Part 15: Highway Adventure
Can you believe it? The lightning striking the houses of people who don’t own Happy Boxes isn’t natural! This game doesn’t try very hard to hide its hand. The plot of this game is more philosophical than it is emotional. Of course, this game has plenty of scenes where you want to cry, but there haven’t been any big twists. In my opinion, the feelings that you get are from the essence of the situation, rather than the shock of it. It’s not a surprise that there is a giant tower that strikes peoples’ houses (how have none of the villagers noticed that, by the way?), but the inhumanity of the Pigmasks is surprising.
Anyways, we’re revealed the title for the next chapter:
Chapter 5: Tower of Thunder
Duster remembers where exactly he hid the egg – It’s under an abandoned Clayman in a valley, humorously called the “Unknown Valley”. Personally, I think he could have done a better job hiding it than next to such a suspicious object. But nevertheless, we’re off to retrieve it.
If, for some reason, you run all the way back to Tazmily instead of looking for the egg, some of the villagers have new dialogue. People are seemingly becoming more and more hostile to Lucas and Duster. Elmore says,
“Oh, if it isn’t Lucas. Everyone’s been talking about how you’ve been living it up in the clubs instead of coming home. And then there’s Flint, always wandering around the mountains, aimlessly. You’re such a weird family.”
Elmore’s never been a very friendly character, but she’s never been this rude before. If you go to the Yado Inn and talk to Jackie, he’ll add Duster on to the list of people hurting his reputation, since he is now known as a thief – and not a thief of justice. Nichol says something very interesting: “I wish I could visit the big city… I bet it’s way cooler than Titiboo, even!” Big city? Is this where all these nameless NPCs are coming from? Fassad’s malevolent speeches to the village have planted seeds of insufficiency in the minds of the villagers; they’re always needing bigger and better things. This “big city” is one of those temptations.
The most heartbreaking piece of dialogue, however, comes from Wess of all people. He notes the journey you made from the Club back to Tazmily, and gives greetings to Lucas, Kumatora, and Boney. He tells Duster, who he mistakes as “Lucky,” that he didn’t have to come visit him. This is the one exception to what I said about people’s attitudes changing. Wess has never been good to Duster; he’s never had anything positive to say about his son. Since he was gone for three years, Wess only seemed concerned for the egg he had, rather than for the person he was. But the fact that he starts calling Duster his stage name over the name he himself gave him, really shows his neglect for him.
After you make the journey all the way back to where you were, called the Murasaki forest, Boney remembers that he is still standing upright wearing a shirt and hat and goes back to being a regular dog. Also, Duster remembers that he went through an underground tunnel to get to the abandoned Clayman. The only problem is, there are about 15 holes in the ground that you can jump in, and only one of them leads to the right tunnel. As you go down each hole in trial and error, you will find worker moles underground, digging with shovels. They have an aspiration to turn the world into one, giant hole. It wouldn’t really be a hole anymore then, would it? Also underground are some new Chimeras Lucas and the gang have to fight against. They range from comedic to disturbing. For example, there is a tortoise that looks normal from the front, but in the back, there are several barrels ready to shoot at you! On the other hand, there are Reconstructed Lions, which have a lion’s head, but have the legs of an octopus, which are purely mechanical.
Once you find the right hole to jump through, you walk through a little passageway and make it to the old Clayman, just where Duster found it. At the most inconvenient time possible, lightning strikes the Clayman, charging it back to life, and it runs away with the egg, backwards.
As you go after the rogue Clayman, you come across the tower that has been shooting out lightning. A sign in front of it says, “Tower of Love and Peace. Stay away!” The tower is extremely tall.
After that, the crew has to pass though yet another factory. This one produces Claymen. When you enter, a group of Pigmasks are discussing whether or not they take off their masks and hang them on the coat rack in the bathroom. When they see Lucas, they start panicking and addressing him as “Sir,” and “Commander,” oddly. One notes that Lucas is setting a bad example for everyone by wearing such informal clothing, and gives everyone a new outfit to wear. Lucas has a jacket and orange pants, Duster and Kumatora wear the basic Pigmask uniform, and Boney just has the mask. Although Duster and Kumatora are in disguise, you can still tell it’s them because of some very subtle details. Duster walks with a limp, and Kumatora’s outfit is exactly one pixel thinner than all the other Pigmasks. It probably took a lot of effort to make all their animations, even though they could have very easily reused the preexisting Pigmask sprites. This is one small detail that goes a huge way.
Do you wanna see how claymen are made? It’s pretty neat.
When you’re done admiring how it’s made and exit the factory on the other side, you witness the rogue Clayman being thrown in a garbage truck, since that’s what happens to old Claymen. We are now on the chase after a runaway truck!
As you run down the road, you have to battle against wild Wound-Up Road Hogs, which are some of the creepier-looking Chimeras.
A pork bean driver notices the Commander walking alongside the road. The following happens:
The hovercraft that Lucas is given to drive instantly crashes because it slipped on a banana peel thrown on the road. A tough-looking Pigmask almost gives up his Pork Bean, but remembers Lucas from the DCMC concert. He then initiates a boss fight, which is actually pretty easy! The Fierce Pork Trooper would have been much more difficult, had he not been such a big DCMC fan. All you had to do to beat him was show off his merchandise to distract him while he got wailed on by everyone else.
This is one of the more iconic boss battles in the game, not only because of the boss’s characterization affecting gameplay, but because of the song that plays here. It was featured and remixed in the popular crossover fighting game series, Super Smash Bros., with the remix itself also being quite popular amongst fans of the game. In fact, that remix was what led me to play Mother 3 in the first place! The composer of this song really outdid himself with this one – and I don’t mean Shogo Sakai. Who I’m referring to is Dmitri Shostakovich, who created the first part of Unfounded Revenge’s melody in his Symphony No. 6. This is another example of Sakai using real-world music in this video game to create a more bound-to-earth experience for the player. I’m not sure if that was the intention, since this is a relatively old song he’s using, and you wouldn’t have known that reference if I hadn’t read up on trivia for this game, but I’d like to think it’s intentional. In either way, recycling other people’s music (mostly classical) and turning it into something completely new is part of Sakai’s style. One last tidbit about Unfounded Revenge is that it inspired game developer/musician Toby Fox to write his song, “Bonetrousle”, which has become quite popular. You have probably even heard it yourself if you’re on the internet a lot. This just goes to show the life cycle of music, and how parts of songs get altered over time to become something different. I could also write about how I love the composition of the song itself, but I’ll save that for the next article, where I will be going over a few upcoming songs in-depth. No new information about the game’s story will be discussed in it, so you’re free to skip that one if you just want to read about the story.
As you ride on the highway, you can choose to recharge the Pork Bean that you took from the Pork Trooper. If you choose not to recharge it, it will break down on the road, and you are required to walk along the highway, which is very, very long.
Thankfully, you’re almost at the landfill, but before we go there, I’d like to visit another dump: the Dur-T-Café. Outside of it, there’s a big line in front of the ladies’ room. In line are two women, a cow, and a man, who thinks it’s the line to a popular ramen shop.
Inside the café is one of my favorite locations in the game; there are all sorts of things going on inside such a small place. Just listen to this song as you read the next paragraph:
You can meet up with Neckbeard and Skinhead again, who are “bouncing” everybody out just because they can. Skinhead says, “I could really get used to this place’s uniquely disgusting feeling. In fact, I even love it more than Club Titiboo!” One of the employees has a coughing fit, before telling Lucas and friends to make themselves at home. If you check out one of the tables, the game describes it as “extremely filthy.” When you check the other table, there is lots of chewed gum underneath it. Next to the table is some punk named “Gum Guy,” who talks about how much he loves chewing gum. If you try to see what’s on the menu, you can’t because the whole place is just that dirty. If you talk to the lady behind the counter, she says “Please don’t come back here. You’ll kick up the mold spores.”
If you check out the jukebox, the game says it’s covered with cigarette stains and old ketchup. Miraculously, it still works. The game prompts you to put 1 DP into it. If you don’t even have that much, the game says “’Get yer butt outta my sight, ya broke bum!’ The jukebox spat bitter words at you inside your mind.” If you do have the money, the game says “Withered, old anchovies and the like are stuck to the record, but even so, it started to spin.” From the jukebox comes some genuinely good music. I’d like to analyze each one of them in part 15½ of this analysis.
This concludes part 15 of the analysis. If you want to listen to the jukebox’s music (which I highly recommend), go to part 15.5. If you want to skip it, you can go to part 16, where Lucas and friends catch up with the dump truck.