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Sound Battles (Combo) in Mother 3

You may have noticed by now that pressing A or L to the beat of the music will cause you to get additional hits. You’ll probably have only accidentally gotten one extra hit before messing up the beat. (Well, that’s what happened to me on my first Japanese playthrough...) Although many of the songs have loud percussion with an easy-to-grasp rhythm, actually landing the combos can be harder than it seems.

The very basics of sound battle is this - you press the A button to the beat of the music and you will be able to damage your opponent more. You can perform up to 15 extra hits besides the first one, giving you a 16-hit combo. Mastering these combos can be extraordinarily useful as it can give you the edge in a heated battle. It is also just an extremly fun mechanic. I quite enjoy comboing and it keeps the turn-based battles from getting stale, an issue I found in EarthBound and Mother.

In the beginning of the game, most of the songs have clearly marked rhythms and are in common time signatures - most are in 4/4, but a few are in 3/4. The most difficult part about comboing with these songs is that some of them may have a fast-paced tempo, making it difficult to keep up with the beat. Chapter 1, 2, and 3 feature the easiest songs to combo to. In addition, when Duster is in your party you can use his Hypno-Pendulum to put enemies to sleep and hear their heartbeats pulsing to the rhythm of the song.

As the game's difficulty picks up, so does the difficulty of comboing. Not only does it get harder to use the hypno-pendulum, but many familiar songs will suddenly have a slightly different rhythm... like a an extra beat that just does not fit in the time signature. Songs that were once 4/4 will now have a measure at the very end that throws you off because that beat is just too long or too short to fit into the song's beat. As such, it is interesting to notice that these songs are also a bit disorienting not just to combo to but to listen to as well. I consider it a genius move on the part of the game developers - as your journey becomes more difficult, so does the very music you listen to. The uncertainty created by the music fits in very well with the increasing uncertainty Lucas and the gang feel as they travel through the Nowhere Islands, trying to beat the Masked Man at a game they had no idea existed.

Another added difficulty is that songs will no longer rely on quarter notes for rhythms. For those of you who cannot for the life of you remember what that means, here is an alternate explanation. Depending on the song's time signature, one will be able to divide the song into equal parts. A song in 4/4 will have four beats per measure, which is a specific segment of time. If you find a song in 4/4, you will be able to say "ONE two three four ONE two three four" over and over again and it will never sound off. Now, if you try to say "ONE two three ONE two three," it will not sound right and the stress of what you are saying will not match the stress of the notes. In the early chapters, you would simply have to count "ONE two three four" or "ONE two three." As things get harder, so do the rhythms. Perhaps the most salient examples of this are the pieces "Serious" and "Fate." Listen to them - their time signature is definitely four by four, but if you try to combo like this in the game, you will only get two beats before failing. That is because this piece's designated rhythm is more complex. The bass part of the song is the real rhythm, commonly designated as "One two one-two-three, one-two-three-four, one-two." The tempo is quick, so the later part is very difficult to execute properly, but the actual rhythm itself is not complex.

Boss battles, of course, can feature exceptionally complex rhythms. "Strong One" has a time signature that is completely bizarre, as well as a rhythm that is simply mind-bending; the most I have ever gotten to this song is a 7-hit combo. The final boss battle with the Masked Man has a version of "Strong One" that is even harder, stranger, and has what is probably a unique time signature never to be duplicated again in the history of music. Others are much easier. "Smashing Song of Praise" has a simple, 4/4 rhythm at a moderate tempo.

As cliche as it may sound, practice is really the only way to get used to these rhythms. The battle memory is quite useful for practicing combos without being attacked at the same time, and it also allows you to use Duster's hypno-pendulum on enemies that are susceptible to it. If you are using an emulator to play the game, then comboing will be much more difficult as emulators lag slightly. This will require you to press the key slightly in advance, making the combos feel unnatural. If you play on a Gameboy Advance or with an extraordinarily good emulator, this will not be an issue. Go forth, young ones, and venture into the exciting (and often headache-inducing) rhythms of Mother 3!