15 years ago, Nintendo released Mother 3 on the Game Boy Advance in Japan, the final entry in the cult classic Mother/EarthBound RPG series. Today, fans celebrate this milestone with fan art and a new version of the unofficial localization patch.
Strange, funny, and heartrending.
Mother 3 tells the story of Lucas, a young boy living with his family in a small village on the Nowhere Islands. His life is changed forever when his mother is killed by a normally friendly Drago, his brother Claus goes missing in a quest for revenge, and an army of men in pig masks arrive to perform strange experiments on the wildlife. Many Nintendo fans first met Lucas when he was a character in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the 2008 entry in Nintendo's mascot fighter series of video games. Fans of the Mother/EarthBound series have long asked Nintendo (in particular former Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Amie, who continues to have some fun with the topic even after departing Nintendo) for an English localization, but 2008 also saw the release of a fan-made localization mod that translates the game's ROM into English.
To celebrate the game's 15th anniversary, fans are taking to social media to post their art, animations, and fondest memories of the RPG. The above image, done with the help of Nobuhiro Imagawa, the art director of Mother 3, is a series of pictures that show "behind the scenes" shots as if the game were filmed like a movie.
New Mother 3 Translation Patch
Meanwhile, Mato, the professional translator behind Legends of Localization and a major player behind the localization mod, has published a new version of the mod. Mato clarifies that he had almost no involvement in patch version 1.3, and that most of the work comes from @Lorenzoone, who worked on the Italian version of the game's translation. The patch itself mostly contains "technical stuff, bug fixes, and performance boosts," as well as an update to the translation tools.
Mother 3 is the last game in the Mother/EarthBound series, but the spiritual sequel Oddity was formerly going to be an unofficial sequel to Mother 3.
