NecrosaroIII
Ultimate DQ Fan
Tomorrow is the fifteen anniversary of a game that is very important to me. Mother 3 was released on April 20th, 2006 after a highly complicated development cycle that spanned off and on from 1994 across three systems. The brain child of Shigesato Itoi, a copywriter from Japan that has become famous for his work in advertising, voice acting and judging Iron Chef, Mother 3 would eventually come out on the Gameboy Advance. On the eve of its anniversary, let’s take a look at this cult hit’s history.
A few years after EarthBound came out, news of a sequel started coming. At the time, I was a Nintendo Power subscriber. A March 1997 article detailed the development of EarthBound 64. Originally slated to be released on the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, EarthBound 64 was ambitious. What is striking about these early articles is just how much of EarthBound 64 survived into the final released game. Lucas is shown to be the protagonist already. Many characters such as Duster, Salsa, the Pigmask army, and the band DCMC all make early appearances. Even the main setting of Tazmily Village was shown off. Sure their designs would radically change over time, but the basics are still there. It is clear from a fundamental level that the story of Mother 3 GBA and EarthBound 64 are relatively the same.
Source: Starmen.net. An early version of protagonist Lucas and his twin brother Claus
Sadly EarthBound 64 was too ambitious. After the N64 DD bombed hard in Japan, EarthBound 64 was left in a precarious position. The developers switched gears to try to save the project, working it so that the game could play on the base Nintendo 64 but it was a struggle. Nintendo would continue to show off Mother 64 at its annual SpaceWorld expo, including releasing a trailer for the game, it was continuously pushed back. Then in August 2000, the game was formally canceled. Shigesato Itoi, knowing that fans would be disappointed, posted a letter on his Hobonichi Itoi Shinbun website discussing the cancellation (translation courtesy of Starmen.net). He would also later have a roundtable discussion with himself, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Satoru Iwata. What it boils down to is that the team was too inexperienced with 3D game development, the vision was too ambitious, and after abandoning the N64 DD technological limitations were too severe.
I was furious at the news that Earthbound 64 was canceled. In my impetulant youth, I swore off Nintendo. I blamed Gamecube’s imminent release for EarthBound 64’s failure. Starmen.net, which was the online center for the fandom at the time, wrote a petition to save the project. But nothing ever came of it. Mother as a franchise lived on solely through Super Smash Bros for a time.
In 2003, a GameBoy Advance port of Mother 1+2 was announced for Japan. While that was exciting enough for series fans, there was an odd message at the end of the commercial for the game. Written in the font Mr. Saturn characters talk in-game with was “We’re making Mother 3 for the GBA ! Dakota!”. Fans were stunned. It felt unreal. Bizarrely enough, there were no further details given. No elaboration. That was the only information given for over two years. Shigesato Itoi was asked about the project from time to time but all he would say is that the game was in development, but to forget about it for now. He would later say that the reason information was much more restricted when the GameBoy Advance version was in development was because he did not want to disappoint fans.
In November 2005, Mother 3 was officially announced by Nintendo. Still, no screenshots were given. Just a red splash page. In January 2006, Shigesato Itoi announced Mother 3 would be released on April 20th, 2006. The game was now close enough to being finished that he felt confident enough it would be released. A promotional page went up on Hobonichi Itoi Shinbun where each day an additional piece of information would be revealed about the game, such as a reveal of Lucas’ new design, or the main theme song of the game. Starmen.net made an English version of the page for western fans that can still be found here. It became apparent that Mother 3 would have the story of EarthBound 64, but redesigned to have a graphics style closer to EarthBound.
At the time, I had made a deal with Tristan, my co-editor on this site, to pick up Kingdom Hearts 2 which was about to be released. I was just a poor college student at the time, so I couldn’t afford many games. But each passing day, I got more and more excited for Mother 3. Not long before release, I bailed on Kingdom Hearts 3 and pre-ordered Mother 3 from Playasia. My one regret is that I did not buy the Deluxe version, which included a special GameBoy Micro, Franklin Badge, and special pouch.
My copy of Mother 3 arrived a few weeks after the release. I decided to take it slow going through the game. I would limit myself to just one hour a day. I had waited way too long for this game to just devour it over the course of a few days. While Mother 3 is very different from Mother 1 and 2 in many regards, it was exactly what I had wanted it to be. Every once in a while, a game comes out that is everything you had hoped it would be. Mother 3 is one of those titles.
The game is divided into 8 chapters of varying length. I would argue that the first three chapters are more of an extended introduction. Events truly begin in Chapter 4, where players take control of Lucas as he and his friends attempt to recover an artifact known as the Hummingbird Egg, and repel the Pig Masks. The story culminates in an astounding climax that is both pure fan service for long-time fans of the franchise and utterly heartbreaking. The ending stuck with me so much that I once painted the final scene in the game, which is hanging in my living room.
The soundtrack is phenomenal. While the composers of Mother 1 and 2 did not return, newcomer Shogo Sakai created one of the best soundtracks in gaming history. I would argue that Mother 1 and 2 had better battle themes, Mother 3 has the best soundtrack overall. Many of the area themes and cutscene music wonderfully capture the whimsical tenderness developers were aiming for. The only knock on the soundtrack that I can think of is that playback is limited by the GBA’s lackluster soundchip. However, hackers have managed to exact the music from the ROM file. Uncompressed, these songs all sound amazing.
Gameplay is fairly typical of the area. Battles are first-person and turn-based. Developers included a key system that is quite engaging. If players tap the A button to the rhythm of the battle theme, they can create combos to deal more damage. Initially, there is no guide, so players have to guess what the rhythm is. Eventually, players gain access to a skill that hypnotizes enemies, allowing you to hear their heartbeat, which is a drumbeat for players to follow along with.
Many groups had begun fan translations as early as the game’s initial release. Many of these groups were doing it for practice, or because it was such a high-profile game. For whatever reason, these projects all fell by the wayside, probably due to the complexity of the project. After a year of no updates from Nintendo, when it became evident that Mother 3 was not going to be getting an English release, Starmen.net threw its hat into the ring. A new section of the website opened up called “Do-It-Yourself-Devotion”. On that page, Starmen.net co-founder Reid Young laid it out plainly for Nintendo. Their contacts within Nintendo’s localization department had told them that the game was not going to be released. Reid goes on to say that they’ve gone out of their way to never step on Nintendo’s toes. They’ve never profited from the site. They’ve never distributed ROMs and they’ve even gone out of their way to show fans out to buy legitimate copies. But Mother 3 was just too big for the community to ignore.
It was announced that Tomato, the online alias of Clyde Mandalin, the other co-founder of Starmen.net and a professional translator for Funimation, would take be in charge of translating the script. A few other members were also announced, such as legendary hackers Gideon Zhi and Neo Demiforce, but eventually, they would have to drop out of the project. Eventually, the project settled into a collaboration between Tomato and a programmer going by the name Jeffman, with various contributions by others.
Tomato detailed progress on the fan translation through 2007 and 2008 on his blog. The project was very strenuous both men involved, both putting in over 1000 hours of work in order to make it happen. In order for the translation to be possible, changes had to be made at the assembly level since there was not enough memory available to fit the English text. Without documentation from the original developers, this is a grueling task but still they pressed through every challenge.
The entire time development of the fan translation was underway, the team worked under the assumption that Nintendo would shut it down at any moment. The fan translation was a very high-profile project in gaming circles but it exists within a legal gray zone. Emulation and sharing ROMs (copy versions of the game’s data) are viewed as piracy, however, translation patches are not. Nintendo never issued a cease-and-desist to Starmen.net. In fact, employees within the company would give words of encouragement in private.
Tanetane Island – A drug fuelled nightmare
The fan translation of Mother 3 was released in October 2008. It received much acclaim from fans who had been eagerly awaiting the patch. Clyde, who was a role model of mine in college, had been respectful to the text of the game. His deep love of EarthBound meant that he was able to capture subtle nuances and connections that perhaps a less familiar translator would have missed. Perhaps the only large change that was made was the re-naming of a character named Yokuba to Fassad. Otherwise, the text is a work of love.
In the years since the fan translation released, fans have continued to demand an official release. For years, it would be commonplace for gaming journalists to ask former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime when Mother 3 would be released. In essence, it has become a punchline that Nintendo themselves have even joked about. At E3 2014, Robot Chicken produced a sketch for Nintendo in which a journalist was burned by a fire flower for asking where Mother 3 was. Just the other day Reggie posted the following tweet:
Will Mother 3 eventually be localized officially? Never say never. In 2015, Nintendo released Mother 1 as EarthBound Beginnings on the Wii U Virtual console. It was the first time in 26 years that the game was available in an official capacity in English. However, the situation is between Mother 1 and Mother 3. Mother 1 was translated back in 1989 but was canceled last minute so that Nintendo could shift focus to the SNES. The company had been sitting on a nearly completed project. It would not take much effort to upload that work to the Virtual console. According to Starmen.net’s contacts at Nintendo, Mother 3’s localization has never begun. Nintendo would have to start from the ground up, which may be deemed a waste of time and money for a niche title by more business-minded folks.
To this day, Nintendo has never officially said why it will not localize Mother 3. Logically the timing seems to be the biggest issue. Mother 3 was released in early 2006. The Nintendo DS had already been out for almost a year and a half by that point. Perhaps if development had been shifted to the DS, we would have seen a stateside release? Some have speculated that characters called the Magypsies were a key issue. They are magical non-gendered characters that some say are gay stereotypes. That explanation has never sat right with me. Nintendo has never shied away from redesigning characters to suit regional sensibilities.
Does Mother 3 really need an official release? I would absolutely love to play Mother 3 in English on official hardware. Plus as polished as the fan translation is, there were a few minor bugs that the team was not able to overcome which are not game-breaking but are distracting. Still, I am not certain that a Nintendo-produced localization would capture the subtlety of the fan translation. Clyde Mandelin’s familiarity with the Mother series and their localizations aided him in his work on Mother 3, making sure that it was both loyal to the original Japanese script, but faithful to EarthBound’s localization.
www.weeabuds.com
Part One – The Development of Mother 3
I was 7 years old when I first was introduced to the Mother series. My father and I were browsing a Spiegel catalog and came across an ad for the EarthBound (the English version of Mother 2). Its weird box art had immediately caught our attention. We got our copy of the game in the summer of 1995 and it quickly became one of my favorite games. I learned how to read playing EarthBound and reading its packed-in player’s guide. I was at an impressionable age at the time; EarthBound would have a profound impact on my sense of humor, taste in aesthetics, and design sense.A few years after EarthBound came out, news of a sequel started coming. At the time, I was a Nintendo Power subscriber. A March 1997 article detailed the development of EarthBound 64. Originally slated to be released on the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, EarthBound 64 was ambitious. What is striking about these early articles is just how much of EarthBound 64 survived into the final released game. Lucas is shown to be the protagonist already. Many characters such as Duster, Salsa, the Pigmask army, and the band DCMC all make early appearances. Even the main setting of Tazmily Village was shown off. Sure their designs would radically change over time, but the basics are still there. It is clear from a fundamental level that the story of Mother 3 GBA and EarthBound 64 are relatively the same.
Sadly EarthBound 64 was too ambitious. After the N64 DD bombed hard in Japan, EarthBound 64 was left in a precarious position. The developers switched gears to try to save the project, working it so that the game could play on the base Nintendo 64 but it was a struggle. Nintendo would continue to show off Mother 64 at its annual SpaceWorld expo, including releasing a trailer for the game, it was continuously pushed back. Then in August 2000, the game was formally canceled. Shigesato Itoi, knowing that fans would be disappointed, posted a letter on his Hobonichi Itoi Shinbun website discussing the cancellation (translation courtesy of Starmen.net). He would also later have a roundtable discussion with himself, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Satoru Iwata. What it boils down to is that the team was too inexperienced with 3D game development, the vision was too ambitious, and after abandoning the N64 DD technological limitations were too severe.
I was furious at the news that Earthbound 64 was canceled. In my impetulant youth, I swore off Nintendo. I blamed Gamecube’s imminent release for EarthBound 64’s failure. Starmen.net, which was the online center for the fandom at the time, wrote a petition to save the project. But nothing ever came of it. Mother as a franchise lived on solely through Super Smash Bros for a time.
In 2003, a GameBoy Advance port of Mother 1+2 was announced for Japan. While that was exciting enough for series fans, there was an odd message at the end of the commercial for the game. Written in the font Mr. Saturn characters talk in-game with was “We’re making Mother 3 for the GBA ! Dakota!”. Fans were stunned. It felt unreal. Bizarrely enough, there were no further details given. No elaboration. That was the only information given for over two years. Shigesato Itoi was asked about the project from time to time but all he would say is that the game was in development, but to forget about it for now. He would later say that the reason information was much more restricted when the GameBoy Advance version was in development was because he did not want to disappoint fans.
In November 2005, Mother 3 was officially announced by Nintendo. Still, no screenshots were given. Just a red splash page. In January 2006, Shigesato Itoi announced Mother 3 would be released on April 20th, 2006. The game was now close enough to being finished that he felt confident enough it would be released. A promotional page went up on Hobonichi Itoi Shinbun where each day an additional piece of information would be revealed about the game, such as a reveal of Lucas’ new design, or the main theme song of the game. Starmen.net made an English version of the page for western fans that can still be found here. It became apparent that Mother 3 would have the story of EarthBound 64, but redesigned to have a graphics style closer to EarthBound.
At the time, I had made a deal with Tristan, my co-editor on this site, to pick up Kingdom Hearts 2 which was about to be released. I was just a poor college student at the time, so I couldn’t afford many games. But each passing day, I got more and more excited for Mother 3. Not long before release, I bailed on Kingdom Hearts 3 and pre-ordered Mother 3 from Playasia. My one regret is that I did not buy the Deluxe version, which included a special GameBoy Micro, Franklin Badge, and special pouch.
My copy of Mother 3 arrived a few weeks after the release. I decided to take it slow going through the game. I would limit myself to just one hour a day. I had waited way too long for this game to just devour it over the course of a few days. While Mother 3 is very different from Mother 1 and 2 in many regards, it was exactly what I had wanted it to be. Every once in a while, a game comes out that is everything you had hoped it would be. Mother 3 is one of those titles.
Interlude – Is Mother 3 Even Any Good?
Mother 3 is a complex game for me to evaluate because I have been following its development since I was a young child. I had certain fears bout the game when I first played it. Would it be able to live up to its hype? My fears were quickly lifted. The story is much more personal than EarthBound. The entirety of the story focuses on a family on a small island literally in the middle of Nowhere. Events play out over the span of 4 years, as the inhabitants of the island are seduced by technology and modern luxuries introduced to them by the mysterious Pig Mask Army. The leader of the Pig Masks childishly plays with the inhabitants of the island like toys, turning the local wildlife into hybrid chimeras as means of being “cooler”. This sets up the island for an unprecedented tragedy.The game is divided into 8 chapters of varying length. I would argue that the first three chapters are more of an extended introduction. Events truly begin in Chapter 4, where players take control of Lucas as he and his friends attempt to recover an artifact known as the Hummingbird Egg, and repel the Pig Masks. The story culminates in an astounding climax that is both pure fan service for long-time fans of the franchise and utterly heartbreaking. The ending stuck with me so much that I once painted the final scene in the game, which is hanging in my living room.
The soundtrack is phenomenal. While the composers of Mother 1 and 2 did not return, newcomer Shogo Sakai created one of the best soundtracks in gaming history. I would argue that Mother 1 and 2 had better battle themes, Mother 3 has the best soundtrack overall. Many of the area themes and cutscene music wonderfully capture the whimsical tenderness developers were aiming for. The only knock on the soundtrack that I can think of is that playback is limited by the GBA’s lackluster soundchip. However, hackers have managed to exact the music from the ROM file. Uncompressed, these songs all sound amazing.
Gameplay is fairly typical of the area. Battles are first-person and turn-based. Developers included a key system that is quite engaging. If players tap the A button to the rhythm of the battle theme, they can create combos to deal more damage. Initially, there is no guide, so players have to guess what the rhythm is. Eventually, players gain access to a skill that hypnotizes enemies, allowing you to hear their heartbeat, which is a drumbeat for players to follow along with.
Part Two – Waiting for an English Release
In April 2006, expectations were that Mother 3 would eventually come out in the United States. I imported Mother 3 not out of fear of the game not coming to America, but rather out of impatience. Many fans opted to wait for what was viewed as an inevitable English release. It was assumed the translation would come out in 2007. A year between Japanese and English releases was fairly typical in those days. But then E3 2006 came and went with no news of an English release was revealed. Fans soon began to give up hope.Many groups had begun fan translations as early as the game’s initial release. Many of these groups were doing it for practice, or because it was such a high-profile game. For whatever reason, these projects all fell by the wayside, probably due to the complexity of the project. After a year of no updates from Nintendo, when it became evident that Mother 3 was not going to be getting an English release, Starmen.net threw its hat into the ring. A new section of the website opened up called “Do-It-Yourself-Devotion”. On that page, Starmen.net co-founder Reid Young laid it out plainly for Nintendo. Their contacts within Nintendo’s localization department had told them that the game was not going to be released. Reid goes on to say that they’ve gone out of their way to never step on Nintendo’s toes. They’ve never profited from the site. They’ve never distributed ROMs and they’ve even gone out of their way to show fans out to buy legitimate copies. But Mother 3 was just too big for the community to ignore.
It was announced that Tomato, the online alias of Clyde Mandalin, the other co-founder of Starmen.net and a professional translator for Funimation, would take be in charge of translating the script. A few other members were also announced, such as legendary hackers Gideon Zhi and Neo Demiforce, but eventually, they would have to drop out of the project. Eventually, the project settled into a collaboration between Tomato and a programmer going by the name Jeffman, with various contributions by others.
Tomato detailed progress on the fan translation through 2007 and 2008 on his blog. The project was very strenuous both men involved, both putting in over 1000 hours of work in order to make it happen. In order for the translation to be possible, changes had to be made at the assembly level since there was not enough memory available to fit the English text. Without documentation from the original developers, this is a grueling task but still they pressed through every challenge.
The entire time development of the fan translation was underway, the team worked under the assumption that Nintendo would shut it down at any moment. The fan translation was a very high-profile project in gaming circles but it exists within a legal gray zone. Emulation and sharing ROMs (copy versions of the game’s data) are viewed as piracy, however, translation patches are not. Nintendo never issued a cease-and-desist to Starmen.net. In fact, employees within the company would give words of encouragement in private.
The fan translation of Mother 3 was released in October 2008. It received much acclaim from fans who had been eagerly awaiting the patch. Clyde, who was a role model of mine in college, had been respectful to the text of the game. His deep love of EarthBound meant that he was able to capture subtle nuances and connections that perhaps a less familiar translator would have missed. Perhaps the only large change that was made was the re-naming of a character named Yokuba to Fassad. Otherwise, the text is a work of love.
In the years since the fan translation released, fans have continued to demand an official release. For years, it would be commonplace for gaming journalists to ask former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime when Mother 3 would be released. In essence, it has become a punchline that Nintendo themselves have even joked about. At E3 2014, Robot Chicken produced a sketch for Nintendo in which a journalist was burned by a fire flower for asking where Mother 3 was. Just the other day Reggie posted the following tweet:
Will Mother 3 eventually be localized officially? Never say never. In 2015, Nintendo released Mother 1 as EarthBound Beginnings on the Wii U Virtual console. It was the first time in 26 years that the game was available in an official capacity in English. However, the situation is between Mother 1 and Mother 3. Mother 1 was translated back in 1989 but was canceled last minute so that Nintendo could shift focus to the SNES. The company had been sitting on a nearly completed project. It would not take much effort to upload that work to the Virtual console. According to Starmen.net’s contacts at Nintendo, Mother 3’s localization has never begun. Nintendo would have to start from the ground up, which may be deemed a waste of time and money for a niche title by more business-minded folks.
To this day, Nintendo has never officially said why it will not localize Mother 3. Logically the timing seems to be the biggest issue. Mother 3 was released in early 2006. The Nintendo DS had already been out for almost a year and a half by that point. Perhaps if development had been shifted to the DS, we would have seen a stateside release? Some have speculated that characters called the Magypsies were a key issue. They are magical non-gendered characters that some say are gay stereotypes. That explanation has never sat right with me. Nintendo has never shied away from redesigning characters to suit regional sensibilities.
Does Mother 3 really need an official release? I would absolutely love to play Mother 3 in English on official hardware. Plus as polished as the fan translation is, there were a few minor bugs that the team was not able to overcome which are not game-breaking but are distracting. Still, I am not certain that a Nintendo-produced localization would capture the subtlety of the fan translation. Clyde Mandelin’s familiarity with the Mother series and their localizations aided him in his work on Mother 3, making sure that it was both loyal to the original Japanese script, but faithful to EarthBound’s localization.
Mother 3 is Fifteen Years Old and Still Has No Official Localization - Weeabuds
Tomorrow is the fifteenth anniversary of a game that is very important to me. Mother 3...
www.weeabuds.com
