Thief Tools to Duster. Thief Tools are Dusters’s main trait in combat. They’re pretty cool! We get things like a permanent smoke bomb that lowers enemy accuracy, and tools to lower defense and offense. Useful stuff. Like any good and memorable JRPG, each party member has their own skill set and abilities that make them unique. But for now, we’re alone.

I should mention that on the way to Osohe Castle, Duster bumps into a man we never saw in Chapter 1. A man with a mustache and monkey companion. As they walk away, the monkey does a double take look at Duster. Almost as if he wants to say something to Duster.

This is where we get quite possibly the most interesting fact about Tazmily Village. They have no currency system. They have no concept of money at all. And if you remember from the previous entry of my analysis series; Tazmily Village has no history of crime or sadness. Surely there’s no connection!

Anyway, back to the mission at hand.

Osohe Castle is a mysterious place filled with ghosts, spiders, and bizarrely harmless enemies known as “Big Bros”. Overall, it’s a cute little dungeon with memorable features like a hidden hot spring and floating furniture. There’s a room filled with ghosts who are just relaxing by sipping wine and playing piano. And I absolutely love this small moment where we see a girl with short pink hair running down the hallway and dropping a pendant. It’s a small reminder that Mother 3 is a series of interconnected stories.

Unfortunately, I always approach Chapter 2 with a bit of hesitance. The game spikes the difficulty up by quite a bit. Chapter 1 wasn’t really hard until the final boss, but in Chapter 2 you can get messed up pretty quickly in the first half. This is mostly because Duster is alone and his thief tools seem to not work on ghosts (I’m not 100 % sure if ghosts are immune to the tools, but they never worked when I tried them on ghost enemies). There’s a ghostly conductor boss who can destroy you in seconds if you’re under level 16. Luckily the thief tools do work on him. Note: After finishing the chapter, I realized I missed an optional weapon and some decent enemies to grind. So some of the extra difficulty I was feeling is because of my mistake of not being thorough enough. Regardless, I remember this area being difficult on my first playthrough a few years ago.

I found grinding an absolute must in this section. It reminds me of EarthBound ramping up the difficulty immediately in Onett leading up the Frank. It’s such a bizarre choice for Shigesato Itoi to open his RPGs up like this. Leading up to EarthBound, he has been noted as saying he wanted to make a game for “people who don’t play games”, but this steep difficulty comes off as a contradiction. I died a few times leading up to the conductor boss during this playthrough. Thankfully, these games keep your experience points after you die (but not your items).

We retrieve the item Duster’s father Wess requested. When we return to his home, Wess berates us again and destroys the item. He calls Duster a moron multiple times. But lucky for Duster, the pendant he picked up from the pink haired girl attracts Wess’ attention. We go back to the castle and soon meet this girl again. Turns out she’s a princess who can use psychic powers! And her name is Kumatora.

One important thing to note here is that Mother 3 has much more dialogue and cutscenes than its two predecessors. As I mentioned in the last part, it may come off as less “gamey” than something like EarthBound. In EarthBound, your party members never talk unless they aren’t in your party at the moment. But in Mother 3, there’s more opportunities for them to speak. Duster is fairly quiet, but Kumatora is a fiesty tomboy. We also get to see tons of awesome sprite animations thanks to the Game Boy Advance. These animations combined with more dialogue explains the cutscenes we see in Mother 3. It’s a very different feeling for this trilogy of RPGs. I’d say the first two Mother games are students of Dragon Quest, but Mother 3 seems to be a student of Final Fantasy.

Once Kumatora joins your party, I began to immediately love the second half of Chapter 2. With Duster’s Thief Tools and Kumatora’s PSI powers, it felt like I was finally playing the core of the gameplay. It’s a little tease for what will come later. This is also when I noticed some quality of life improvements from EarthBound. There’s a separate tab for Key Items in the menus. EarthBound sadly had a bit of an inventory issue. For example, the Sound Stone is a key item that you never have to use in the game. And yet it permanently takes up one of Ness’ inventory slots. Another improvement is the healing magic. In EarthBound, if you cast a healing PSI in attempts to heal a character before they die, if they die, that spell doesn’t happen. In Mother 3, if they die, the caster will simply heal themselves. These little improvements help game feel more player friendly.

Speaking of teases, we see a small needle-like object in the castles courtyard. Wess said he once asked the King of Osohe about it, but the King pretty much told him to forget about it. We also get to the final room of the castle and see an egg, which is the “Egg of Light” aka the “Hummingbird Egg”. Apparently it holds “all of the worlds secrets.”

The chapter ends on yet another interesting cliffhanger. Duster, Kumatora, and Wess are flooded out of the castle by a huge wave of water. Duster was separated from the crew along with the Egg of Light.

And as I’m sure you’re accustomed to by now, Chapter 3 will not pick up where Duster disappeared to. Which person do we play as next? Well…he’s not much of a person at all actually.