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Mother 3 is the Japanese-exclusive sequel to Earthbound the SNES classic from back in 1995.
Like Earthbound, which looks very friendly and childlike on the surface, once you start to dig
deeper than the initial aesthetics of the game, you'll see that the game is actually much, much
darker than it seems. And compared to Earthbound, for Mother 3 it's arguably even more so.
Now whilst initially Earthbound was met with only mild acclaim,
this is something that changed as time went by and it turned into a big cult classic.
Over in Japan on the other hand, the Mother series has always been very popular and
this includes initially and both with the sales and fan and media acclaim.
However, with Earthbound becoming such a huge cult classic over in the west,
this has always posed the question of why there's been no official release of Mother
3 at any point ever since its release in 2006 for the Game Boy Advance - which was more than
10 years after the north American release of Earthbound, and by this point Earthbound was
already brimming with popularity over in the west. So much so in fact that, when it became apparent
that Mother 3 would not be getting localized into English, a group of fan translators
released a patch for the game in 2008 that fully localized the game into English.
This fan translation took two years and thousands of work hours to complete. And the team over at
Starmen.net reported that the highest levels of Nintendo of America knew about the project, though
they for some reason chose not to intervene. Now April 20th of this year actually marked the
game's 15th anniversary and with this came a big update for the unofficial
English patch of the game - with this now making it the 1.3 version of the patch.
However Mother 3's 15th anniversary has also saw some other things go
on - including Reggie trolling everybody over on twitter, with him replying to a tweet that
Twitch made saying "What's the oldest game in your library that remains unplayed."
With him then posting this image and saying "Mother 3 English version. Every time i think
it's time to play it I get trolled and decide to put it off. Maybe I will fire it up this weekend."
With his tweets then going on to receive over 80,000 likes and lots of trolled
Mother fans in the comments. However, even more curiously
is the actor Terry Crews deciding to step in on the matter. With him on April 30th
simply tweeting out "Localize Mother 3." And so then, this poses the question
of why Mother 3 has never received an official English localization. And of course,
this is something that's been discussed many times over the years by Mother fans,
with there being the numerous theories for why the game has not received a western release.
This is also something that made headlines a few years ago in 2019,
when an editor for Game Informer made a comment talking about the western localization,
saying "It was full steam ahead for a while, but upon re-evaluation there were aspects of the game
that weren't going to go without controversy." Now where exactly the Game Informer editor
apparently got his information is not known. However the game and its controversial themes
has been a common theory amongst fans for why the game has not seen a English release.
As mentioned earlier, despite its child-friendly aesthetic many themes within the game are actually
very dark and adult - with, for example, there being many themes within the game
surrounding topics such as death and cruelty. Although some of these themes that the game
has can be threaded throughout the game in quite a complex and adult way. And also to
properly go into some of them will also be getting into the spoiler territory.
However, the game has a lot of other adult themes as well.
For example, during one section of the game the party will eat some mushrooms to heal themselves,
with the sign besides the mushrooms advertising them as "Energizing mushrooms."
However these mushrooms are in fact drugs and result in a big hallucination sequence.
This causes the characters to comment on the strange sensations
and the screen to flash lots of different colors. The music also changes to something
that is more fitting for the mood and then the gang of characters get knocked out.
They then wake up and go on a big hallucinatory sequence
Aside from the drug use, another elements that may have posed controversial
in the west are the magypsies. The magypsies are very big
central characters in the game who you will meet up with countless times during your journey.
Despite resembling humans, they are a group of magical beings who are thousands of years old
and are the protectors of these Seven Needles. With the game saying that they're "neither
human nor beast, neither man nor woman." However, taking a look at their character
models and you can see that they all have very masculine bodies, including having facial hair,
but that they behave and dress in incredibly feminine manners.
And so these characters appear to be either a trans or cross-dressing representation
and the ways they are depicted within the game may be seen as insensitive.
But over in Japan, and especially during this time period, there wasn't as much concern
about these sorts of matters. And for example, they seem to
be based on a theme that's very common in Japanese media, which is the "okama" - which
is a slang term for homosexual and one who cross-dresses and is very feminine in nature.
Another theme that the game has quite a bit is animal cruelty.
For instance, one of the main characters in the game is Salsa - a monkey.
And for a big portion of the game, Salsa is abused by his owner, with him being
forced to wear a collar that can allow him to be electrocuted whenever his owner wants.
And this is something that will happen a lot throughout the game and also the corresponding
script is also quite adult in nature, with it portraying it in quite a grim way.
And yes, this is also thought to be another possible reason for why Nintendo
haven't localized the game outside of Japan. However, like Mother 3, Earthbound was also
quite adult in nature. However, Mother 2 still got localized outside of Japan. And so for Earthbound,
the English release ended up making a vast amount of changes to the game to make it more appropriate
for the west. And this is something that the channel has covered in a previous video,
if you want to go take a look at. So, considering this is what happened
with the previous game, it begs the question of if these things were such a problem, why
they didn't just make changes to the game again. However, some other points to possibly take into
account is when the game was released, which was for the Game Boy Advance in the year 2006.
And so, Mother 3 came right at the end of the Game Boy Advance's life cycle - with
the Nintendo DS already being available in North America for two years by this point.
And so that, in combination with the amount of time and money that would be needed to
localize and release the game over in the west, it's possible that Nintendo
thought it wasn't worth the effort. And again, Earthbound when it was
initially released wasn't very popular. Alongside that, it's also a possibility
that the fan translation being available may have further influenced things to a degree.
And also, whilst the original Mother game also wasn't released over in the west, but then much,
much later was released on the Wii U eShop in 2015 - Nintendo already had the localization work done,
but it just went unreleased. And so this means they didn't have
to spend time creating the English version. However, despite these points and as the years
have gone by, the popularity of the Earthbound over in the west seems to continue to grow more
and more. With this also being partly influenced by its inclusion in the Smash Bros. series,
with the main characters from both Earthbound, as well as Mother 3, being included in the
Smash series as playable fighters for many years now. As well as the Smash Bros. series including
numerous other elements from the Mother series. And so, despite not being released in the west,
western fans have still experienced various parts of Mother 3 in other Nintendo games.
And, due to its popularity and its inclusion in these other titles,
it's very possible that one day Mother 3 will finally be released officially over in the west.
What are your thoughts on the lack of a western release for Mother 3?
As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments below and a big thanks once again
to NordVPN for sponsoring today's video. Until next time, thank you for watching.