posted: 2024-10-11
Mother 3's Most Devious Trap
A Narrative Analysis of the Boat Ride Scene
Spoilers for Mother 3
Chapter 8 of Mother 3, "All Things" is a chapter designed to get the player to despise Porky Minch. Over the course of the preceding seven chapters, the player has watched (through the eyes of the protagonists) the village of Tazmily wilt away through the corrupting forces of pigmask-flavored fascism. The player watches as "Once perfectly good things are cast aside" for a proclaimed "better", which includes the nebulous concept of happiness, and the sweeping spectrum of the entire world. And when the player finally arrives in New Pork City, at the point in the story where all the rest of the world is considered "worse" and worthless by everyone else, what is presented is a disgusting and infantile pastiche of modern urban life.
Welcomidos indeed.
Buildings are little more than cardboard cutouts, half the people in the town or either robots or brainwashed. The only form of nature has been co-opted to house a monument to the fascist leader. The only functional public buildings in the city are a hyper-expensive restaurant no one attends, an arcade, and a movie theater. This latter area lays bread crumbs by showing clips from Earthbound outright, as if to say "this happened and if you played it, you will remember this." Remember Earthbound? Didn't you like the whimsical nature of it all?" All of these spaces are the only "relevant" places to a kid. The only other building is Porky's Tower, which is a monument to the fascist pig. You're supposed to feel disgust in all senses when you compare New Pork City to literally every other place on the Nowhere Islands. It's a gross creation of a kid who sucks.
It's all fake, down to the people living in it.
Porky's Tower is 100th Floor after 100th floor of reasons to hate Porky even more. One floor is a floor manufacturing hippo weapons of mass destruction as if the two were individual building blocks. Another floor is Porky's "fan club" which is as cartoonish as it is uncomfortable. Yet another floor is a set of mini games where you have to let a replica of Porky beat you in various basic competitions, but you can't sandbag, you have to let the Porky robot narrowly defeat you, just like that one annoying kid did whenever you went over to his house when you were younger. Yet still, another floor is the "Nice Person Hot Spring" a floor entirely designed to brainwash anyone and everyone into worshiping Porky. The toilet maze is pretty fun, at least (but's an immature joke, quite literally toilet humor!). And the entire time Porky is taunting you and berating you. He's an immature freak who wants to do nothing but live out childish fantasies until the end of time, never growing up, never maturing. You're supposed to develop such vicious contempt of Porky and his methods of clinging to a twisted version of childhood, that when you reach the true 100th floor, you've fallen into the game designer's trap.
You beat the Natural Killer cyborg and the enter a long, empty hallway. What's that playing? Oh, it's the Mother title theme. It makes you freeze in your tracks. If the party is walking, the hallway is exactly long enough for the song's intro to play to its completion before your reach the doorway at its end.
And when you walk through the door, you're met with...
A house boat.
And a song.
The final room of Porky's Tower features a collection of visual callbacks to EarthBound all while a rendition of the song "Pollyanna" plays. These items are all static sprites of characters, places and things from Earthbound that might evoke a sense of nostalgia for anyone who has played the prequel to Mother 3. It seems like a acelebratory moment for the player! It's the end of the trilogy! Look at all the things you remember from the other games! Wow!
However, to Lucas and company, these items are quite literally meaningless. One can argue that it's simply more of Porky's collection of things he wants, but this doesn't add anything new to his character: we already know Porky has a penchant for hoarding things as seen in his playroom in Thunder Tower. Porky is a villain who craves being a child forever, but this hallway is redundant in expressing this information for Porky. So this section doesn't alter the protagonist, and it doesn't say anything new about the antagonist (besides, maybe he stole Ness's house lol), so what purpose does it serve?
The song's title in this section is literally titled "A Certain Someone's Memories". One could argue the "memories" are Porky's, but I am of the opinion that the "certain person" is the player. Why would the name be so vague? The space might very well have items from Porky's youth but the song playing, Pollyanna, is a song from Mother, not Earthbound. This whole space is to reach the player's mind more than anyone else's in-universe.
The boat ride is designed to get a nostalgic reaction out of the player. Mother 3 came out in 2006, 12 years after Earthbound's release on the Super Nintendo. Kids who played Earthbound at age 10 are now 22 and likely finishing college. They're becoming adults and they are cognizant of the horrors of political regimes and power structures. It's not a stretch to say that most people at 22 long to go back to a time where things were simpler, better perhaps. This boat ride offers the player a chance to consider those times again, all the fun they had as a kid, and how now they're no longer in that space of time. It invites them to return to that time, but in doing so, the game springs its trap. Being a kid forever, and longing for a bygone era of simplicity is exactly Porky's motivation, and the game almost seems to laugh at you for having these feelings "See how easy it is to get a reaction out of you just by showing you 'that thing you played one time', at the very end of its sequel? Look at yourself. You're nostalgic for a white pixel and a black pixel. Maybe you and Porky aren't so different".
Said two pixels, the last items in the hall of memory.
After all is said and done, when the player reaches the end of the game after taking down Porky and pulling the final needle, they are met with the black "END?" screen. Nothing else remains; all they can can do is see a reflection of their own face. At the end of the game, Mother 3 asks the player to consider themselves. "What role do you play in these worlds? What are you going to do now that the world has been wiped clean? You're all that's left when all is said and done." The player can long for the times of playing Mother 3, or they can move forward through life towards their next great adventure.
So no, there won't be a Mother 4. Stop asking for it!
Big shoutouts the lowercasejai Jaicord, this piece would not have been made without the great discussion. Special shoutouts to Game&Burger whose inputs to the channel provided some additional thoughts and ideas.
Shoutouts also to Tomas Jefferson, the coolest dude in New Pork.