Unlike earlier games in the series, "Mother 3" is presented in chapters. When the Pig Mask Army starts a forest fire and imposes police state-like conditions on a "pastoral forest village", a father, Flint, ventures out to protect his family (twin sons Lucas and Claus and wife Hinawa), but the rest of the world is eventually implicated in the plot. Lucas, the game's hero, does not become prominent until the fourth chapter. Along with his dog, a neophyte thief, and a princess, Lucas fulfills a prophecy of a "chosen one" pulling Needles from the Earth to wake a sleeping dragon and determine the fate of the world. The game features a lighthearted plot, with characters such as "partying ghosts" and "talking rope snakes". "Mother 3" is a single-player role-playing video game played with two buttons: one for starting conversations and checking adjacent objects, and another for running. The game updates the turn-based "Dragon Quest"-style battle system with a "rhythm-action mechanic", which lets the player take additional turns to attack the enemy by chaining together up to sixteen taps in time with the background music. Apart from this, the battle system and "rolling HP meter" (where health ticks down like an odometer such that players can outrun the meter to heal before dying) are similar to "EarthBound".