You get the Dinosaur Fang and need to get to Alec's cabin. I have only Flint in my party, and not only is there a bunch of enemies roaming the forests, but they dish out a good deal of damage too. Not to forget the snakes with their poison (and the lack of being able to carry more than like 2 items :tpg:).

Play-fighting with the Drago is SO ADORABLE ::falls over:: ::opens eye::

The majorly tall guy who stands next to the bell tower and doesn't say anything. Why is he even there in the first place, OH RIGHT BECAUSE EARTHBOUND 2

Best part: he's so tall that when you try to talk to him he doesn't fit in the screen all at once, but sometimes if you try to talk to him and then immediately walk around him so you can see his top, a "..." bubble briefly appears over his head. It doesn't happen with all parties and it goes away really quickly so it's really easy to miss it.

After you get covered in soot, you can go to the hot spring before heading back into town. Once you get out, the soot is cleaned from the part of you that was submerged, but your head is still covered.

He's there for the lulz

A roomful of stuff from the prequel: a bike, a Decoy Teddy, a jukebox that plays classic themes, and Ness's yo-yo in a case guarded by a robomaid. Wonder who put it there...?

Dr. Andronuts cameo! He's as misanthropic as always.

SATURN VALLEY REDUX! The pigs complaining about the place being nonsensical followed by the farting presents...bliss

Holy crap what a fucking terrible way to deliver news.

Dude comes rushing in and I'll paraphrase but this is pretty close to what he says to Flint.

"Oh man I just got back from over yonder and holy crap do I've got news for you. Okay do you want the good news or bad news first? No screw that I'll go with the good news first. Listen up I found this freaking sweet Drago tooth and I'm totally going to carve it into an uber weapon. Here take a look at it. Cool huh? Oh man but total bummer, Flint, I found it pierced through your wife's heart! Yeah she's pretty dead."

*Flint goes fucking beserk*

Seriously, I totally understand why Flint goes nuts after hearing THAT. Worst way to deliver the death of a family member EVER.

Wow is this game bitter, pretty much every aspect of modern society is bashed by the end of it.

The chapter 4 time skip was actually pretty good, though, mostly because of the introduction of the DP system. It's actually a really telling moment when you look back over the first part of the game and realize that there was no money; people just gave you things.

I really like the combo system. Completely unnecessary to playing the game, but given a full combo adds another 1.5x your normal damage or so, it's very handy. Especially excellent are the hard battle songs that try to trip you up by changing the tempo or using complicated rhythms, I would have been very disappointed if it were just metronoming through the entire game. The Battle Memory item was awesome, of course because the enemy descriptions are great, but also because you can practice fight the enemies with it to nail down the combo timing.

I only ended up grinding in two places, and both were more for the heck of it than actual need, because there were high-XP enemies near hot springs. You really don't have to, because there are save points and recovery areas everywhere, and the enemies aren't that hard, especially using the combo system. Some of the bosses were actually pretty challenging though, starting mainly with the final two from chapter 5 (Li'l Miss Marshmallow and Mr. Genetor). They actually require a little more strategy than BASH-HEAL-BASH-HEAL-BASH-HEAL, and I like that. Granted that strategy is SHIELD-OFFENSE DOWN-DEFENSE UP-BASH-HEAL-BASH-HEAL-BASH-HEAL, but still.

I don't know the moonspeak, so I have no idea how faithful the translation is, but it seemed pretty decent quality overall. Especially good was some of the wordplay in names, I thought. You'd think some of the people and enemies were created by an English speaker: Fassad, Cattlesnake, Einswine, Navy SQUEAL, etc.

Humor was pretty spot on. It really does feel like Earthbound 2, which is probably the highest compliment that can be paid to these guys.

I won't say the music for either game is better than the other, but Mother 3's soundtrack does compare very favorably. It sounds great, lots of excellent compositions around, good melodies, unholy :rock:, etc. I've never thought much of Shogo Sakai besides "one of those guys at HAL who isn't Jun Ishikawa," which is a big compliment in my book, but my respect is through the roof now from what he accomplished with this game.

FUCK YES DASHING SKIP SANDWICHES CAN GO TO HELL

Mother 3 feels a lot smaller than Earthbound. Granted, it's because you're on an island for most of the game, but there's a lot of revisiting areas, and it's shorter overall.

Then again, the game also feels a lot more focused than Earthbound. EB of course has the overarching THIS DUDE IS BAD WE MUST BE STOPPING OF HIM, but it does feel at time like you're just going to places and doing things, whereas Mother 3 piles on the emotional involvement in spades, whoa man I can't breathe here. But given both games happen in silly, silly places, Earthbound's approach to the story might have worked out better overall. I'm mixed about which one I like more.

After you pick up the phone at the Osohe courtyard, you're supposed to go to the chimera lab/forest needle, then right after that there's Mole Cricket Hole/Snowtop Mountain/needle, and then you take the fridge to the graveyard, where the Mr. Saturn note leads to the underground highway and Saturn Valley/Fire Mountain/needle. Once you leave Osohe, though, you can go to the underground and Saturn Valley immediately, and so you can probably get Duster and pull the Fire Mountain needle before you find Kumatora (I wouldn't fight New Fassad without Kumatora, though, I'll be honest). I don't know if Mole Cricket Hole only opens up after you pull the forest needle or if you can do that out of order too.

The first thing that really got me is that altough this is obviously a sequel of sorts to Earthbound, the world itself has a completely fresh feel to it, as do the characters. On that note, I was rather dissappointed when Salsa joined the group only to leave a few minutes later, as I was hoping that we would be able in the end to switch characters in and out, since each of them really had distinct abilities that would have been interesting to combine in different manners for different parts of the game.

As far as the length of the game goes, I can't help but feel it was really too short. Wether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not sure, as the feeling of shortness is surely augmented by the fact that I had such a good time playing the game. However, the experience was in a way also lessened by it as it left me craving for more. I think a big part of this is the fact that the dungeons really were not challenging in any way as you always had a hot spring close enough that you could just use your psychic ability liberally and still be able to get to the boss with enough to defeat him.

The combo system I felt was interesting but unfortunately its purpose to me was defeated by the rolling HP meter, since you could get a lot more hits in for bigger damage while your HP was dropping than you would have by trying to combo on every attack. Also, if you wanted to get through an area without losing too much HP, rushing through the menu and text to get the fight rolling as quick as possible was the best way to go in most situations. In fact, the only part of the game where I actually was actively concentrating on combos was when I first got to play Duster and he could put most of the enemies to sleep easily.

My favorite moments of the game where numerous, but I'll state only a few here. The first was when I first met the magypsies. When I noticed that their names represented the musical ecclesiastic modes and that the missing one was Locria, I was quite amused. If you didn't already know this, the ecclesiastic modes are different scales that were used up until the baroque era of music and have been again since the end of the romantic period. The Locrian mode is the one where the tonic chord is diminished, and thus it is almost impossible to harmonise it in a classical fashion and get it to sound right. The Locrian mode was shuned by many a composer, and when it was used, concessions were made to make it sound right. Locria being Fassad just makes even more sense for that reason. The Ionian and Aeolian modes, incidentally, are known as the major scale and minor scales and thus are the most widely used of the modes. As such, Aeolia being the magypsies' leader and Ionia being the one we encounter most often are not coincidences either.

Another moment that really made me chuckle was when Wess told Duster to turn around because he had to do something secret to get the door to open and then started dancing. The interplay between the two characters at this point was quite charming.

Finally, a small but nonetheless funny line that I can't quite remember but that made me laugh was when your in New Pork City and this woman is looking at a totem pole and giving you her "deep" analysis of the aesthetics of the totem pole. The terms she used seemed quite symptomatic of many "artsy-farty" people, as we call 'em back home.

Oh, and Leder ringing his bell. That was probably the best and most surprising moment of all. It really made me listen to its ringing in a whole new way, and mysteriously made the game experience that much more involving.