‘Mother 3’ Producer Wants the Game to be Localized in the West

After Nintendo announced in their recent Nintendo Direct that Earthbound and Earthbound Beginnings are arriving on the Nintendo Switch, Kameoka Shinichi, the producer of Mother 3, wants the game to have an English release.

Mother 3 is a 2006 role-playing game that was developed by Brownie Brown and HAL Laboratory and released in Japan for the Game Boy Advance. The game is the third and final installment to the Mother series.

Its previous installment, Mother 2, was the first in the series to be released in the West for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) as Earthbound in 1995.

The first Mother game was later launched as Earthbound Beginnings for the Nintendo Wii U Virtual Console in 2015, 26 years after its Nintendo Famicom appearance in 1989.

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According to Nintendo Everything, Kameoka admitted that he would love to see Mother 3 to be localized for its English-speaking players in the United States and Europe. He even added that he is willing to wait for the game's worldwide release.

According to NME, Kameoka also reminisced about his time working on Mother 3. During its development, Itoi Shigesato, the creator of the Mother series, rewrote all of the placeholder texts that the development studio's staff had put in, changing the game's atmosphere completely.

Ever since its release in April of 2006, Mother 3 did not receive the same treatment as its predecessors and was not given the localization the fans of the video game series wanted.

According to Gamerant, one of the reasons behind it is that it might receive low sales.

When Earthbound was released in 1995, it was competing with other role-playing games like Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger. This attributed to its small number of copies sold in the United States.

Another reason is that the game's story is filled with mature themes and sexual allusions while it tackles subjects such as death, drugs, and alcohol.

This was until November of the same year when members of Starman.net, an internet community for the fans of Mother and Earthbound, decided to do a fan translation project for Mother 3.

In a 2008 interview with Ars Technica, Reidman, one of the members of the translating team for the project, revealed that the reason behind it aside from appreciating Itoi's work, is that they have been waiting at that time for the release of the localized version of Mother 3.

He even added that the community even made a petition for the release that was sent to both Nintendo offices in Japan and America during that time. However, they did not receive any updates regarding the petition.

Because of these reasons, Reidman and the rest of the team decided that they give their time and efforts in making their own translated version of Mother 3 by hacking its ROM files to insert every translated text in the programming.

He also noted that when they are working on the project, Nintendo of America knows what they are doing, but they never interfered.

The project was finally released in 2008 on their website, but according to the team behind it, players need to import a copy of the game if they have one to make the translations work.

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