Mother 3/YMMV


 * Anvilicious/Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Mother 3 is many things, but one thing it is not is subtle. Fans will assert, however, that the messages are valid and important, and without them, the game would lose a lot of its charm and impact.
 * Awesome Music: Many, many examples.
 * Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
 * The old man who randomly appears in the hot springs and says "Yes?" when spoken to.
 * The item boxes that open and play music, shoot fireworks into the air, or fart, but otherwise do absolutely nothing.
 * The part where the party accidentally drop their jar of pickles. Probably the only reason it exists is to give the player a single chance to play as Boney.
 * Complete Monster:.
 * Contested Sequel: This game caused a Broken Base in Japan considering how much it strayed from the first two games. On 2ch and elsewhere, it is often said that They Changed It, Now It Sucks. It is often assumed by international fans that the game is popular in Japan, but either its fans are a minority or its haters are a Vocal Minority.
 * This may have affected the game's stance in future material. Lucas ended up being Demoted to Extra as a trophy in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS/WiiU, alongside the other Mother 3 trophies that managed to return from Brawl. Most of the rest of the series' representation in that game is only focused on the first two games. Lucas eventually did get to return to Smash 4 as DLC with the primary focus of it being advertised to the western fanbase, but whether this means MOTHER 3 might get some more recognition by Nintendo in the US though is currently unknown.
 * Creepy Cute: The Ultimate Chimera, to some people.
 * Draco in Leather Pants: is this all over, along with his chimeras. Good lord, the fangirls. Heck, some people make New Pork City look like a real utopia!
 * Ensemble Darkhorse: There's a pretty large fanbase for Kumatora.
 * And Flint.
 * There's also a lot of fanart for Lil' Miss Marshmallow, an optional boss character.
 * Quite a bit of fanart exists for Fuel as well. Some people were rather disappointed he never has much relevance after the prologue.
 * Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: People at starmen.net are insane. The best one is "The doorknob is a metaphor for happiness". Funnily enough, it made sense.
 * In an interview shortly after the original Japanese release of the game, Itoi hinted that he included to doorknob to see all of the crazy interpretations people would invent. One in particular he liked was that the doorknob is meant to be the doorknob to the world of Mother 3, and you can use it to go back any time.
 * Fridge Horror: Kind of an example.
 * Funny Moments: Wess's door-opening dance.
 * "No problem here... problem here."
 * "Thank you for taking the time to read this sign. This sign loves you."
 * When you find out the real difference between the green and regular trains.
 * The random music and fireworks presents.
 * "Your friend smells like a dog..."
 * "It's perfectly safe! See? I can roll it like this!"
 * The Barrier Trio strikes one final Barrier Pose! --- It was spectacular.
 * Game Breaker: Kumatora's PK Ground, which dishes out several hits of 2-13% of an enemy's HP and can cause them to trip and a lose a couple turns. This attack works on bosses. She doesn't learn it until level 60, but once she does the rest of the game becomes pathetically easy.
 * It's easy to beat the game before Kumatora reaches level 60. It breaks the game, but it's still difficult to acquire. Even intentionally trying to get it, the player is unlikely to have much use for it in the final few dungeons, which are more lengthy than challenging.
 * There's a reason Salsa never returns to the party after : his Monkey Mimic ability becomes a little too effective the closer you get to the end.
 * Heartwarming Moments:
 * During Chapter 3 Fassad is trying to get the people of the Tazmily Village to buy into the happiness boxes stating they are the best way to happiness. If you talk to Paul (one of the people who doesn't buy into the boxes), he'll remark he doesn't need happiness because it (meaning his wife Linda) is standing next to him. It's just a quick throwaway NPC line but seriously, aww.
 * Chapter 6. Just... Chapter 6.
 * Ho Yay: While underwater, you must fill up on oxygen by kissing robot O2 tanks who look like middle aged mermen wearing bright red lipstick. It makes Lucas, Kumatora, and Boney blush. Duster blushes too, but it's difficult to see due to his sprite's cheek marks being only a single pixel big. In the last level there's a similar looking centaur that offers oxygen above water for no reason.
 * One of the Pigmasks comments that he kind of likes them, disturbing his comrade.
 * There's something fishy about how exactly Ionia showed Lucas how to use PSI, also.
 * There's also a Pigmask who nervously offers you an item when  and insists it's just a friendly gift.
 * Flinty-poo ~<3 ...What? That was my Magypsy impression. Do you like it? ...Don't act so embarrassed!
 * Magnum Opus: This game is considered to be Shigesato Itoi's greatest work... outside of Japan. In Japan however, it's simply another thing he's done.
 * Memetic Badass: Flint, who has gained such affectionate nicknames as Flint Norris and Flint Eastwood among the fandom.
 * Memetic Molester: There are often questions regarding what Ionia did to Lucas in that hot spring...
 * Memetic Mutation: FLINT LOVES CHEESE
 * Welcome to th
 * a Ultimate Chimera appears!
 * Ultimate Chimera is enraged
 * The [character's name here]'s shield disappeared!
 * From the early days of the translation progress: The Flint equipped the Nut Bread!
 * Wess's door-opening dance, to the point where Starmen.net had a competition for it!
 * The Ultimate Chimera itself is considered one. Heck, it even has it's own GMod game mode. With pigmasks!
 * How would you make a ladder?
 * Misblamed: Nintendo often gets railed at by fans for not releasing this game in America and the rest of the world. Except the game is a landmine of licensing issues, from the direct AC-DC parody to riffs from popular shows. Additionally, it was released near the end of the Advance's lifespan, and sales in Japan were somewhat lacklustre. Not to mention the fact that EarthBound itself was a commercial failure at the time, which likely soured any attempt made. This doesn't stop the fans though, including one memorable instance where Yahtzee himself claimed it would sell better than Mario Kart.
 * Nightmare Fuel: Unused battle backgrounds found within the game's data revealed something.. well.. stuff like this. The Epileptic Trees went flying after this was uncovered. No matter what it is, though, it's disturbing as hell.
 * Lucas' Nightmare music.
 * And then there's
 * There's also a little bit of recursive Nightmare Fuel later in the game. First you travel through the lab where the mechanical chimeras are made, complete with massive surgical saws and the like. Then you meet the Masked Man, who turns out to be a cyborg himself, and, without spoiling, you find out who he is. Once you find that out, you suddenly realize just what the Masked Man must have gone through when being Reconstructed. AUGH.
 * The Ultimate Chimera. A wild, unkillable beast the size of a lion. Four fifths of its body is composed of its jaw line.
 * In the Chimera Lab, after you find out that the Ultimate Chimera has escaped. There's no music, and you frequently hear the distant roars of the Ultimate Chimera mixed with agonized screams and squeals. And the Chimera has free reign through the floors, so you can't just change floors to avoid it. Touching the beast gives you an instant game over, and it will chase you if it spots you.
 * The Chimera Lab/Chimeras in general, they even have
 * They're all bad enough on their own, why did they have to make the ostrich-elephant hybrid charge at you trumpeting horribly?
 * While the Frightbots are indeed Nightmare Retardant, most people don't bother to listen to their theme (all the cutscenes with them are really short). It sounds kind of like Giygas is laughing throughout most of the song. Here it is!
 * Okay, so the regular female zombie sprites aren't too bad, despite having appearance. Except for if you go to  right after being introduced to those and find out that very rarely there's one of the very same zombies standing right in front of her grave.
 * How about the zombies from the canceled Nintendo 64 version? Here's what they originally looked like. Believe me: compare that to what we eventually got with the Game Boy Advance version and you'll agree they were toned down greatly.
 * Nightmare Retardant: The Frightbots.
 * Well, to humans, at any rate (they're among the weakest enemies in the game). The sound they make sure works on the Saturns.
 * Player Punch: If you thought ...
 * Sacred Cow
 * Surprise Difficulty: EarthBound, for the most part, was Chrono Trigger-level easy, even without exploiting bugs. -Mother 3, while still not a particularly hard game, does make sure pretty much every boss is quite challenging.
 * Though the two most difficult bosses in the game become trivial once you reach 45 and 50 respectively.
 * That One Attack : Some of the battle songs are a pain in the ass to combo.
 * So I heard you like songs in 29/16.
 * coughed something up!
 * That One Boss:
 * The Pork Tank, a nasty "Wake-Up Call" Boss fought when you have two characters under your control.
 * The Jealous Bass, a Flunky Boss that gets a massive attack buff when you take out its flunkies.
 * , for being fond of status effects, having high-level PSI, and being able to heal 500+ HP seemingly at random.
 * The Barrier Trio, a group of PSI-immune golems.
 * The Steel Mechorilla, who Turns Red and becomes nigh-unstoppable if you hit him with electric attacks.
 * The Masked Man, who hits incredibly hard and has a ton of HP.
 * The Natural Killer Cyborg, who is huge and extremely tough.
 * , who hits hard (surprised?) and has an attack that hits your entire party for massive attack and defense debuffs.
 * Tier-Induced Scrappy: Possibly deconstructed with Salsa. Yeah, he's almost totally useless and needs a lot of Level Grinding to stand up to the weakest of enemies without a Crutch Character, but he's so adorable and Fassad puts him through so much that you can't help but want to hug him.
 * Boney and Duster are virtually superfluous and most players will end up using them simply for bashing the enemy. Duster's status moves are useful on occasion but not overly so.
 * Tear Jerker: And HOW. The subtitle is "Strange, Funny, and Heartrending" for a reason.
 * Whether this should be considered a Tear Jerker or some kind of Nightmare Fuel is up for debate, but consider the following: Remember Negative Man? That random encounter who just sat there and let you beat on him, just crying and doing nothing while you mercilessly ended his life? Now compare that to the final boss...
 * The entire last hour of the game. Everything about it will pretty much leave you in tears up to and including the final shot.
 * The Woobie: Lucas. At the start of the game, he's pretty shy and quiet, already making him a bit of a woobie. But then,
 * Poor little Salsa. First, his girlfriend gets kidnapped by the Pigmasks, and they threaten to kill her if he doesn't go along with their plan. Then, he gets stuck with Fassad, an unrepentant Jerkass who insults, starves, and shocks him at every opportunity, even when Salsa does what Fassad told him to, all throughout Chapter 3..
 * True Art Is Angsty: This is considered the closest video games came to literature. Some people found Unfortunate Implications because it is also sad.
 * Woolseyism: In the Fan Translation, Yokuba's name was changed to Fassad, possibly in reference to the facade he puts up around the public. Get it? It also happens to be Arabic for "corruption". Also, Kumatora's waitress alter-ego gets named Violet and Duster's name when he's with the DCMC is Lucky. The latter, however, was purely due to the fact that in the original, they have different aliases when they are named their aliases, and to keep this in, their aliases were changed, because "Yoshikoshi" and "Tamekichi" were too long to enter into the naming screens.
 * Averted in the case of Hinawa's name. Tomato almost gave her the name "Amber," which would have fit very well considering she's married to Flint (in Japanese, their names reference "Hinawa-juu" and "Furinto-juu," meaning matchlock and flint guns) but decided to leave that one alone.
 * Similarly, other names like Kumatora are kept, avoiding this trope as well.
 * The mice in Club Titiboo's attic spoke in an incredibly difficult-to-understand dialect of Japanese in the original game. In the fan translation, it was changed to a similarly-impenetrable Cockney accent.
 * Woolseyism: In the Fan Translation, Yokuba's name was changed to Fassad, possibly in reference to the facade he puts up around the public. Get it? It also happens to be Arabic for "corruption". Also, Kumatora's waitress alter-ego gets named Violet and Duster's name when he's with the DCMC is Lucky. The latter, however, was purely due to the fact that in the original, they have different aliases when they are named their aliases, and to keep this in, their aliases were changed, because "Yoshikoshi" and "Tamekichi" were too long to enter into the naming screens.
 * Averted in the case of Hinawa's name. Tomato almost gave her the name "Amber," which would have fit very well considering she's married to Flint (in Japanese, their names reference "Hinawa-juu" and "Furinto-juu," meaning matchlock and flint guns) but decided to leave that one alone.
 * Similarly, other names like Kumatora are kept, avoiding this trope as well.
 * The mice in Club Titiboo's attic spoke in an incredibly difficult-to-understand dialect of Japanese in the original game. In the fan translation, it was changed to a similarly-impenetrable Cockney accent.