Mother 3

• 1. Introduction

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  Mother 3 is a role-playing game that took twelve years and four consoles to finish, and then never left Japan.

  In the run-up to its release, people who phoned the Japan Post heard the game's main theme, "Love Theme", while they waited on hold. A Nintendo handheld game had become part of everyday Japanese life. English-speaking players, meanwhile, could not buy it at all.

  How did a project survive a cancellation and a change of console after console? What kind of story did its writer, Shigesato Itoi, want to tell with a cast of children, dinosaur-like creatures and a Pigmask army? And what happened when strangers abroad decided to translate the whole thing themselves?

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• 2. Chasing Three Dimensions

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  Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata were the producers when work began on the Super Famicom. Shigesato Itoi, who created the Mother series, was already practiced at pitching games, so Miyamoto offered him a team willingly. Miyamoto later said the decision was commercial, driven by the success of the previous Mother game. The team skipped the usual prototyping and expected to make something unprecedented. Itoi wanted it to feel like a Hollywood film.

  Super Mario 64 changed the plan. Inspired by it, the team moved to the Nintendo 64, believing a 3D world free of technical limits would let them thrive creatively. In September 1994, Itoi predicted the game would be done around 1996. Instead, the early specifications outgrew the console's memory. Halfway through, the team scaled back and moved to the 64DD, an expansion for the Nintendo 64 that finally appeared only in Japan, in 1999. At E3 in June 1997, Miyamoto speculated that this game would be one of four for the add-on's expected 1998 launch. When the 64DD failed commercially, development shifted back to the Nintendo 64.

  The public saw the work at the 1999 Nintendo Space World trade show. The demo suggested a North American release under the title EarthBound 64. It was to ship on a 256-megabit cartridge, like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. IGN reacted favorably and said the game seemed "very far along", roughly half complete. Readers of Famitsu ranked it among their ten most anticipated games near the end of 1999.

  Then the schedule broke. In 1999, the team missed an internal milestone. Cancelling was discussed and rejected as wasteful, and a release on the forthcoming GameCube was floated. In late August 2000, Itoi announced that Mother 3 was cancelled after repeated delays. Iwata and Miyamoto explained that resources were moving to the GameCube. Itoi said another two years would have been needed, and that the game stood at 30% complete.

  Iwata later offered a franker account. He said the focus on 3D graphics had made the project overcomplex. Miyamoto had little time on site because of other work. Iwata himself was distracted by bankruptcy worries at HAL Labs and by stress-related health problems. Looking back, Iwata wondered aloud why the game had needed 3D at all, since Itoi's "greatest talent lies in words". He said he was "genuinely ashamed" and that both men were "caught up in the 3D obsession and felt obligated". A Game Boy Advance version had been discussed, but they judged it would take "just as much time" with 40 to 50 staff. Itoi expected the story to stay known only to those who had worked on it. He did say he might turn it into a novel or a kamishibai, a picture-card story, if time allowed.

  A television commercial in 2003 for the compilation Mother 1+2 revealed that Nintendo had restarted the project for the Game Boy Advance. Itoi had believed a restart was impossible, but encouragement from the Mother fanbase changed his mind. Brownie Brown, a Nintendo subsidiary, built the game with input from Itoi. The graphics dropped from 3D to 2D while the story stayed untouched. By July 2004 the game was about 60% complete, and a late 2005 target slipped into 2006.

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• 3. The Game That Might Have Been

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  Itoi's earliest seed for Mother 3 had nothing to do with psychic children. Near the end of work on Mother 2, he imagined a detective story in which the city was the main character. Its hero would be a hack, small-time, womanizing private investigator drawn into a huge murder case. A young flower-shop clerk would slowly recall pieces of the plot, and the city would seem to grow around her. That idea of a single place changing over time became central to everything that followed.

  Itoi saw earlier role-playing games as "road movies" with little reason to revisit a town. He wanted players to watch gossip spread and change. He planned 12 chapters with different mechanics and rotating player-characters, including one built like a classic role-playing game and one made only of cutscenes. He first pictured the work as moving 3D puppets, until he understood how much programming that required. As development wore on, he suggested replacing some chapters with still images and text. He cut the plan down to seven or nine chapters. He described the story as "normal" at first, leading to a "triple-play twist".

  The Nintendo 64 version looked quite different. It was set 10 years after the first Mother. Its hero, Flint, was a cowboy in the vein of Clint Eastwood. He had a dog, Boney, and two boys named Lucca and Klaus, who later became Lucas and Claus. The game promised more than 10 playable characters and a story spanning 10 years. It centered on a Pig army that tried to use "primitive machinery... to enslave mankind".

  At Space World in 1999, IGN sampled a hovercraft ride through a desert canyon and a snake dungeon. It also saw a bullet train cutscene, a town full of characters and a mine cart sequence. The themes ranged across fantasy, the medieval and science fiction. Battles had psychedelic backgrounds and a circular menu with a command to "get up" after a knockdown, played in real time. The designers also planned several routes through the game, and consequences from small acts, such as a monster finding food dropped in the forest. A clock synced to real time needed the 64DD. The planned length was 40 to 60 hours.

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• 4. The Nowhere Islands

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  Tazmily Village lies in the Nowhere Islands, at an unspecified time after the events of EarthBound. The story opens with twin boys, Lucas and Claus, and their mother, Hinawa. They are about to head home after visiting her father, Alec, in the far north. A military force called the Pigmask Army attacks first and bombs the nearby forest, starting a fire. Hinawa's husband, Flint, rushes to find his family. Hinawa has been killed protecting the boys from a Drago, a normally peaceful dinosaur-like creature. Claus later leaves to take revenge on the Drago. Flint follows, defeats a Drago that has been turned into a cyborg, and cannot find his son.

  Elsewhere, a novice thief named Duster is sent by his father and teacher, Wess, to Osohe Castle to fetch the Egg of Light. There he meets the spirited Princess Kumatora, and both he and the Egg vanish in a trap. In the village, a peddler named Yokuba, who works with the Pigmasks, introduces money and sells television-like Happy Boxes. He relies on an abused monkey named Salsa, who escapes with help from Kumatora, Lucas and Wess.

  Three years later, the Pigmasks have taken over Tazmily and filled it with railways, Happy Boxes and other modern technology. Rumors say Duster is playing bass at Club Titiboo, so Lucas sets out with his dog, Boney. On the way he learns psychic powers from Ionia, a benevolent, androgynous Magypsy. At the club he finds Kumatora working as a waitress, and Duster suffering from amnesia. When the group tries to board a Pigmask airship, a Masked Man shakes them off and sends them tumbling to the ground.

  The Magypsies explain that a vast Dark Dragon sleeps beneath the Islands. Seven Needles were driven into it to hold its power in check, and whoever pulls most of them can reshape the world. The Masked Man is hunting the Needles. The heroes race him, and each side pulls three.

  The seventh Needle lies under New Pork City, the Pigmask capital. There a villager named Leder reveals that Tazmily's people are survivors of a global apocalypse, sheltered on the Islands by the dragon's power. To prevent a second disaster, they sealed their old memories in the Egg of Light. Leder was left to tell the truth if the need arose. He also says the Pigmask leader is Porky Minch, called Pokey in Mother 2. Porky travelled through time to the Islands, built an empire and kidnapped people from other eras, including Dr. Andonuts from Mother 2. He also twisted local wildlife into new forms, such as the Drago that killed Hinawa.

  On the way to Porky, the heroes learn that Yokuba was the Magypsy charged with guarding the seventh Needle, and that he betrayed them. On the 100th floor of the Empire Porky Building, Porky taunts Lucas and his friends in a monologue. After a battle deep below the city, he shuts himself in an "Absolutely Safe Capsule" built by Dr. Andonuts. Andonuts has tricked him. The capsule makes the outside world safe by sealing Porky inside forever.

  At the seventh Needle, Lucas faces the Masked Man, who is a brainwashed Claus. During their fight, Hinawa's spirit begs the boys to stop. Claus removes his mask and dies by casting lightning at the Franklin Badge Lucas wears, which reflects magic. Lucas pulls the last Needle. The Dragon wakes and destroys the Nowhere Islands. In an epilogue set in pitch darkness, the cast says they survived and bids the player farewell. After the credits, the Mother 3 logo appears again, made entirely of wood.

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• 5. Rhythm and Melody

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  Frogs are how Mother 3 remembers your progress. Players save by talking to them, and they also hold money, which appears in the later half of the game as Dragon Power, or DP. Hot springs scattered across the world restore health and power points, and heal status ailments. Between those stops, the game plays like its predecessors. The player explores a two-dimensional world from above, chats with villagers, collects items and runs into enemies.

  Contact with an enemy switches to a battle screen, as in EarthBound. Battles are shown from an apparent first-person view against a warped, animated backdrop. Some characters use psychic abilities called PSI, which cost power points. Health uses a "rolling" counter, like an odometer, so a badly hurt character can still act if the player is quick. A character at zero falls unconscious until another revives them. If the whole party falls, the player restarts at the nearest save point with half the DP on hand.

  One feature is new to the series. When a character strikes an enemy with a weapon, the player can keep attacking by pressing the button in time with the background music. Each enemy has its own musical theme with different rhythms, and the chain can reach sixteen hits. If the beat is hard to find, putting the enemy to sleep strips the rest of the music away.

  Shogo Sakai composed the score. He was a composer at HAL Laboratory whose earlier work included Kirby Air Ride and Super Smash Bros. Melee. Itoi chose him for his deep understanding of the story and the series, and because EarthBound composers Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka were both unavailable. The soundtrack came out on compact disc on the 2nd of November 2006.

  "Love Theme" arrived late. Itoi had meant to use the "Pigmask Army" theme as the game's main melody. Then Sakai was asked to write something with greater impact for a key scene, and the new piece took over. Itoi said the speed of the work suggested Sakai had been "waiting for the order". He asked that the tune be playable on a piano with one finger, because the "Eight Melodies" theme from Mother had spread through elementary schools. One small sound has a longer history. The "OK desu ka?" heard after naming a character was recorded by Hirokazu Tanaka more than a decade before the game appeared, without Itoi's knowledge.

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• 6. Chimeras and Kindness

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  The metal-and-wood logo of Mother 3 came from Itoi's fascination with the "uncomfortable beauty" of chimeras, creatures fused from several animals. He read the logo as two materials that could never truly join. The same idea shaped the original subtitle, "Forest of the Chimeras", which became "The End of the Pig King" before the cancellation. The release had no subtitle at all, because Itoi did not want to steer the player's interpretation. This time he worked less as a manager and more as a team member and scriptwriter. He said he was making the game he wanted to play, setting traps for the player, and making something Nintendo could not.

  His choices on visuals were stubborn. Itoi kept the pixelated style of Mother 2 for the Game Boy Advance because he had no interest in computer graphics trends. The series is written in hiragana rather than kanji so young children can read it. He described the game world as ruled by a "might equals right... macho" power struggle. Porky was designed as a "symbol of humankind", fitting Itoi's view of evil as a sliding scale with "pranks" and "crimes" at its ends. He likened the tone to the lyrics of "Reunion" by Kazuko Matsuo, in which the singer loves someone the world considers evil.

  Bodies mattered to him. Itoi compared the way characters discover their psychic powers to menstruation, and called human physiology one of his themes. Players sweat when learning an ability, because he believed physical struggle helps people grow. The Magypsies and Duster, who has a bad leg, show the value of friends with different qualities. Osohe Castle was meant to convey the scale of time. Tantane Island was built to mirror the player's worst nightmares, much like Moonside, the "hallucinatory city" of Mother 2. The game also nods to Kiki's Delivery Service, a Studio Ghibli film. Itoi had written film taglines for Ghibli and voiced the father in My Neighbor Totoro.

  He placed a serious death scene in the first chapter to express the tension between solemn and lighthearted games. He wrote the ending while overseas in Saipan, before the cancellation. That Nintendo 64 version of the final battle was darker, "dirtier" and more upsetting, though the finished version changed little in concept. Itoi credited his own growth and the makeup of the new team for the softer tone. He had always planned for the two brothers to fight. Yet he wrote the ending only after production began, a process he compared to Hayao Miyazaki's. He handled each line of the final scene on its own. Afterward he reflected that bad people sometimes need help even more than good people do. The line that moves him most is "You must be tired". He tied the ending's theme of renewal to his view that we should value our time on Earth, given the planet's certain end. Much of the remaining script was written after hours at a local hotel.

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• 7. Release and Reception

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  The 20th of April 2006 brought Mother 3 to Japanese shops, where it became a bestseller. Famitsu had listed it among the top five most wanted games, and it sat at the top of the Japanese preorder charts. A limited-edition Deluxe Box Set came with a special Game Boy Micro and a Franklin Badge pin. The television commercial featured the actress Kō Shibasaki on the edge of tears as she described her feelings about the game. Itoi has said her performance was unscripted.

  Sales matched the buzz. The game sold around 200,000 copies in its first week and finished among Japan's top 20 sellers for the first half of 2006. Weekly Famitsu gave it a "Platinum Hall of Fame" score of 35/40. By year's end it had sold more than 368,000 copies, the 36th highest in Japan for 2006. Critics abroad imported it and mostly liked it, even though few could read it. Reviewers praised the story, the graphics and the music, and lamented the 1990s role-playing mechanics.

  Eurogamer's Simon Parkin called the script "excellent". A "straightforward tale" grew, he said, into a "breadth and depth of quality that few titles many times its budget achieve". He compared the chapter structure to Dragon Quest IV and described Itoi as a "storyteller" who chose role-playing games as his medium. Parkin found the juxtapositions of "nature and technology, feudalism and capitalism, individuals and community" somewhat "heavy-handed". He praised the graphics as "childlike" and "unusually Western", with flat pastel textures set against lively backdrops, and the "bespoke" cutscene animation. The memorable moments he listed included frogs in ever sillier costumes, a "reconstructed mecha caribou" battle, a bad haiku and the "campfire scene".

  The mechanics drew a cooler response. Mark Green of NGC Magazine felt it was like Mother 2.5 and called its mechanics "depressingly basic". Parkin saw the rhythm battles as the only "systemic innovation". Richard Eisenbeis of Kotaku praised that system, and GameSpot's Greg Kasavin compared it with the Mario & Luigi series. RPGamer's Jordan Jackson found the music "just as catchy as previous games". He also found the game easier and shorter than the rest of the series, at about 30 hours. His colleague Mike Moehnke called the music "nothing less than stunning" and heard hints of Wagner and Chuck Berry. Jenni Lada of TechnologyTell called it the "perfect" Game Boy Advance role-playing game, and a darker one than its forebears. Eisenbeis found its key theme in "the importance of mothers".

  The game came back to the Wii U Virtual Console in Japan in December 2015. It reached the Nintendo Classics service, again only in Japan, on the 21st of February 2024.

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• 8. Fan Translation and Legacy

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  On the 17th of October 2008, the Starmen.net community released a patch for Mother 3. Applied to a copy of the game, it turned all the text into English. Reid Young, a co-founder of the site, said the group took on the job once it was clear Nintendo would not localize the game. About a dozen people worked on it, led by Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin, a professional Japanese-to-English translator. The work took two years and thousands of hours. The theoretical freelance cost was estimated at $30,000.

  The team translated, wrote and revised about 1,000 pages of script. They also hacked the ROM at the assembly level, to support features such as variable-width fonts. They localized place names and puns but made few dramatic changes. The best-known was renaming Yokuba, loosely derived from the Japanese word yokubo, as Fassad. The new name comes from the Arabic word fasad, meaning "corruption", and echoes the French word facade. The team said the highest levels of Nintendo of America knew about the project and did not intervene. They planned to stop if Nintendo announced plans for the game or asked them to cease, and they admitted the legality was unclear. More than 100,000 downloads followed in the first week. The group also announced the Mother 3 Handbook, a full-color, 200-page English player's guide, which Wired compared to professional guides from Prima Games and BradyGames.

  Why had Nintendo not released it? Game Informer's Imran Khan alleged that an English version was planned and then cancelled. He said Nintendo feared controversy over bereavement, drug use and animal cruelty. Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told Bloomberg News something simpler. A localization "just didn't make business sense" for a game released so late in the handheld's life. He added that he had been in talks with Iwata about a possible North American Wii U eShop release before Iwata's death.

  Critics were blunt. Bob Mackey of 1UP.com wrote that no other game in history had drawn such demand for translation. Chris Plante of UGO Networks listed the missing localization among 2008's "worst heartbreaks". Frank Caron of Ars Technica wrote that he could not begin to fathom why Nintendo wouldn't release it in the West. Jenni Lada called the fan project "undoubtedly one of the best known fan translations in existence", and it has since inspired retranslations into other languages. IGN described the Mother series as "neglected", noting that EarthBound was the only entry released outside Japan for decades. The first Mother finally reached the world as EarthBound Beginnings on Virtual Console in 2015-26 years after its Famicom debut in 1989.

  Tim Rogers argued that Mother 3 was "the closest games have yet come to literature." Itoi says he has no plans for a fourth game. Lucas became a playable fighter in the Super Smash Bros. series, and other characters appear there as collectibles, items or stage hazards.

  At Nintendo's digital event during E3 2014, a stop-motion short from Robot Chicken played on the missing localization. A fan pleads, "Come on, Reggie, give us Mother 3!" Fils-Aime replies, "How about this instead?" Then he eats a Fire Flower and throws a fireball at the fan.

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