Mother 3 Handbooks
The Mother 3 Handbook has finally shipped! Mine arrived yesterday, and I finally found the time to sit down and go through it. I took some pictures of it to share with everybody, but they were garbage, and Tomato’s are better, so I’ll just link to that and call it a day.
The book itself is a really professional piece of work — I’d expect nothing less from the team of crazies at Starmen.net, who are the only people I know offhand who have turned being fans of a fifteen-year-old video game into a cottage industry. The guide has the same general "look and feel" as the old Earthbound player’s guide (right down to the clay models for important characters and boss mobs!), but without the, you know, gratuitous errors. It does an excellent job of guiding you through the world, pointing out secrets and hints and strategies, but in a way that minimises the amount of spoilerage; it really makes me want to go back and play through Mother 3 again so I can find out what all the damn secrets I missed actually are.
The book comes with a keen dust jacket (anybody else never seen a paperback with a dust jacket before?) that doubles as a poster featuring all of Meeeella’s clay enemies, since Fangamer is pretty big on the pack-in freebies with everything you order from them. It also comes with a free Courage Badge keychain!
… Or, anyhow, it did when I ordered mine. The keychain was a preorder bonus, and actually only ended up being available to early preorders, since I guess demand was a lot higher than anticipated. The keychain itself is a really solid piece of metal, with some serious weight and heft to it; you could do somebody a minor mischief if you hit him with the thing, or I suppose you could do him a major mischief if you happen to have it on your person when he attempts to hit you with a lightning attack. But that would be his own fault anyhow. Here’s a slightly blurry close-up picture without all my other distracting keys in the way:
Oh yeah, there’s a trailer too.
