How Mother 3 saved us all from learning Japanese
Mother 3 (2006)
Mother 3 (2006)
It’s one of the most natural and dangerous human instincts we possess: we all want what we can’t have. And we PAL gamers ought to know this - after all, how else was I going to react to the news that Super Noah’s Ark 3D and Mahjong 64 wouldn’t be making it to Dublin? So wrapped up in my carnal desire for these games was I that I didn’t even know what an EarthBound was until I kept getting battered by some tubheaded kid called Ness in Super Smash Bros.
I later became acquainted with EarthBound, second game in the Mother series, and found it to be a game that would have to be described as pretty good, but not top notch. Soon, though, I became more than a little bit worried by the braying bloodhounds that worship that game, and the Mother series as a whole, as it’s called in Japan.
I can see why the fanbase were giving it so much vigour, though: there was another Mother game on the cards, and vocal shows of support directed at Nintendo seemed necessary, in order to get that mother out of Japan and into realms that wouldn’t understand half the jokes, references and Japanese-ness.
Mother 3 is a game that had been a long time coming, that’s for sure – about twelve years by my reckoning. We could have had it on the Super Nintendo (or more likely, the Japanese Super Famicom), the Nintendo 64 and even the very ill-fated Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, before development was finally restarted and the game released on the Game Boy Advance. What started, potentially, in 1994, took until 2006 to come out. Boy, that’s a lot of salaries and wasted profit potential, isn’t it?
Well, scaling down the game for the Game Boy Advance did give the game the unusual benefit of having the right graphics at the right time; rather than going for severely dated 3D graphics, as can be seen in the N64 trailers for Mother 3 (then called EarthBound 64 in western media), the final GBA version brings us some truly wonderful spritework, a lovely reminder of what lovingly crafted sprites can do.
It’s easiest to compare the battle system in this game to EarthBound. If you haven’t played that, go and play that first, or else we can compare the battle system to Dragon Quest instead. And if you haven’t played that either... well, alright, let me just give you the dope: there are no random encounters, and in fact you can see all enemies on the field before getting into a scrape with them.
Battle takes place in a first-person perspective, so you can take a good look at the enemies trying to crush you into dust - kitschy enemies such as the Forlorn Junk Heap, the Men’s Room Sign, the Artsy Ghost and the Gently Weeping Guitar. What’s really terrific is that every enemy has its own out-of-battle sprites as well, which must have took designer Shigesato Itoi and his graphical boys and girls a fair chunk of time. I commend the game for that.
The battling is your usual RPG stuff - equip weapons and armour for higher stats, and attack foes with physical blows or PSI, which is your somewhat limited array of magic. There’s not much in the way of customisation in battle - you just wail on your enemies until they bounce out of existence.
An ingenious quirk to the battle system keeps things interesting, though: if you keep tapping the attack button to the beat of the battle music, you can deliver more and more damage. It’s challenging, it’s fun and it offers great reward. It doesn’t make the battle system world class or anything, but at least it’s something that keeps you awake.
The plot of this game was designed to be ‘strange, funny and heartrending’, and it takes place over a number of different chapters, from the perspective of different characters too. In fact, it’s not until you heartrend your way to Chapter 4 that you assume permanent control of your main character Lucas - later to appear in a fair few Smash Bros games, and there’s no better endorsement for a character than that.
Mother 3 has got some great ideas, particularly watching the development of the world around you, and how malevolently designed technology starts to destroy nature. That’s always a relevant theme. But I find the story just a bit too goofy to really care about.
There’s a heartbreaker in the first chapter, true, years before the game’s main plot begins, and that really sets the tone. The two subsequent chapters set up a few more background details, and then the action switches to the present day as you traipse around odd event after odd event, until you finally go to pull seven needles out of the ground, which has some sort of world-shattering effect.
One thing we have to mention is that this game never did make it out of Japan, even after a hell of a lot of anxiety and aggravation on the part of the rabid fanbase I warned you about earlier. This was a problem, as the witty dialogue of Mother games is half the fun, and I sure as hell don’t speak Japanese. Have you ever tried to learn it? Lots of us nerds have, and most of us don’t get anywhere, ever.
So that means there were, and still remains, only two ways for me and the rest of the fans to play through Mother 3: one was to stumble through the main plot, not knowing the meaning of any of those funny little symbols, never realising that the character said something like “I’m sorry, Mike, but that’s called sexual harassment these days,” - basically the last thing you expect from game dialogue.
The other way of experiencing the game is through playing the fan translation, released late in 2008. This of course means ROMs and emulators and all that, but it’s the only way. The fan translation effort never fell victim to a cease-and-desist during its development either, despite Nintendo having knowledge of it, which is refreshing.
Two years, thousands of manhours, some very complex coding doohickery and 1,000 pages of dialogue to translate, that’s what it all took to bring Mother 3 to English-speaking fans. And that doesn’t even mention the dozens, maybe hundreds, of subtly nuanced jokes that the Mother series is famous for. Translation is one thing, but localisation is quite another.
The result of the online translation effort was a huge triumph, another glowing endorsement for the dedicated fanbase. Just think about that achievement. A group of fans actually contributing something useful beyond bluster, for once? And not only that, a group-effort fan translation that actually didn’t end with online drama, shady controversy, whiny meltdowns, strops and in-fighting? I wasn’t willing to believe it, but it happened, and it’s a credit to the guys in the charge – particularly led by a pro video game translator who goes by the online moniker Tomato.
Let’s face it, retro nerds like me tend to romanticise EarthBound (Mother 2 to our Japanese friends) but the truth is, that game is up against competition so stiff that it can’t really be called a top-tier game for the console. It definitely deserves a couple of playthroughs, and the fans adore it religiously, and good luck to them – Christ, I’d build a shrine to it too if I dropped a thousand dollars on a complete copy of it.
Mother 3 may have less competition on the GBA, if you can fairly dismiss the Final Fantasy ports and you do your best not to mention the Pokémon games. But is it the best RPG on the system? One of the finest RPGs of all? Not really. Despite some very poignant moments, the plot is a bit too disjointed and the final villains are hardly big twists.
The battle system is always fun, even for the rhythmically bewildered people like me. But there’s usually little strategy involved and it does get tiresome having to buff all of your party members three times, while debuffing the enemy thrice as well, for every single boss fight, and all just so that you don’t get bodied immediately. At least, that’s how it went for me.
Mother 3 is not a disappointing game, even an old grump like me wouldn’t go that far. But, and with my apologies to those who still campaign militantly for this game to come Stateside and beyond, the only way we’re ever, ever going to play this is via the fan-translated ROM. We must be realistic about that.
But do we really need this one to be localised and released? The spritework, the unique story and the fun battle system all offer good reasons to play through this one - once. And it’s a nice way to cap off the series, which now looks to be finished for good. But it just isn’t a top tier game.
15 May 2026