"Release me... Release him! Release the krak- I mean, Mother 3! Damn it! Release me... And release. Let me go...." Mother 3 is the white whale of unreleased
video games. While plenty of titles have never made it
overseas, the demand for this game has uniquely broken into pop culture, almost reaching Half-Life
3 levels of devotion. Time has done little to quell the fans because
at the heart of Mother 3 is something special and timeless ASTERISK. The Mother series has been the victim of unfortunate
timing since the beginning. When writer Shigesato Itoi pitched his idea
for a narrative heavy RPG Miyamoto firmly rejected him, only for the decision to be
reversed shortly after. The resulting game was well received in japan,
but the localization took too long to complete and was withheld to make way for the launch
of the SNES. Mother 2 became a hit on that system and Nintendo
followed through with a US release, but marketed the game with a very 90ās fart-centric-gross-out-nickelodeon-slime-barf-scented-sticker
campaign that didnāt communicate the quality of the story or gameplay. Players had also experienced most of generationās
RPGs by that point and found the comparatively humble cartoon visuals crude and unimpressive. The game flopped hard in America and only
gained a footing with a cult audience. Mother 3ās development was a disappointment
for fans in all regions, spanning three systems and two failed disk add ons. It was initially intended for the aborted
SNES-CD drive before migrating to the soon-to-be aborted N64DD, with the features of that device
factoring heavily into the game's design. When the DD flopped, Earthbound 64 had to
be scaled back not only to fit on a normal cartridge but also to reign in the unattainable
scale it had reached. The staff was overwhelmed taking on even the
reduced workload of the cartridge version, and with priorities shifting to the GameCube,
it became unreasonable to devote resources to an N64 game that almost certainly wouldn't
launch until after the new hardware. Nintendo was just as disappointed by the cancellation
as its fans and never really let the Mother 3 go. After flirting with the idea for a while,
Miyamoto and Itoi finally made one last push to finish it on the Game Boy Advance with
developer Brownie Brown. This 2D version seems at least somewhat faithful
to what Earthbound 64 apparently would have been, with certain scenes and level layouts
bearing unmistakable similarities. The obvious difference is that it retains
the pixel style of the previous games, lending it far more color than the drab N64 visuals. The characters are animated with such personality
and the comedic timing is so natural that one might assume the game was always meant
to look like this. Itās still not a system-defining graphics
showcase, but there is a kind of beauty in its clean simplicity. Some music also seems to have been salvaged
from Earthbound 64- and as is often the case it does some of the heaviest lifting to make
the story land. Because this is an unreleased game I want
to spoil as little as possible, but Mother 3 has an incredibly dynamic mood that goes
places you couldn't possibly predict when happily strolling through the first area. The soundtrack is always dead locked on the
exact right feeling for each scene and effortlessly shifts between extremes in an instant to keep
up with the plot. Hip Tanaka and Keiichi Suzuki had composed
for the first two games as a team but in their absence Shogo Sakai was chosen to handle the
music alone. His score seamlessly continues the weird tone
of the earlier games but doesnāt just imitate them; it has its own kind of emotional depth
and is so full of references to Western music that it feels like the game is vomiting a
jumble of Americana onto the player... in the good way. They're all cleverly chosen and subtle enough
that you may just barely notice them, like the Batman theme being adapted for the bat
enemy. āMustā¦ resistā¦ urge toā¦ boogie!ā Unfortunately, that amazing music was wrung
through one of the worst systems for audio in gaming history. The Game Boy Advance had no dedicated sound
processor and music to compete for time on the CPU, leaving the sound harsh and full
of background hiss. Mother 3 fares surprisingly well through headphones
but fans have uncovered what could have been by reconstructing the tracks at full quality. The samples on Game Boy Advance cartridges
are actually pretty decent, and when ripping them and the MIDI data you get this: It's just a shame that this can't be heard
in-game. MGBA does have an experimental feature to
improve the audio quality, but it's far too broken to use yet. For the time being, you still have to experience
the story in lo-fi mode. The world layout is different than most top-down
RPGs; games like Earthbound and A Link to the Past had large, squarish maps that were
filled in as a single continuous area. Mother 3's map looks much more like an N64
game, with narrow pieces stuck together end to end. Itās hardly proof, but it could be another
sign that Earthbound 64's map was mostly retained after the switch to 2D. Exploring is a little more linear and the
game has a variety of ways of keeping you on track- a line of ants may block you, or
a map fanatic may give you an objective marker, or some other weird thing will point you in
the right direction. It mostly flows well but there was at least
one moment where it seemed like there was no direction at all, so I ended up climbing
a mountain and losing most of my inventory to tough enemies before finding out that you're
actually supposed to visit a train station in town. Itās possible I missed an NPC conversation
somewhere and Iām sure the comments will SPANK MY LITTLE ASS for being such a noob,
but the game basically got derailed for 20 minutes because I hadn't walked far enough
onto this platform to trigger the cutscene, which seems like a rare blip in an otherwise
tightly designed game. The segmented world makes sense with the broken-up
style of the story- rather than going on an adventure through a variety of different towns,
Itoi wanted to invest more in a single set of characters and instead focused mainly on
one village. The concept is similar to Majora's Mask, where
a greater density of gameplay is packed into a smaller area. While this could have run the risk of making
the game repetitive, different events happen in each chapter that give the village a different
feel. The chapters also swap characters around Pulp
Fiction-style, which gives a different context to your time in each setting. The decision pays off, as seeing even the
smallest NPCs follow your journey to the end gives a sense that something truly big is
happening. Most of them are still relatively disposable
but no opportunity for a joke has been overlooked; almost every interaction you have with anything
in the game is funny, even the control tutorials. The continuing tradition of text entry can
also lead to a lot of horrible, evil fun, but I may have gone too far in a few places. (WAP montague) The song was relevant when
I started the video, and it got less funny as it went along- oh- oh god, no. I praised Lisa The Painful RPG for being able
to juggle disparate tones but Mother 3 has it soundly beaten, because Lisa never had
genuinely happy moments. Mother 3 begins in an innocent place with
such a positive vibe- but wastes no time traveling elsewhere, even into borderline horror territory-
and it's remarkable how one of the silliest games I've played is also one of the most
emotionally real. It was advertised with actress Kou Shibasaki
breaking down in tears while recounting her experience playing, and it wasn't a ridiculous
exaggeration; the story has that kind of power. And this is a game that has literal fartboxes
in it. I always think of story as something secondary
to gameplay, something I'm not really there for and that has to work to earn my interest. On those terms, Mother 3 is the most successful
thing I've ever played- it's fascinating and moving right from the start and keeps getting
better. It helps that it's also a great playing game-
it improves on Earthbound by making actions more direct and losing the menu for checking
and interacting. Instead of visiting a hospital, you can revive
your team more conveniently by using the plentiful hot springs. Saving is done quickly using frogs rather
than calling your dad; the latter was a reference to Itoi's own overworked father, but the repeating
walls of text could be a bit much and it wouldn't have made sense to "call dad" with so many
changing characters anyway. Storing items also no longer requires calling
a courier and waiting- just find the item guy and exchange with him directly. There are still a few things that could be
more fluid, like the requirement that characters possess the items you want to equip. It becomes a hassle to shuffle items back
and forth, especially late in the game when you're too stocked up to make room. There are also certain repeating animations
that eat up a lot of time, which made me grateful I was playing on an emulator with a fast forward
feature. Outside of those nitpicks, they've generally
fixed everything that made the previous games feel sluggish compared to other RPGs. The power to instantly beat weak enemies returns
with more control; you can still fight enemies by engaging them normally or trample right
over them by using the new run ability, which doubles as an improved replacement for the
bike. Other ideas from Earthbound return and play
every bit as big a role; the rolling health meter gives you a short window to frantically
heal before reaching zero, which could be seen as softening the difficulty but I would
argue that it allowed the enemies to become even harder. Fighting after your teammates have already
died becomes a regular occurance in later bosses, to the point where I can't imagine
the game working without it. It adds more intensity and blurs the line
between turns. Traditional RPG stiffness is broken up even
more by the music battle system, which lets you land successive hits if āAā is pressed
exactly in time with an enemy's heartbeat. It's hard to understand at first, as each
enemy has a different pulse that can only be heard under hypnosis and certain enemies
seem totally immune. It's possible to completely ignore it and
get by, but the action feel it adds to battles makes it well worth spending some time in
practice mode until you get a grasp on it- even a small combo feels great to pull off. It's also worthwhile to practice since the
game retains the high difficulty the series is known for and can be brutally tough. Grinding isn't quite as effective as usual
because your party changes so often, and even basic enemies can wipe your team out in a
few turns with no chance to refill before a boss. In fact, there are a few enemy gauntlets where
a tough boss will deplete your party and you'll be turned right back around to push through
the same series of enemies again with no chance to save. Moments like that feel a little underhanded
and cheap, but the difficulty is mostly very manageable. There's rarely one silver bullet strategy
that makes a fight easy, but shuffling items around or starting with different PSI buffs
can make a huge difference. I die a lot in this game, but rarely in the
same place twice because the battles are that responsive to experimentation. The gameplay stays just as fresh as the story,
lasting me 27 hours without growing dull. It's a great RPG, a great story, and a great
thing in general, and it was very positively received in Japan just like the other entries
before it. And then... nothing happened. There are a lot of theories about why the
game was never localized. Miyamoto referenced the failure of Earthbound
as the reason Mother 1 and 2 didn't come to the Game Boy Advance, but in the same breath
marveled that 30,000 American fans had signed a petition for Mother 3 to be made. By the early 2000s Nintendo seemed well aware
that Earthbound had finally found its US audience and eventually gave the game a high profile
rerelease on the Wii U. It doesnāt seem as if they had much doubt
that the games could sell anymore. They explicitly mentioned Mother 3 in their
e3 event - (ācome on reggie, give us mother 3!ā āAww, how about this instead?ā)
- which one assumes is the kind of ribbing they would only give their fans if they planned
to actually release the game. They went on to release Mother 1's localization
for the first time ever under the name "Earthbound Beginnings" in 2015. It seemed as if Mother 3 must have been right
around the corner, and according to Game Informerās senior editor it was before Nintendo remembered
what was in the game and lost their nerve. Fans tend to agree that the "magypsies," described
as āneither man nor woman,ā are the biggest stumbling block for a localization. Characters struggle to identify their gender-
at least, in the fan translation- and they behave in a flamboyant way that some consider
to be a reductive stereotype. At the same time, theyāre very positive
characters that are selfless heroes in the story, and Itoi has said that his hope was
to inspire kind feelings towards similar characters in real life. Thereās enough room for interpretation that
Iāve seen them described as both transphobic and trans positive. Either way, the game would certainly generate
discussions in todayās climate and they arenāt discussions Nintendo likely wants
to have. The game is also filled with references to
alcohol and drugs that would be pretty hard to remove; one entire sequence of the game
is literally a mushroom trip. An official localization would also likely
have to alter a lot of the edgier jokes... Itās possible to change all of these things,
but then it wouldnāt really be Mother 3 and the core audience Nintendo needs to sell
it to may reject it. If Nintendo released the fan translation untouched,
they might have an even bigger audience upset with them for different reasons. Thereās no easy way out, and I donāt want
to vilify them for not releasing it. But I do want to offer this fan movement as
proof that the people using emulators want to buy their games. If we were all cheap pirates who just wanted
things for free, weād be set already. Itās not hard to play Mother 3; within 30
seconds, you could find the ROM and an emulator and have booted into the title screen. Playing Mother 3 is no problem at all. What fans want is for it to be legitimate-
for the game to get its rightful place in Nintendoās library and for us to be able
to give them our money. Instead, there are inklings that maybe theyāre
happy enough letting the unofficial channels handle this. The fan translation was done by a professional
in his spare time and is, by all accounts, very good. The fact that all of the humor made it through
razor sharp is proof enough of that for me. The staff received a letter that was supposedly
from someone within the industry, possibly Nintendo itself, asking them not to release
their work because it was too good and would render an official localization obsolete. The sender was never identified, but it is
known that Nintendoās higher-ups were fully aware of the fan patch. Theyāve never spoken against it or tried
to block it in any way. Maybe this is their way out; the fans can
play it and they donāt have to take any responsibility for the content. But if that is the case, and they are happy
enough to let the ROM sites handle this one, then theyāve got to stop shutting them down. Itās a story as old as time. I donāt know what Nintendo has to do to
make a localization work, but what I do know is that this is a game that deserves to be
released. After everything that Mother 3 and its staff
went through, itās a miracle that the finished product exists at all, let alone that it lives
up to all the expectations fans had along the way. For the game that prevailed over so much to
die in a localization department would be a pretty sad ending to the story, so Iām
going to say something a little controversial- Iām not going to win any awards for saying this,
but I think Nintendo should probably- maybe- release the game sometime at some poin-
Nerrel rules and continues to have impeccable taste (i.e. tastes that are, uh, similar to mine).
Havenāt watched the video yet, but I already appreciate the effort to put Claus in with the rest of the party in the thumbnail. Thatās quality effort to minimize the spoiling of the game.