Many games are part of a series. What is one of your favorite series of games...and your least favorite(s) in it and why? As much as I gush and gush about Earthbound and the Mother games in general on this forum, I still have negative things to say about them. And to answer my question, I'm focusing on...Mother 3. *Armageddon commences.* I may mention others though.
Mother 3 is probably my least favorite game in the Mother series and I have several reasons for it. One...now, every series needs to change and evolve some. I don't like developers that keep repackaging the same thing, but all the same, you have to be careful lest you distance one too much from the others, and I feel this is the case with M3 in many ways. Like enemies - M3's enemies are still pretty goofy and many return, but some of the strangest were missing. No more New Age Retro Hippies, Dali's Clocks, Abstract Art, possessed every day items, Starmen, random robots or aliens. It's all chimeras. The chimeras are interesting but towards the end, they started getting a bit bland and same-y. M3 is also just plain SAD, quite opposite Mother 1 and Earthbound and it lost a lot of the goofy absurdity and surrealism. Often times, I was forgetting it was a Mother game at all, but thankfully, just as I started thinking that, something just downright stupid would happen and I'd think 'Oh yeah, this is a Mother game.' But I wish I hadn't gotten that feeling at all. I was also really disappointed that there was no Magicant in some form, a place that had played an integral role in both the previous games. So while it does evolve the series and is its own thing, for me, it feels too distant at times and more like a typical RPG.
My other big gripe in M3 is motion. It locks you in and this really started annoying me while playing through. Many times, once you got to an area, you were stuck there until you got through it. Once you got through, you couldn't go back. M3 is rife with place locks and unexpected points of no return, making backtracking for exploration and levels impossible. The entire game also revolves around Tazmily village, and you keep returning there to go somewhere else. This limited variety. All this contributed to unpredictable difficulty spikes instead of a smooth increase. This got frustrating occasionally, and Lucas, unlike Ninten and Ness, never learns PSI Teleport, so moving around the game's world is generally much less free. By point of comparison, Mother 1 never completely locks you in (that I can remember), and Earthbound only locks you in four places (Zombie-ful Threed, Moonside, Magicant and the Cave of the Past, the final area), and only the latter three are points of no return. And since Ninten and Ness both learn how to teleport, backtracking is easy if you get in over your head or want to explore a previous area some more. M3 loses this.
Mother 3 is still an incredible game and WELL worth playing. But despite its greater maturity than its predecessors, it's still my least favorite of the series for feeling too distant and the lack of freedom. I also have some other little problems with it, but these are the two big ones.