And as it happens... After ten years, Ness finally makes his covert reappearance as a recurring, nameless street vendor; yet another one of the all-powerful King P's time-napped and brainwashed victims. In this oblivious and thoroughly humbled capacity he serves as the prize trophy of his former neighbor and archrival, and now apparent direct superior. [img of vendor] For particularly attentive players, this claim isn't all that surprising or unusual. What other character/sprite in the game could I possibly be referring to? There are probably plenty of other people in the Japanese and English fan communities that might have vaguely taken notice of the facial resemblance and had it momentarily strike their curiosity, but after nothing of direct relevance to the plot was ever made of it immediately saw fit to write off the possibility as seemingly no more substantiated in-game than "Ness=Flint" conjecture. I've included a larger comparison image below. [broken - removed] At a close glance, the vendor is only a pixel or two taller than the 13 year-old Ness was in Mother 2; his slightly paler facial structure is identical with his visible hair somewhat neater, tucked under a different new work hat; and he's still wearing red sneakers and a short-sleeved shirt as part of his uniform. Naturally it would be remiss not to note that Ness's basic facial expression (simple black lines for eyes/mouth) is used often throughout the games, usually with only slight variations. Most of the younger named female characters, including Kumatora, bear the same expression but with red lips. The facial structures of the older Lucas and Claus in particular are nearly identical; along with temporary party member Fuel’s, who design-wise is more or less a direct equivalent to the twins that simply lacks any greater function in the storyline to play, given his mis/fortune to have not been born into a similarly such vital role. And of course all four main characters of EarthBound are known for sharing essentially the same blank expression, with the minor distinguishing additions of red lips for Paula, glasses for Jeff, and heavy eyebrows for Poo. As such it can be considered to serve most significantly as the official distinct 'main character' face for the teenaged protagonists; its near-perpetual stoicism coupling with their forced mute status while serving as the party leader to establish a blank template for the players to transpose their own feelings on as the bizarre events of their journey are staged out. To summarize the following direct accounts from the game and my personal interpretations, Ness is effectively being forced to serve as a menial snack distributor for the PigMasks, following some of them around on their latest deployments. His nature as a recurring unnamed yet clearly distinguishable character also isn’t unique in itself. The developers approached the identical-sprite characters in Mother 3 differently than they did in Mother 2 (in which many sprites in Eagleland especially had consistently similar personalities while still apparently being different individuals). Among the others that share this distinction - a man and woman that always stand within a short distance of each other and aren’t sure how to interpret the other person staring at them, until they eventually end up as a couple; the Mr. T character, who takes it upon himself to ensure that children aren’t carelessly running in and out of the train tunnels, as another unique means of path-blocking; the only female Chimera researcher/developer that assembles a sturdy pod of Hippo-Launchers for the Empire Porky Building’s artificial habitat; and ‘Uncle Custodian’, another guy with a cart that conveniently manages to show up in the most out-of-reach places. But now on to actually further proving my claim: The character in question first appears in Chapter 5, as you're traveling in disguise through the middle of PigMask territory on a vital mission to recover the Hummingbird Egg of Light. As you race through the convoluted highway system you come across a rest stop diner shortly before your destination, where a few PigMask road maintainers and the bodyguards Bearbeard and Skinhead are taking a break; outside is the modest vendor, designated only as "Oniisan" ('big brother', or a title for any young man older than oneself - all 'generic' brain-washed civilians wandering the island after Chapter 3's three year time-skip, whether they're based directly off of non-playable character sprites from EB/M2 or not, are named similarly). He greets you enthusiastically, asking if you’re interested in buying any souvenirs or snacks, and thanks you nicely whether you buy anything or not. Excepting the mind-read at Lumine Hall, and a brief outburst and encounters with different versions of himself in Magicant, this is the first we witness Ness speak and have a chance to glean whatever is left of his original personality as a non-controllable main character. At this point he has a full inventory [Handy Yo-Yo, Souvenir Hoodie, Taurus Bracelet, Pork Chips, Pork Noodles, Fresh Mint, Secret Herb], with the green Handy Yo-Yo standing out in particular - it's the first such weapon available in the game, more practical less toy-like means of offense having been exclusively utilized up to this point, and is usable by all human characters like in EarthBound. Not long after this unnoteworthy encounter, after your recovery mission is successful, you are given the chance opportunity to disable the Thunder Tower - one of the primary agents by which Yokuba and the PigMasks have manipulated most of the original residents of the village into subscribing to the more modern lifestyle of the new 'Money Age' (designed to closely replicate Pokey's hometown of Onett from his own time period, which he has by now been permanently sealed off from), and punished the few remaining villagers still possessing their own independent good judgment. Near the top of the tower is the office playroom of the man still only identified as 'King P'. Among the many scattered toys from the modern era are a sarcophagus from the Summers museum, a now-operational jukebox possibly from Jackie's Cafe/Boruhesu's bar that plays EB's hotel and drug store themes, and most significantly, a glass case containing the 'Friend's Yo-Yo', the second weapon of its type (a Spiny Mace later is the third and last). The playroom android-attendant Miss Marshmallow (perhaps vaguely modeled over the executive maid of the Monotoli Buildng Electra) will defend her master's precious memento to the death, perhaps just naïve in assuming that Pokey’s actual emotional attachment to the item is truly related to it having once belonged to a literal old ‘friend’ of his, rather than the apparent reality of it having simply been seized among several other personal possessions of Ness’s prior to or immediately after his capture; a perverse ever-present reminder to Pokey of one of his most satisfying personal victories – the complete domination of his former chief archenemy, a person he may have once regarded as his only worthy competition. After the sabotage of the Thunder Tower and a brief Chapter 6 (in which Hinawa supernaturally assures her son's safe landing), Lucas and Boney end up back in the village, where the residents have shifted around somewhat since you left in Chapter 4; with the relocated vendor being the only completely new addition to the town. He's set up shop at the Oouroko Beach, presumably in anticipation of a future major PigMask initiative, this time only selling three items: Aloha Shirts, Lobster Newberg, and the comparatively out-of-place Giant Abalone Steaks. For those that have since forgotten, 'Steak' was the default favorite food of Ness in EarthBound; more specifically 'Salisbury Steak' in Mother 2. It’s not overt and wasn’t intended to be. He’s enthusiastic about his new ocean-side cart location and demonstrates the same casual little sales pitch as before. He remains stationed at the beach throughout Chapter 7, which eventually becomes an important base of operations for the Submarine PigMasks and their mythic Supplemental Oxygen Machines, tasked with scouting the Underwater Labyrinth for any leads on the needle under Mixolydia's custody. If the previous two meetings were too subtle for any normal player to catch on to, the circumstances around his final appearance in Chapter 8 should really hit the concept home for the reasonably observative player; perhaps considerably moreso for native fans of the game. While there are three other immediately available fully-stocked locations to buy the best items in the game around New Pork City, the recurring vendor has now been relegated by his superiors to the functionally useless position of merely selling Hot Dog Sushi, a mid-range food item with no other apparent significance. He observes that you all must have come from the countryside of the island to do some shopping, and seems to make note of how poor business has been for him lately if you turn him down. This should strike an inquisitive player as at least somewhat peculiar, in part because of the contrast and also given that the game has no other single-item merchants (although EB’s bazaars did). In fact, he is stationed immediately outside the New Pork City movie theater, where one of the other merchants is selling vastly overpriced replicas of the equipment being used by the ‘movie characters’ – the male lead’s ‘Bogus Bat’ and Red Cap, and the female lead’s ‘Faux Frypan’ and white Angel Ribbon. And within the cinema room itself is Mother 3’s most direct reference to the events of its prequel, a slideshow of photos from Ness’s adventure; most presumably taken from his stolen photo album, and a few with no obvious explanation behind, thrown in for dramatic effect. A projectionist notes that this ‘movie’ was personally selected by King P. All the while, a slightly older Ness himself remains stationed obliviously just outside of the lucrative business that, entirely unknown to him, has been forged out of his own past extraordinary trials and tribulations. The cruel irony of Pokey’s scornful design is palpable; this is the last indignation he sees fit to impose on his unsuspicious, thoroughly neutralized former opponent (a rivalry that seems to have always been fundamentally one-sided since the beginning) before hitting off his “final, malice-filled party.” The deliberate setup of this little scene alone should remove any doubt that the previous individually subtle similarities were all just some kind of coincidence. A humble vendor that the designers chose to make a recurring character, with the exact same face (however common it may be) and other smaller shared traits as the otherwise supposedly entirely disregarded main protagonist of the previous game, serving as one of the few distinguishable nameless characters that the developers chose to move around the map several times, until he ends up in New Pork City ahead of most of the other nameless characters; standing right next to the building with the most prominent EarthBound references in the game. It will probably be independently noticed by more people once the game is released in English, seeing as it's one of the largest and to much of the fanbase probably the most significant essentially untouched-upon plot point in the game. The character is seen only once more in the ending ‘cast roll’, just thrown into the middle of a large group of unnamed mostly time-napped characters, sharing a row with EB/M2’s generic old cane-leaning man and a hardhat-wearing mole (one of a dozen-some identical examples of wildlife in both Mother 2 and Mother 3 that highly suggests that it is in fact the same planet). But due to the highly open-ended interpretive nature of Mother 3’s ending, this isn’t necessarily the end of Ness’s story, as I’ll get into later. All of the vendor's text in Mother 3: Highway / Diner いらっしゃい！　おみやげやら　たべものやら　ありま すよ？ ありがとうございましたー。 あんまり　 ありがとうございましたじゃ　なかったでーす。 irasshai ! omiyageyara tabemonoyara arimasuyo ? arigatougozaimashita^ . anmari arigatougozaimashitaja nakattade^su . Welcome! Would you like a souvenir or snack? [Yes] Thank you very much. [No] Ah well, thanks anyway. Oouroko / Great Scale Beach いらっしゃいま　せー！ うみのみせに　ようこ　そー！ なにかー　かっていきます　かー？ まった　おこしくださいま　せー。 irasshaima se^ ! uminomiseni youko so^ ! nanika^ katteikimasu ka^ ? matta okoshikudasaima se^ . Hi, welcome! This is my ocean-side shop! Would you care to have a look? [No] Please stop by again. New Pork City / Outside Theater いらっしゃーい！ いなかから　きたひとも　ニューポークで センスのいい　かいものを　していってくださいよ！ あ　そうですか。 そのまま　ダサく　いきててください。 irassha^i ! inakakara kitahitomo nyu^po^ku de sensunoii kaimonowo ****.ittekudasaiyo ! a soudesuka . sonomama dasaku ikitetekudasai . Welcome! So you've come from the countryside to New Pork to appreciate the good city shopping, I hope! [No] Ah, is that so. Business has been poor lately, so please come by again. With all of this in mind so far, I’m wagering that the average long-time EarthBound fan would feel quite alienated by this concept if it could truly be considered ‘canonical’ (the associated restrictions of which Itoi never really cared for imposing on his style), a primary reason that many may prefer to just regard this all at being part of one giant coincidence or more likely a deliberate misrepresentation on Itoi’s part, a distraction devised to momentarily intrigue and perhaps even slightly worry or bother the player, without ever being expounded upon. It should be noted, however, that one of Itoi’s intentions all along has been to actively alienate fans of his previous installments as a means of keeping the series ‘fresh’. One might presume that he otherwise accomplished this by merely having Mother 3 take place in a completely different, initially indeterminate setting from Mother 2, while prominently featuring only a few returning characters in primarily behind-the-scenes roles, and entirely ignoring the original main protagonists (as he seemed to, until now). But I don’t feel that this sufficiently encapsulates Itoi’s original intentions. Here are some old quotes we have from Itoi concerning the overall ‘tone’ he had hoped to set in Mother 64; the first two from earlier on in its development in 1997, and the last two from just a few months before its cancellation. Itoi: “(About the ending) You asked if the ending is tearjerking, but I'd say the real tearjerking probably happens during the game itself. And the game might end with you being like, 'Huh?!' It's really an unpleasant game (laugh)." (64 Dream, Dec. 1997) Itoi: "(About the story) This time, I do terrible things. Very unpleasant. It's almost like, 'No, not characters like that!'" (Famitsu, June 27, 1997) Itoi: "I think the ending will go above tearjerking and turn your mind into a complete blank." 64 Dream: "So it's like, 'How horrible!'?" Itoi: It's horrible (laugh). People might say I took the easy way out, but I'm a convinced criminal." (64 Dream, May 2000) "...[Miura] stated that Shigesato Itoi's goal has been to keep the series fresh by alienating fans of previous installments. In fact, he went on to say that if players come in expecting the same lighthearted Mother2 storyline, they're in for a shock. While there are comical elements to the storyline, he believes pain is the reoccurring theme." (Core Magazine, 2000) Having spent a good amount of time analyzing all of the old Mother 64 material, along with the version we ultimately ended up with, I’m fairly confident in my appraisal that the ending of Mother 3, after being affected by who knows how many rewrites, simply does not sufficiently estrange old fans of the series to the extent that Itoi originally aimed for – and that he instead sought to re-appropriate the sentiment by different means – most subtly and subversively in the unique way he brought back the previous game’s main character, as an unnamed NPC with no recollection of his past journeys, which he probably didn’t anticipate that many players actually noticing on their own anyway. I believe his intentions as a storywriter softened somewhat during the four years between Mother 64’s cancellation and the restart of development on Mother 3. Especially with his conviction that Mother 3 would be the last work in the series, he most likely would have felt somewhat obligated to focus on appeasing the aging, eager fans of Mother 1/2 with his rewrite, more so than the initial storyline would have at least, and leaving us with a far more satisfying and unequivocally optimistic conclusion to the series. At the very least I’m wagering that there probably wasn’t supposed to be an “END?” scene where you blindly wander around hearing disembodied but fairly distinctive comments from all of the villagers establishing definitively that everyone has miraculously survived; it seems far more likely that the original intent, for it to have been considered by its creator as the “easy way out,” would have involved only showing events of the dragon’s violent awakening and ‘cleansing by eruption’ of the island, and simply left everything else up to the interpretation of the player – how exactly Lucas having been the one to pull to personally awaken the dragon ultimately affected the end result than if his soul-suppressed twin brother Claus had won their race for the final needle (almost certainly plot points that has been planned throughout all stages of the game’s development). After ten years of build-up for this game I think it must have been obvious to him that this was no longer appropriate or even a particularly innovative approach anymore, and so we ended up with our final product: a still atypically-apocalyptic ending in which the primary setting of the entire island is utterly destroyed forever along with all remaining traces of the civilizations that it once hosted (that undulating mountainous form in the last scene of the final cinema is, for the record, the body of the dragon itself); followed by the nearly blank “END?” screen in which the player must be intuitive enough (apparently not everyone is) to notice that it serves as a controllable cursor, and then poke around on the screen until eliciting several dozen messages of incredulity and thankfulness over the course of several minutes. The final wistful farewell triggers the ‘true’ final ending scenes directly reminiscent of EarthBound: a complete cast roll (which almost certainly wouldn’t have been included in any form in Mother 64 due to the comparative impracticality of 3D-rendered characters, besides it undoubtedly being out of place in the original concept for the ending), followed by 20-some screenshots of the more dramatic moments in the game. The game closes with a shot of an updated version of the logo, depicting a planet earth that has seemingly been restored by the dragon. Obviously the ending is no longer as sorrowful/aggravating/’terrible’ as it was once planned to be. Although Claus does indeed die by a necessary self-sacrifice (after the combined efforts of his family and some degree of supernatural influence by Hinawa – possibly acting through the Egg of Light to convey her memories to him - at least momentarily brings him to his senses, and he realizes what he must do to ensure that that he does not further harm them or end up being the one to inadvertently wake the dragon – whatever technology that had been implanted in his body after being saved by the PigMasks that suppressed his true personality was clearly quite thoroughly ingrained into whatever life systems his fall in Chapter 1 ended up necessitating, and it can be assumed that attacking his Franklin Badge-protected brother with his lightning attack might have been the only option available to any of them to short-circuit his overriding programming), and Nowhere Island itself was impressively and thoroughly ravaged, taking the products of Pokey’s abominable ‘Charming Chimera Project’ and the rest of his unholy personality-based kingdom with it, the overall ending itself, while still up to a good deal of interpretation, is undeniably hopeful; and despite one family’s tragedies the fate of humanity is far better off than it was at the beginning of the game. For those that didn’t understand the ending, it can be assumed that all of the villagers, the time-napped integrated NPCs, the island’s natural animal life, and possibly even the more good-hearted/fundamentally innocent of the PigMasks have all been transported to a safe location, and almost certainly not just returned to the ruins of the island after its near-complete destruction. It is more than implied that the dragon’s awakening after tens of thousands of years of forced slumber has had - in accordance with Lucas’s desires - the global consequences of reversing the centuries of whatever damage humans gradually unsuspectingly inflicted on their planet (to the point of necessitating the villagers’ original exodus to the last divinely protected area in the world). They are now free to spread out and repopulate the earth; this time far wiser thanks to their collective experiences with Pokey and the degree of supreme corruption that he exemplified, and no longer under the restrictions they were deluded enough to inflict upon their flawed 'utopian' society when it was devised fifteen-some years earlier. And there is one other factor that opens up the possibility for an even happier ending for Ness and the other time-napped characters in particular: the presence of the Phase Distorter/Time Tunnel (Version 3, presumably – the same one Ness and friends left stranded in the distant past that Pokey would have been able to pick up for his own use), seen stored in the Hall of Memories among other stolen mementoes from Pokey and Ness’s separate quests in EarthBound. Through whatever sources Leder has available to him, he is able to verify that it is the means by which, after having been personally sealed out of every other era by some universal force, Pokey eventually ended up in their time period – naturally the place where an immortal, invincible, entirely self-interested individual could do the least damage, given that the few dozen remaining humans were already set on an inevitable course for extinction (it’s debatable whether his presence is the only thing that could have set in place the course of events that lead to humanity being given a second chance at the end of the game). It’s also presumably the means, along with the potent ‘Good Person Bath’ of either Giygas’s or Dr. Andonuts’s invention, by which he was able to gradually assemble his army, which he would have then used to kidnap the random NPCs of his own time period by the hundreds, along with a few other key figures (notably - Gerardo Montague, the Noble Warrior, Pancho, Pincho, and Tomas Jefferson, members of Eagleland’s/Onett’s police forces, the zombie lady, the Deep Darkness Doctor and Tough Businessman, and a mostly-concealed boy in blue cap). Without getting too far off topic, there is the (comparatively small) possibility that Dr. Andonuts ended up in the future sometime before the beginning of the game by his own volition, where Pokey could have merely took him hostage (whose disappearance in turn might have initiated action on Ness’s part if he had the means to track him down and follow him – again, fairly improbable). But more than likely Pokey simply recalled Dr. Andonuts from their encounter in Saturn Valley in which he stole the Phase Distorter Version 1 (the one he apparently thoughtlessly used to reach Giygas at his hiding place in the distant past, without having ever been informed of the eventual consequences of time-warping as a natural lifeform, and then dismantled so that it wouldn’t somehow still be there in the future for Ness to use) and kidnapped the Mr. Saturn, and simply arranged for his abduction from the 1990’s upon realizing how instrumental his technological genius could prove towards setting up his custom-tailored empire. Presumably Ness himself would have been suddenly kidnapped from his time period and family in a similar manner, leaving no real leads for his friends to follow. Regardless, the Phase Distorter is implied to be used by Pokey as some kind of ‘shortcut’ to the just-then-discovered subterranean energy-filled cavern of the final needle (the only probable explanation for his being able to get there before Lucas and co., even faster than just plummeting straight down 100+ stories); which Dr. Andonuts most likely would have had the ability to use for his own devices after seeing to it that Pokey had been permanently neutralized as any sort of a further foreseeable threat. It’s a very, very significant final plotpoint that Itoi seems to have left to just be entirely deduced by the more perceptive and observational players. Andonuts has the ability to return to his own time period, and from there it will be possible for him to set up recovery missions to right all the wrongs of Pokey’s time-stream interferences, returning Ness and the others to their proper time period and reversing the effects of the Good Person Bath brain-washings, which he would have presumably played a large part in setting up in the first place. So, Ness’s final fate at the end of the series really isn’t so bad after all, if you’re willing to use your imagination by extrapolating on the plot details Itoi has actually left us with. And now to analyze the significance of Ness’s role in Mother 3 as it concerns the true central character of the game, King P/Pokey Minch. Many aspects of the storyline are actually much further reinforced and even simplified by the mere presence of Ness in his previously unnoticed capacity. Since the game's release I had more or less assumed that the major consequence of Pokey having been 'sealed' out of all other time periods was that he would be unable to personally deal with his old arch-nemesis, as he had seemed set to do in his final letter in EarthBound. His new unforeseen time-traveling complications impeded this particular endeavor of Pokey’s, leaving Ness and his friends supernaturally protected from his petty wrath; although the error of not dealing with him as a serious threat to humanity was a mistake that a future generation would have to deal with. This unexplained protection by a universal force intending to prevent the now highly dangerous Pokey from personally messing around in the time-stream was the Chosen Four’s reward for having overcome the Embodiment of Evil and altered the original course of history, and they would now have the privilege of living out the rest of their days quietly - Ness and Paula even seemed to be hitting off a long-term relationship at the end of the game. Naturally, they could not possibly be expected to protect the earth beyond their own lifetimes, and the collective activities of the human race, presumably mirroring our own but at a slower and less severe rate (and as such, most likely lacking the benefit of mass awareness that certain human activities were the direct cause of the irreparable harm being inflicted on the world – an implication of Leder’s, when he notes their motivation for wiping everyone’s memories with the naïve hope that similar such mistakes, which they seemingly had still not been able to absolutely ascertain, would not be able to be repeated), would gradually and unavoidably deteriorate the world over the next few centuries or so; until only Nowhere Island's divinely protected land was the only haven for the last group of human settlers with the good sense to depart from their former civilization, and the luck to actually find it. But as it’s turned out, Ness has not been so lucky. In fact the most significant implication of the ‘time sealing’ detail is that it contributed more than anything to the boredom that defines Pokey’s motivations in the final chapters – the fear that, because he is now unchallenged in staking claim to sovereignty over the entire world, his ennui has simply run out of entertaining outlets, and can now only be alleviated by having a personal claim to initiating the apocalypse itself, through waking up a being that he anticipates will be his only companion as he lives out his immortal, god-like existence. At the end of the game, Pokey talks of Lucas, Kumatora, Duster, and Boney as now being his most ‘beloved’ meddlesome pests ever (now that Ness has been thoroughly dominated). He’s been entertaining himself by ‘playing’ with them for some time now, possibly having kept some kind of surveillance on them since they all assembled at the end of Chapter 4 and caused Duster to leave the DCMC (the band and the renovated ‘Club Chichibu’ having been an integral part of his plan in keeping his new subjects loyal to their unseen King, a less direct method of brainwashing through their PigMask-acclaiming concerts and songs – all of the band members are furious when they eventually realize how they had been used all along), and may have been responsible for a mysterious bolt of lightning from the Thunder Tower that recharged the Egg of Light-holding Clay Mask, initiating an amusing wild goose chase for them (unless that was just a misfire/coincidence). After their series of successes against his army – managing to obtain the (seemingly unutilized) Egg of Light, dismantling the Thunder Tower, and evenly matching his perfect robot slave/son Claus for number of needles pulled – he seemed to genuinely consider them the worthiest competition he’s had since his more-or-less one-sided rivalry with Ness; and even allowed them to participate in a race against him and Claus to reach the last needle in its just-discovered location, regarding ‘fair play’ as having the potential to be more fun (a trait he demonstrates with the whack-a-mole/racing/balloon pumping games beforehand – appreciating any competition that seems to be just slightly inferior to his own abilities). Locria/’Yokuba’, a being that Pokey seems to have forged a strong friendship with based on mutual common interests, not least of all their similar status as immortals (Locria’s major difference from his Magypsy brethren being that even he did not seem to know where the needle directly connected with his lifeforce was actually located, only aware of its significance for being lodged in the head of the dragon; which seems to be the most likely explanation for why he ended up with such different attitudes and a willingness to take a huge risk by telling Pokey about the needles at some point), explains after his final defeat that they have all merely been playing roles in Pokey’s grand game – his own role as the fosterer of avarice and greed amongst the villagers fairly transparent given his chosen name ‘Yokuba/ri’ – which has simply grown too out of control, and he is grateful for being able to escape this ‘maelstrom/whirlpool’ of Pokey’s design. The matter of how Pokey ended up in his current state. It seems that Pokey’s fate was sealed the moment he used the Phase Distorter Version 1 (which, given that the inventors were short on at least one material during the construction of the other Phase Distorters, may suggest that the later two versions could have been somehow inferior; but there is no evidence that Giygas ever had access to any more efficient form of time travel, or that he made any attempt to personally recruit Pokey as his new chief lieutenant – all of Pokey’s efforts were almost certainly by his own volition) to finally reach Giygas, without the benefit of Dr. Andonuts warning that, based on whatever observations he had been able to make, ‘life is demolished in the process of warping’ (a translation from Mother 2 is something I’ve been meaning to check out). This would technically appear to be true, at least in the traveling of vast distances across time as in Pokey’s case. Getting into the details of time travel in the Mother universe clearly wouldn’t have appealed to Pokey, so we can only make our conclusions based on conjecture – although what’s stated and actually demonstrated in Mother 2/3 can seemingly be reconciled. The decision of Ness and his friends to have their souls transferred into robots is probably the most dramatic moment in the game – they risk the possibility of their souls never being able to return to their bodies in the present, against Dr. Andonuts’s certainty that their bodies and life processes will otherwise somehow be drastically and irrevocably screwed up (but not necessarily killed, as Dr. Andonuts seems to imply) in the process. They get to the chamber of the Devil Machine in their robot forms, where the still-human but heavily armed Pokey teleports in to (rather portentously) make fun of them for how stupid they look now. His out of battle sprite appears normal, and the only sign that he is in any way biologically different is his battle sprite itself, the topic of much debate to this day. While still looking quite lively and arrogant, his skin is blue and his hair has gone from bright yellow to a much darker shade of brown, although his outfit remains the same color. The resemblance to the blue-skinned out-of-battle sprites of mind-washed human enemies in EB, purely a gameplay detail, is almost certainly just a coincidence – one of the main points of Pokey’s character is that he obtains power entirely by his own efforts and luck, and proves to have more control over his situation than his ‘superiors’, Carpainter, Monotoli, and seemingly even Giygas himself. Somewhat more probable is that the thick glass of his spider-mech is (selectively) altering the tint of his skin and hair from an outside perspective; or even that that the sprite was the victim of some kind of color limitations. But at this point the most likely explanation is that Itoi just wanted to show us (somewhat inconsistently) that something was in fact quite wrong with Pokey at this point, and there would in fact be a poetically fitting consequence to his reckless time traveling. Alternatively, Pokey was still more or less completely healthy at this time due to some differentiation between the process of traveling to the past and its effects on the human body (which science simply has no means of offering any valid speculation on), and the end result of traveling the same vast distance (seemingly many millions of years) back to the future, in which some limited natural effects of aging on the human body and its processes cannot be avoided; just not directly in commensurate with the years being traveled – some smaller, almost inconsequential ratio that only makes a noticeable difference over thousands or years or more. So, traveling to the past is safe enough, as it seemed to be for Pokey; but it’s the return trip that will get you, especially if it’s over the course of millions of years. On that note, at whatever point Giygas/Giegue himself traveled to the Cave of the Past – either since the beginning of his second invasion of Earth where he made it his permanent base of operations, or more logically, at some point while Ness was claiming the last couple of ‘Your Sanctuary’ locations and proving himself enough of a threat to genuinely frighten the alien overlord (according to the Tenda tea ‘epiphany’) into retreating to the most inaccessible hiding place he could come up with – it’s somewhat plausible that the process similarly affected his physical form, to the point that, combined with his already unstable mental processes (both from his experiences with Ninten and incomprehensible frustration at the thought of being foiled by the inferior human race for a second time), it may have somehow contributed to his wholesale d/evolution to the state you confront him in; an embodiment of pure mindless evil restrained only by a new variation of his old life support capsule/tank, the only thing still protecting him from his enhanced weakness to any sort of positive emotion or sentiment and his apparent weird inability to even differentiate between love and pain. Anyway, we can assume that in Mother 3 Pokey was arranging both targeted and random abductions from the 1990s at the hands of his PigMask soldiers and/or robots on a regular basis, having them brought to Nowhere Island’s time periods and location – which seemed to have no visible negative effects on anyone, given the short distance between those two eras (perhaps a few centuries, we are left to assume), and the comparatively vast difference of years between Giygas’s hiding place and the present era that Pokey personally traveled as a living being. But Pokey seems to have not just survived this, but in some ways benefited from the end result. He seems quite confident of his immortality, and it is even implied that he is also functionally invincible in Lucas and company’s battle against him (at least, against PSI and their own relatively non-violent/blunt means of attack), since he very calmly conducts his final speeches while giving no indication of even feeling any pain, despite the fact that his hospital-bed-mecha leaves him far less directly protected than his original spider-mecha in EarthBound (on display in the Hall of Memories). He notes that he has no way of knowing his actual physical age, or even guessing the nearest 1000 or 10,000 years. My guess would be that when Pokey escaped from the Cave of the Past after Giygas’s defeat by use of the left-behind Phase Distorter Version 3, he underwent some manner of instantaneous hyper-aging which the laws of nature simply had no way of regulating upon his arrival in the future. In all likelihood he has only limited control over his desiccated body, only exerting himself by speaking and somehow operating his mecha, his only real means of functioning semi-normally. He eventually outright tells them his ‘secret’, that he cannot be harmed no matter what they throw at him; and only needs to retreat to his Absolute Safety Capsule when the mech itself simply runs out of energy/short-circuits. Thanks to Dr. Andonuts and the Mr. Saturns’ failsafe, he will never again be able to threaten the world, just as his eternal confine will guarantee that he never has to worry about being bothered by any other members of his race, finally alleviating his paranoia and distrust. Even Dr. Andonuts seems confident that Pokey can continue to live on in there without access to any form of sustenance or even oxygen; meaning that, for lack of need of these necessities of life, his biological functions must somehow no longer be of any actual consequence to his continued survival. The presence of some kind of ‘pleasure room’ in his skyscraper suggests that he was still able to enjoy food and such sensual delights; but there are only so many luxuries accessible to him that would have had any chance of withhold his mind-crushing boredom in the long term; he regards this as the tragedy of his god-like existence, while showing no concern for anyone else’s fate. He is confirmed to be among the survivors after the dragon’s awakening; seemingly content rocking back and forth within his capsule when you stumble upon it, having essentially accomplished all of his objectives. The only lingering question in my mind is how the confrontation between Ness and the forces of Pokey that abducted him (which, if you’ve forgotten, was the basis that commenced my writing this whole analysis) might have occurred exactly. It can now be considered one of the larger plot details in the series to be left entirely up the players’ imaginations. The ‘raid’ as I would imagine it probably didn’t take place until Pokey was more than assured of the invincibility of his power base and the inherent stability of his new empire, at least a year or two after all of the allies split up at the end of Chapter 3. Dr. Andonuts has been working for Pokey’s army since before the beginning of the game, and his unexplained missing status has surely left an impression on the Chosen Four, especially his son Jeff, who he had pledged to spend more time with under his tutelage. A number of other named characters will eventually go missing, but what would have been noticed by everyone was the pranks orchestrated by Pokey from his safe haven in the future, that most prominently took place in the form of all the stolen artifacts he wanted to surround himself with - to both remind him of his home time period that he is no longer able to return to, and visibly reinforce his satisfaction of being effectively untouchable by his former enemies. The first examples seen are the two elephant statues of the Dalaam royal palace (re-appropriated to the front gate of Club Titiboo); then a sarcophagus from the Summers museum and a now-operational jukebox from Jackie’s Café; a few Octopus and Limbless Doll statues along with the Octopus Statue Eraser, the Runaway Five’s tour bus, the Sky Runner, Monotoli’s reconstructed hijacked helicopter, Tessie of Lake Tess herself, the Dungeon Man, and even the black and white sesame seeds. Some of Ness’s own possessions – his photo album, home telephone, and one of his battle Yo-Yos – were probably acquisitioned prior to his actual abduction, as a way of making him aware of his presence in the time after Picky delivered his foreshadowing letter. It’s rather unsatisfying to imagine that a slightly older Ness, whose powers had perhaps been fading from disuse, was eventually just ganged up on by PigMask troops sent from the future and then immediately dumped into a Good Person Hot Spring capsule, to serve as yet another one of Pokey’s collectible toys, and his prize trophy. It’s doubtful that someone like Yokuba or Claus would have taken the risk of being sent from their own timeline to personally deal with him, and Pokey would have been unable to; but if more standard PigMask agents were at least able to catch Ness off guard with an swift ambush, get him into the Phase Distorter, and haul him back off to the future successfully, it’s easy to imagine one or more of them waiting for him, and simply proving more than a match for the former hero in combat. Pokey himself seems absolutely confident that no mode of attack can ever harm him in his final battle with Lucas and company; it’s quite possible that theory was put to test earlier in an arranged final battle between him and Ness, since Pokey professes to enjoy ‘playing fair’, at least in a highly controlled setting. It’s hard to imagine any other situation in which Pokey would have willingly engaged in combat with anyone of a reasonably high power level, after he had already begun to establish his militia. Again, all very good fanfiction material. Pokey once considered his more popular and athletic next-door neighbor to be his only worthy competition; his particular choice of punishment for Ness therefore makes sense. Pokey is generally perceived as being an all-around violent person among his other negative traits (the Mother 2 novelization in particular emphasizes it), but he is certainly not so vicious as to want to kill his greatest rival. He derives far more satisfaction in hoarding his complete and utter domination over him – he’s already snatched him from his family, friends, and budding love interest; overwritten the memories of his past adventures (and even profits off of them in New Pork City) through the use of the Good Person Bath technology he borrowed from the alien forces; and has rendered him effectively harmless, assigned to the demeaning status of the PigMask army’s preeminent cart vendor. This makes Pokey’s motivation easier to comprehend than they were before we were aware of this significant subplot. Pokey doesn’t have any intricate or redeeming psychological complexes in his character, as would seem to be something of a necessity among modern villains in all forms of media today; he’s just a plain all-around horrible young man, personifying the purest forms of all of humanity’s worst traits and implemented in an ingenious manner – and you’re missing the whole point if you try to look at him any other way. Yes, he actively hoards and recreates elements of his childhood, and has no compunctions about remodeling an entire island and all its inhabitants, the last survivors of his race, into a shallow remake of the cities he once lived in; because he’s still mentally a teenager who’s lived a short but eventful life, who no longer has any need to ‘grow up’, and there just isn’t anything else he’d particularly care to use his authority to replicate. His relationship with Ness wasn’t as complex as it initially seemed either; he grew up privately resentful of his positive qualities, and was manipulative enough to stay ahead of and exceed him when it ended up mattering. And now, he even works for him. The mementoes and theater were just his sick little way of gloating over his complete victory. Looking back on this all, I'm surprised that I ever underestimated Pokey (and Itoi) by assuming that his personal time-traveling impediment would prevent his vow of revenge on Ness in EarthBound’s final scene (although, as I said earlier, Itoi doesn’t allow his previous works to restrict his new storylines; so this subtle subplot might not have always been planned). The single most prominent aspect of Pokey’s character is that he’s NOT to be underestimated. His negative impact on the course of events in Mother 2 and the entire basis of Mother 3 can be directly traced back to the prologue of Mother 2, in which Pokey is regrettably one of the three people privy to Buzz Buzz’s announcement of the imminent invasion of Giygas, the Universal Cosmic Destroyer, who has already destroyed all life on Earth and countless other planets in Buzz Buzz’s timeline, and the only factor that will prevent it from happening again is Pokey’s despised next door neighbor being able to get a whole lot stronger within a couple of months. Even after Pokey has the opportunity to personally witness a small sample of Giygas’s power in the form of the Starman Junior, the player and Ness leave Pokey and his dysfunctional family at home to begin their journey, fooled into regarding him as nothing more than a quirky subplot with no foreseeable future relevance to the plot once he’s thankfully ruled out as a possible candidate for the Chosen Four; his unprecedented uselessness in basic combat reinforces the whole concept. But not anticipating some kind of malicious epiphany in the mind of someone as transparently manipulative and self-serving as Pokey, especially after he’s shared the same astonishing experiences as your main playable character, is the largest misconception that the player ever makes. While Ness is staking out the First Your Sanctuary location, Pokey is already plotting a rise to power to ensure his own long-term survival above everyone else’s by following the course of the Evil Mani Mani Statue, smart enough to let the potent ancient relic control the minds of his superiors while settling for the second-in-command position. He even starts off his villainous career by personally kidnapping an actual member of the Chosen Four. After stealing the helicopter, he sets off on his own improbable quest to locate Giygas personally, utilizing his recently-accrued financial assets to constantly stay a step ahead of his rivals (there is much irony in Monotoli’s fervent hope that his former advisor will be ‘okay’). He somehow survives the Deep Darkness once his helicopter crashes before it’s even illuminated by the Hawk Eye, and even finds his own way to the Lost Underworld, before he finds the actual key to accomplishing his objectives, the Phase Distorter, which he acquires by taking one of its inventors hostage. Once he acquires some armor and finally meets up with the encapsulated remnants of the ‘almighty idiot’ of an supreme overlord he’s been looking for, he may have even had a role in deploying the alien attack force to his own former hometown. We now know that by the finale of Mother 3, Pokey has managed to succeed at every endeavor he ever set out to achieve. In the end he was genuinely invincible and immortal, deemed dangerous enough to be sealed out of all time periods, and was only finally done in through succumbing to his own lack of attention to details involving the powerful technology he's stolen and commissioned over the years; being foiled for the second and last time by an invention of the Earth’s greatest technical minds. Representing the cruelest and most selfish aspects of the human race, he is at last sealed away forever, prevented from corrupting the planet ever again. As a connoisseur of villainy, I don’t believe I can justifiably hold any fictional figure in greater regard than him. And, my final thoughts. Getting back to my original point, I believe that with all these factors considered, the prospect of a mere coincidence going on here really shouldn’t be considered at all likely at this point; and the only reasonable alternative conclusion to be made is that Itoi or one of the other developers expressly intended for the vendor character to be misleading; an ultimately insignificant plot detail that was intentionally thrown in just to nag at the observational players' minds - the concept that after all these years, this is how the developers saw fit to have the former star of the series make his comeback. Either way, those that do happen to notice are more or less left to use their own imaginations to make these connections with only limited assistance from the game itself. And after quite a few years of closely analyzing the masterful storytelling techniques of man near-universally acclaimed as a genius in his homeland, I believe this really is the fate that Shigesato Itoi felt was fitting to inflict on his most famous character, as portrayed in the final version of his last game in the series. Even though this specific concept just hit me a few days ago, you can still assume that I've spent a lot more time pondering over the entire storyline during my time in the EarthBound community than just about anyone else. At the very least I would suggest you not underestimate Itoi's subversive storytelling tactics. The series undeniably works on many levels, and can be greatly appreciated at face value by the less inquisitive; but I'm quite confident that Itoi himself always had these sorts of overarching concepts in mind when developing his scripts. It just ended up being a matter of finding the most creative and occasionally subversive methods of putting them into action in a videogame format, and ultimately coming out with a genuinely unique overall experience at the end of each endeavor. In my mind all three games still qualify as the finest collective embodiments of true artistic expression in recent decades. I suppose I’ll mention that any other plot point in the series that anyone would like me to further analyze or clarify as definitively as possible for you all is quite welcome in this topic, for my own cataloging purposes more than anything; otherwise, I'll probably get around to explaining the whole deeper plotline of the series scattered throughout the game boards at my own pace, separately and eventually collectively. I'd highly recommend keeping up with my posting history if you feel any of this enlightened your perception of the Mother series.