The History of the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation

Mother 3 is a Japan only game if you were to only know one thing about this game before having clicked on this video it was probably that fact but instead of creating yet another video for the internet shouting into the abyss on how much people want an official Mother 3 English release I think it'd be far more interesting to delve into the history of the Mother 3 Fan translation the fan translation was a project to make Mother 3 accessible for English speakers by translating the original Japanese text of the game all into English but how did it all come to be and what is the legacy of this project now all this and More in today's video I think a little background is needed before I delve into the meat of this video so let me explain what a fan translation means fan translating is when a piece of media say a cartoon song video game Etc that is unavailable in one language is taken by a fan and translated into a different language without the endorsement of monetary backing of the original Ip holder most of the time fan translations are made made when an official translation isn't available but can also often times be made when an official translation is deemed to be too different from the original text intent it is essentially the duty of the translator to keep the original intent of the author's writing typically the most common form of fan translating is taking Japanese media and translating it into English but seeing as the Internet isn't made up of 100% English speakers other language translations are also very common such as translating stuff into Spanish French Korean and more with TV shows or Comics fan translating can be relatively simple as all you usually need is the skill to edit images or add subtitles but when it comes to video games there of course is an added layer of having to hack a game to make the text in a different language be displayed with no issues while many video games can still largely be enjoyed without knowing Japanese it's always nice to have context as to what's being said in the game and in particular with role playing games being able to understand character dialogue and menus is pretty much Essential meaning fan translation of that genre are all the more lorded now that you know what fan translating is I don't think I have to give any introduction as to what Mother 3 is but I'll do it anyway Mother 3 is the third game in the Mother series officially known as the Earthbound Series in the west the game went through quite possibly some of the worst development hell seen by any video game and had to go through several redesigns due to changing Hardware the project was being developed for culminating in an April 2006 release in Japan Jaan Earthbound known as mother 2 in Japan had seen a North American release and seeing as during the game's N64 days Mother 3 was planned to have an official localization under the name Earthbound 64 or Earthbound 3 people reasonably assume that this would mean the GBA version that had finally actually released would also seen English translation and no it obviously did not and this is where I can now get into the Mother 3 Fan translation the story of trial and error of Hope and P patience and it's one I think deserves a chronicling like this because it's pretty damn interesting anyways so Mother 3 releases in Japan and the form for the Earthbound fan site starman.net has a huge interest in discussing the game of course but the question inevitably arises will there be an American release or even a European one will Nintendo translate this game into English fans waited for some time hoping against hope to see this text Heavy RPG May get the chance to be localized despite the Game Boy Advance now being on its way out as the months went on with no announcement in sight and by November 8th 2006 something would happen Reedman one of the original starman.net alumni made a blog post that would change everything for english- speaking mother fans a lot was said in this post detailing the past 10 plus years of trying to get Nintendo America to acknowledge the Earthbound series or for it to be in vain and the final nail in the coffin towards hope of seeing that coveted official Mother 3 translation and so an announcement was made Clyde tomato mandolin a professional translator and hardcore mother fan would be translating the game with a team who would join to rom hack the game and polish it to make it the best fan translation they could all make overwhelming positivity from fellow English mother fans followed this news Mother 3 may not have been getting official acknowledgement from Nintendo of America but this was the next best thing fears aose however that Nintendo of America might want to take down this fan translation but there was a long road still ahead no one at this point even knew quite how long it take to translate this game shortly after the initial reveal announcement a few people who had previously begun working on translating Mother 3 separately joined the team to help out with the project not long after that a new site was formed to host updates about the translation there was a lot of work moving forward and this is where Earthbound fans could see how progress was going now just to clarify I'm not going to recount every single blog post word for word I just want to give a timeline of how progress was made and any other interesting events and tidbits that occurred during bit by bit the game was worked on and a lot of interesting stuff happened what work was done early on was pretty quiet at first understandably the couple of blog posts made showed some early looks at how the game was now looking as well as some technical info by July 29th 2007 a user a part of the project named Jeff man had managed to dump all of the text from The Game's files to which it was discovered all of the game's text was not ordered conveniently like by chapter or chronologically it was ordered by all of the maps in the game something that would make work more difficult but certainly not a deterrent a lot of tough hacking work was still yet to come it wasn't until a blog post on August 10th 2007 that things would really get interesting it was revealed that Mother series content would indeed be in Super Smash Bros braw the upcoming entry in the Smash Bros Series this was a spanner in the the works with this knowledge a lingering fear that Super Smash Bros braw would release and spoil mother 3's plot for so many people was not just a possibility but more likely a probability and what do you know they were right but anyways this was something that the fan translation team wanted to avoid of course and with that scheduled release date of December 3rd for smash looming in the Horizon the team ordered the fan translation to be done some time before then preferably with a few weeks to play Mother 3 before brawl hit store shelves there for sometime during November 2007 they wanted this but couldn't make it a promise man can you imagine the side of relief these guys must have had when it was announced brawl would be delayed to the first quarter of 2008 hindsight is of course 2020 and yeah the team didn't meet this November 2007 goal and couldn't even get the patch done by early 2008 either but that's okay this was no rush job the team continued to chip away at the project and by the 18th of August 2007 the first draft script was reportedly 9 92 to 93% complete 3 days later it was shown that the English was now working in the game a huge milestone and plenty of screenshots of this were shared in the comments section to this update M also disclosed that the welcome to Mother 3 world text at the beginning of the game would be changed to welcome to the world of Mother 3 as well as confirming some name changes would be done too on August 23rd ma revealed a tidbit that this project had only really begun work in July 2007 that's pretty interesting as the days and weeks progressed more and more was shown off many technical glitches would slow progress down such as getting the game to not freeze at scrolling text in September M let it be known that Mother 3 had dropped down to only $14.90 on play Asia and encouraged everyone to legally purchase a copy of the game as it might even quell any moral issues someone would potentially have about playing the fan translation halfway through the month he mentioned that in about only 6 weeks time 5,000 people had signed up up for email notifications for the blog the people were getting real excited by the end of the month with Super Smash Bros brawls expected release date looking closer the team decided to release what they dubbed a mini patch that only translated the game's menus as it was clear the full translation wouldn't be ready by November October 1st comes and Lucas was finally announced for Smash Brawl on the 8th M revealed that the menu translation patch had been downloaded over a thousand times already people really wanted to experience this game on the 10th a post was made advertising that a red ultimate Chimera t-shirt would be given away in a contest that starman.net would be holding M also pointed out that the text on the shirt which was an official product available from the king of games was translated into English making it the only text from Mother 3 officially translated and licensed by Nintendo by October 28th the chapter titles were now fully translated and displayed correctly in game November 8th came along with a big new blog post the 1year anniversary since the announcement of the fan translation M reiterated while progress was going good there were still a ways to go showing off some of the glitch screenshots of unfixed bugs and also made a well-deserved jab at mother 3's code really being particularly difficult to work with I didn't really mention this earlier but a huge roadblock was that with the Japanese text in the original game it was 16bit and just simply replacing it with English text didn't look right everything looked all spaced out among other issues the hackers on the team had to get the game to display the text in an 8bit format just to fix this these folks were dedicated man and have the notes to show their hard work back on track by the 12th name tags were now beginning to be displayed in English albe it's still in an incomplete State on December 7th M posted a huge list of hacking stuff that still needed fixing he pointed out that working on a fix sometimes could lead to other parts of the game breaking and really helped paint the picture of the struggles the team were going through just to get this patch working they continued to press on no matter what on the 27th that list of tons of hacking stuff needed to be done was updated with a good amount on that list either having been completed or in progress the New Year came and on the 4th of January 2008 M stated it would be really nice if the patch could be done by the end of the year hold on to that hope team on the 19th an updated hacking to-do list was posted with a bunch still left for all aspects of the game a couple of particularly interesting notes listed was to add an intro screen/ disclaimer at the beginning of the game and some extra things like getting a silver star if you meet every enemy in the game for your battle memory on February 5th it was posted that the team had finally managed to get menu text centered and damn did it look clean the next day mat posted that the name tags were still being worked on specifically to fit longer names as well as sharing this awesome photo of a dog and a cat for some reason February 11th another post showing once again how scary this game could look when the text decides to break as well as showing how the battle system was now looking pretty good their hard work was paying off little by little February 23rd more reason to get annoyed at brownie Brown for mother 3's code March 14th and more text testing was being done such as with your favorite food and favorite thing also they finally finished fixing the name tags awesome on the 19th M posted how they had managed to fix battle text to not sound so convoluted as the Japanese version of the game would always assume the enemy name was at the beginning of an encounter sentence with some new code they had the freedom to rewrite these messages to sound better in English the next day some grammar stuff was shown off working in battle too that stuff's important another big thing that happened in March was the North American release of Super Smash Bros brawl and with this came for the first time many official localizations of names of characters from Mother 3 in other words Kumar's name was the same as it was in Japanese as was H was in an effort to stay consistent with these official names presented in the official English Nintendo product the decision was made by the fan translation team to keep her name as hwa as it was considered by them otherwise to rename her to Amber as that would sound more natural in English on April the 6th Jeff man made a blog post going over technical details behind the player name and how it was done in the original game in the patch April 20 came and it was Mother 3's birthday so much progress had been made by the fan translation still there was work to be done such as the second and third script draft as well as a finalized one and estimated two more months of major hacking left and of course testing the hack for anything else before release by May 1st fuse were starting to rise amongst the team that they were beginning to run out of free space in the ROM with some clever file relocating though any drastic issues were avoided on May 5th it was posted at a hardcoded element the way in which the game displayed text relating to selling items had been Rewritten so the text would sound more natural in English with this m claimed that not too much major hacking was left and that that light at the end of the tunnel was pretty bright now the end was in sight on May 10th another major hacking hle was overcome all nons Sprite menu text including item names could now be over 18 letters long from before only being able to be about 8 or 9 letters long May 13th was another major hurdle overcome the you can't carry any more stuff text was now properly working on May 15th Jeff man posted that the health and safety warning screen had been fully trans and implemented into the game as well as a brand new disclaimer about the fan translation which I'll discuss in further detail later on May 16th M posted the main script hacking was currently being worked on and showed an amusing anecdote entitled flint and the Mystery of the missing letters in June the writing of the second draft was fully underway on the first of the month it was 3641 done 5 days later on the 6th it was 4261 and by the eth was at 52.2 9% Lucas also made a reference to the wizard on June 13th M's blog post contained links to a few form posts one of which was where he disclosed several creative decisions how some elements would be translated for example at this point they had yet to decide whether to keep Po's name is poy like in the Japanese version or to rename him Pokey like in EarthBound but we're leaning towards the former option on July 9th M announced that thanks to clever organization and planning that after the release of the English mother 3 Fan translation the tools used to create it could be reused by anyone to translate Mother 3 into almost any other language on the 12th the second draft was up to 91.3% completion and mat said even he who had played the game to death was getting excited finally by July 22nd the second draft was 100% complete with the overall percentage of the project up to about 85 to 90% on the 26th M now had put out that new names for many of the game's chimeras and other enemies were needed and that the community could help by coming up with witty names that would sound good in English as some of the direct translations were pretty boring a few of my personal favorites that made into the fan translation would be the reconstructed Caribou the squawking Boomstick and the yam monster as the endrew near the updates slowed down but a month later on August 22nd Nat revealed that all of the English text was now fully polished and implemented the last thing to do having been the enemy names and descriptions the next month or so of work was fixing bugs mainly related to how text was displaying and then finally by the 26th of September it was announced that all the hacking was complete the Monumental task of translating all of Mother 3 into English was done and was almost ready to be released the proper testing came next and in October 1st blog post showed a few minor bugs that were being fixed much better and then on October 14th came the big news testing was complete and the fan translation patch would be releasing that week M gave some technical info about how the patch could be played particularly about flash cards people could use to play the patch should they be interested in playing on real Hardware I can only imagine the Elation in the air at this point it was finally happening and then the day before the fan translation was intended to release M received an email in it an unnamed person essentially begged him and the rest of the fan translation team to not release the patch they cited that releasing this would result in an official translation would be discouraged by Nintendo of America if this would to be available unofficially for free and I don't want to go on a mini tangent or anything here but I will say I am so damn glad the team just ignored this because this email they received really really just sounds like some effortless troll trying to stir discourse in the mother Community it's honestly pretty pathetic especially in hindsight carrying on October 17th came and there it was the mother 3 Fan translation was finally released for everyone this was it all the blood sweat into te put in by the whole team led up to this and it was glorious October 24th came an epilog blog post where m talked about how the first week of the fan translations release had gone down in only 2 days after the Patch had been released it had been reportedly been downloaded over 70,000 times and this was only from their link on mother 3. fobby Donnet that number was likely even larger when you consider this patch was reposted to many many other sites and downloaded elsewhere too a few rare bugs showed up from people having played but nothing mind shattering October 29th was when a bunch of notes were posted particularly on the decision to not rename the game to Earthbound 2 for the patch and the etimology behind the main family a few years later on April 20th 2013 the 7th anniversary of the original games release an offer was presented to Nintendo they could use the fan translation for no royalties to publish Mother 3 into English officially for Western audiences and while nothing ever came of this this offer really showed that despite all the turmoil these fans felt about this little game not seeing an English release officially they would always be there to pick up the slack that Nintendo of America would leave and that is that that's the history of the Mother 3 Fan translation now that we've gone over the history of what led up to the translation patch I think I should review the patch I feel like that sounds kind of weird but just as the original game is a piece of art the fan translation itself is Art too and I think it's worth giving it at least some analysis for its creative decisions for this video sake to start I want to talk about the disclaimer screen that I brought up before during the History Section it's so interesting for one thing I think it's hilarious how the team implemented it in a way should someone try and hack it out of the game it just breaks everything that's awesome but what's always intrigued me is this line please support this series by buying official merchandise well I've got that covered it is strange to think that despite this immensely good faith recommendation of supporting the series financially some people didn't see this as good enough of an excuse against piracy but regardless I think the way the fan translation is written is great but before I get into the game's writing I want to go over my thoughts on the technical side of the patch it is absolutely phenomenal what they were able to accomplish in this game with such bad spaghetti code and the bonus stuff they added really is a cherry on top if nothing else I seriously applaud the devs for adding back the unused memo screen to the game accessible by holding the lnr buttons while accessing the status menu also changing the Japanese voice line to be in English is pretty funny too go it's also worth mentioning that the plethora of glitches the original game had that the fan translation team fixed is amazing seriously though how did Nintendo not notice before the game came out that dust's attack instrument was bugged and wouldn't change randomly each turn like it was intended to with every character the fan translation team was able to fix this and more and it was seriously cool of them as I said before the English translation is extremely high quality to the point where it does does feel official as in when I play the patch it really doesn't feel like I'm playing a fan product it does just feel as if I'm playing what Mother 3 would be like if it was officially available in English and that is great that is in short the best thing I can say about this fan project and I absolutely applaud everyone involved in making the fan translation happen for being able to make something of such high caliber every little element from putting in an entire optional hard mode which provides replayability to adding into the game the same font that Earthbound uses contributes to this that all being said I do want to bring up some of its weaker elements for the sake of analysis one extremely important thing for the team was to try and preserve the original meaning of the original text shasat Toy's writing is that of Legends as the way the mother games are written cannot be replicated by pretty much anyone and I do think they did an amazing job of doing so but M has gone on record in the time since the release of the patch and said that he wasn't entirely satisfied with how he transl ated certain things two of the particular ones he regretted was the way he's letter to Flint was worded it just didn't sound natural enough compared to the original text as well as this he was also dissatisfied with kum's dialogue he said that in the Japanese version kumur is far more informal and crude with her dialect he said just using apostrophes for some of the words she says really wasn't enough to convey this since this is indeed criticism from the man himself who translated this game's text I can't help but agree with him that yeah in sight those two things could have been translated better but it is always worth remembering that translating and localizing is almost always going to vary from person to person and can never truly be perfect in a traditional sense there are some creative decisions on how certain things were translated that actually feel pretty agreeable on for example making yuba's name into facade worked out for so many reasons particularly that it is a clever pun and is what I went over in my magypsy analysis video I think getting a gay man to help bring flare for the magypsies dialogue was the right decision ultimately still though the text in the fan translation I think gets across the original intent of Mystery Toy in a way that feels natural and official and I guess that's all you can really ask for I think a sort of sad thing you need to accept often times when it comes to translating Japanese media into other languages is that not every single pun or reference can be just translated directly into English with the same effect as the original text intends the fan translation's effort to take lines that would otherwise not make sense to an English speaker and replace them with an equivalent that gives off similar energy such as renaming Janik tea to init tea is very much a statement towards the quality of this patch not just being an excellent translation but an excellent localization too localizing and translating aren't exactly the same thing but this patch put in the effort to do both of those things from other three now that I've going over my personal thoughts on the patch what did everyone else think well there was this one dude who wasn't n happy how the patch contains swearing yeah I'm serious but besides that it was an overwhelming positive reaction the people could finally play Mother 3 in English and that's all they had wanted it's now been over 15 years since the release of the fan translation in that time it's received three update patches full of improvements it's been shown off in countless video game magazines among other accolades but in the time since its release the question does Flo around in my mind is it time for a re translation do we need to see M take a crack at trying to get the English script closer to the original Japanese intent and rectify his grievances in the time since the release of the fan translation M has of course improved as a translator as would anyone with a skill in a creative field even in the time between him joining the mother fan base and the release of the fan translation you can tell he improved significantly he went from accidentally mistranslating parts of an Earthbound 64 demo report in 1999 to being able to largely preserve the original meaning of Mystery toys text in the actual finished game itself less than 10 years later to answer my question though I think a retranslation would be neat but it's not something that I'm in a rush to see it is a lot of work translating a whole game and I think people with the skills of being able to properly translate Japanese are better off putting that time and effort into Mother series material that has yet to be translated at all that being said I don't really think M specifically needs to be the one who has to retranslate it the man already translated the game once he's already done more in service to this game than anyone could ever be obligated to plus the man's busy doing stuff like working on officially localizing other Nintendo games so he has no real reason to drop that in favor of more fan projects Mother 3 is a beautiful game a sentiment I've repeated in many of my videos but I don't think I've done enough to truly express my gratitude towards the people who enabled me as well as hundreds of thousands of others to get the opportunity to play and experience this game and I hope this video can help serve as an expression of that gratefulness towards the Mother 3 Fan translation at the very least I hope you learned something you found neat if you found what I spoke about to be interesting at all I highly highly suggest you check the sources and links in the description for more info about the Mother 3 Fan translation there's a lot I couldn't cover in this one video that deserves to be read up on in your own time if you enjoyed watching Please Subscribe and until the next time bonvoyage amigo

Channel: DaEgg123

Views: 4,809

Keywords: Mother 3, Mother 2, Mother series, Earthbound, Mother 1, Earthbound 2, Earthbound 64, Earthbound beginnings, Nintendo, Reggie, Localized, Localization, America, Treehouse, English, Translation, Translated, hacking, Retrospective, Official, Fangamer, Lucas, Kumatora, Duster, Boney, Claus, Animation, Subtitled, Gba, Game boy advance, Nintendo online, Switch, Nintendo switch

Id: FCqBCPZn73E

Length: 25min 23sec (1523 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024