@@mannyheffley5481 it is just very occasional Like if you could get it during the first two areas were most ennemies don't use too many psi moves and can give status effects without psi It would be way more useful
If Ness had Pk Magnet, he could fairly easily run the game alone. I personally believe that's why he doesn't get it. He's a fast, bulky, dual attacker with tons of support and healing PSI. Ness is one of the most powerful, yet balanced, main protagonists from the era.
@@sharpless2953 See, I think Ninten is great, but with specializing in support PSI, i feel like he doesn't benefit as much as Ness getting almost every PSI power in the game lol.
I strongly resent your placement of duster so low. Personally i think mother three probably has the most balanced party members as all of them have a role they do competently that really cant be usurped by another party member. Maybe it's just me but I've always found duster to be a fairly good party member and I was always glad to have him there and i could at least form a decent plan about what he should be doing in any given situation. At least relative to Poo where i often had no idea what i wanted him to do besides use pk starstorm and take up space. I'd personally put him slightly above or below Jeff.
This is true, in hindsight i overlooked dusters ability to tank and have more hp and def than the rest of the party. in some sections of the game boney is the least helpful party member because boney cant live any attack, meanwhile duster is tanking the best. after thinking more i would easily put duster at least above poo and pippi, and probably around Jeff. it would be interesting to analysis the mother 3 cast more in depth than what I did in this video
@sharpless2953 I haven't actually done much research on the party's stats, so I was wondering if it was just me that recognized Dusters tank utility. I've personally often times used him as something of a backup Boney as I'd often find that him and Lucas were the last two party members alive and it was more efficient to give him certain items because of that since I certainly wasn't using Lucas as my Item character as anything other than a last resort. I'm pretty sure he's the second fastest character aside from boney, so he's really well equipped to take on that role as well. He's saved my butt multiple times by being both sturdy and fast enough to tank hits and distribute revives to my downed party members.
Personally I'd rank Jeff higher, Bottle Rockets in general help for casual runs, even the early ones when Paula is kidnapped. Then he gets the Heavy Bazooka which is basically infinite super bombs which counts as his AOE attack which replaces his attack option and then Multi Bottles for Single Target damage.. He has all he needs to always be useful.
vaild, jeff has bazooka, slime generator, and all the other broken weapons and tools that i neglected to mention. in a run setting jeffs inventory is all rockets and a speed equip, i forgot about how many and how useful his other inventory battle items can be. the only other thing i will say casually about jeff is that hes usually the least important party member to revive, as ness and poo have revive spells and paula is really fast plus has lots of psi options. All this being said i agree i probably underrated jeff and duster the most this list
I remember through swapping savestates between Earthbound and several ROM hacks I managed to keep Ness' dog on the team for almost the whole game before he was replaced by a Flying Man (who repeatedly died after being killed but somehow was alive). Truly was a wonderful playthrough I never finished
Me personally - id never put paula over jeff. Jeff has access to everything paula has with his fixable weapons and the bottle rockets still do massive damage regardless of how many of the rockets hit. Of course, this mainly aplies to me only playing casually. From the perspective of speedrunning, i can see the ranking - but if we are considering both, they should at least be in the same tier. Even if you find jeff multi bottle rockets annyoing to use in speedruns, it doesnt chamge the fact that you are going to use them 100% of the time because its optimal.
Paula in A seems like it’s pushing it a bit bc you get her super underleveled, she’s frail as paper, and she never gets GREAT. PSI Element attacks (especially Freeze since next to nothing resists it), prayer utility, and more inventory space are her best attributes. For context, I just did a playthrough where by the time I unlocked her Ness was level 17 and while Paula definitely can catch up, that stat gulf due to early XP really kinda puts Ness in a league of his own for Earthbound IMO.
i respect that, but paula is much faster than ana relatively, and paula starts with a teddy bear at least. Paula also learns better magic faster than ana imo. That being said ana has PK beam Y which is one of the most op spells in the game and ana. the other thing is paula joins early ish as part of the main story, and ana is very out of the way to recruit. That being said as characters i like ana more
Tbh i always thought ninten felt worse then lucas and ness. The mother 1 group in general feel worse then the others except Teddy. Ninten having no offesive psi and life up being relatively awful to the other games is pretty bad in a game where its main difficulty comes from dungeon crawling and its high encounter rate. the game only has like two bosses max. 4th d slip is ninten's only saving grace while Ness is pretty close to being a one man army near the end of the game. Also i feel ana is a tad overrated. She does have the strongest psi of anyone in the whole series but you'll never get to that point unless you grind a crazy amount and avoid running away.
boney faster, and at the end of the day both boney and dusters main job is to fire pencil rockets. since boney's faster he uses the shield snatcher and priority heals. That being said i certainly undervalued dusters use and bulkiness in the early game, especially ch 2 4 and 5 where boney and lucas are very weak. I would raise duster place for sure
@@sharpless2953 but duster has the scary mask and tickle feather, they are a super consistent debuff for all enemies and his high attack will carry you for the early game with the boots from the abandoned castle
@@cristobalpinochet i personally like kumatoras def and off down more than the theif tools because you dont need to know boss weakness. for most enemies theif tools is consistent, especially the siren beetle for back sprites. certain bosses are only specifically weak to the stick or mask or smoke bomb, and you have to know already unless you want to waste turns with duster. Also like you said the the high offensive boots in the castle, and assortment of weapons throughout the game, help him way more in physical offense than boney's one super late game weapon. Duster starts really strong, and gets less valuable as the chapters go on, especially after duster rejoins. Boney is the opposite and is generally weak the whole early game, but towards the end boney gets really fast and doesn't get one shot by everything, i like boney alot more in the late game. Boney and duster are super comparable are are very fun to discuss, maybe because they are the 2 non magic users, and the other game with 2 non magic users are not fun to compare, because Teddy is 80x better than loid and they are never in the party at the same time.
@@sharpless2953 don’t get me wrong, kumatora def down and attack down are better, but they cost, while duster has them for free, I do prefer doing them with duster because in most boss fights duster doesn’t have much to do for the early portion of boss battles, but I also debuff enemies with kumatora, but in my experience duster is like the tank and the backbone of the team, since at least in my experience he lives the longest and with his great speed can heal with items, stun enemies (if you know the matchup) or just hit them hard with no cost (his damage does get worse the longer you are into the game tho), but he can be replaced by kumatora in the debuff department and boney in the item one, but his versatility makes him the backbone of the team at least in my opinion, I do believe he is slightly better than boney but he isn’t better than Kumatora and Lucas
i only rated the main mother3 cast, i would put flint near teddy and salsa near pippi and loid, but it would be fun to analyze in detail the rest of the mother 2 and 3 playable characters
