The Japanese version of Wednesday’s new Nintendo Direct showcase had a surprise: the beloved Game Boy Advance role-playing game Mother 3 is now part of the Nintendo Switch Online series of retro games.
But that release is only for Japan. There was no similar announcement for fans of the Earthbound games in the West. While Switch owners in North America and Europe will be able to get their hands on a new series of games from developer Rare via Nintendo Switch Online, a long-awaited official translation of Mother 3 still eludes us.
And it doesn’t seem likely we’ll ever get that, based on Nintendo’s history of releasing (and re-releasing) Mother 3 in Japan and offers its Western players the same privilege. In 2015, Nintendo made Mother 3 playable via the Wii U virtual console, but only in Japan.
Nintendo has released Mother And Mother 2known in the West as Earthbound beginnings and Earthbound, via Nintendo Switch Online respectively. But Nintendo’s North American and European branches have ignored pleas to localize Mother 3 officially for non-Japanese audiences. A localization of the Game Boy Advance game “just didn’t make business sense,” former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé said Bloomberg in 2022.
Developed by HAL Laboratory and Brownie Brown, Mother 3 was released in Japan in 2006, and fans of Earthbound have repeatedly tapped Nintendo to officially localize the game in other languages. The star of Mother 3Lucas, has appeared in the Super Smash Bros. games and got his own amiibo figure in 2016.
It seems that for now Mother 3 fans will have to keep looking for fan translations to find their fix.