As much of a fan of the Earthbound series as I am, I can't deny that its fanbase does have a very retarded stick up their collective asses when it comes to Mother 3's official release. There's not just a fan translation, there's a very good one made by a team of industry professionals that's as good as one could ever do with that game. It even unlocks an unused bestiary feature not available in the official version, and adds a secret Hard Mode unlockable via a code that's exclusive to the fan translation.
And, Jesus Christ,
it just had an update last month. The first version of this translation was released in
2008. That's some serious dedication.
Come to think of it, it's kind of funny that
(from my outsider perspective) the Western anime community doesn't seem to give a fuck about official releases, since it grew out of pirated fansubs where those were better than the official product. The official product
(of the time, 15-20 years ago) being $50 DVDs with two episode a piece, dubbed by novices across the board, and released by businesses that didn't understand the exotic appeal. Maybe things have changed by now, I don't know, but I've never once seen such a stigma against piracy in that scene like I have with video games, and
especially Nintendo.
An axiom I hold onto firmly is that if you're a customer, you should always go with the best version of the product you're trying to get, and whether or not you obtain it legally isn't your problem, it's the publisher's problem. In 2015, Nintendo officially released Mother 1 as
Earthbound Beginnings, exclusively to the Wii U's Virtual Console for $10. It was a 1:1 release of the American prototype that was dumped and released online like 20 years ago, often under the
(much better) name
Earthbound Zero. The thing is... the team that translated Mother 3
also made their own little remaster of Mother 1's GBA version, with a full retranslation and even more QoL improvements on top of what Nintendo themselves added to make the game palatable. The draconian NES-era censorship is gone, the L button now talks/checks, and the all-important Easy Ring greatly reduces the grind. It is objectively, thoroughly a much better product than Nintendo's zero effort
Earthbound Beginnings, and to top it all off, it beat
Beginnings by four years.
But the Nintendo fanbase just didn't give a shit. They'd rather pay $10 for a vastly inferior version on a locked down console that was already winding down, with no guarantee on whether or not they could bring that purchase along to future Nintendo platforms
(they couldn't). Meanwhile, by the nature of how roms work, the fan translation is something you can keep forever, and run on anything with a GBA emulator.
So, you've got idiots giving their hard-earned cash to a $9 billion international corporation for an inferior product than they can get for free elsewhere. All rationality is out the window, and what they're really paying for is a crafted feel-good attitude that they're doing the right thing by paying for their game, lest they be branded a pirate, as if that's a horrible thing. It's all kind of culty.
Nintendo will
never localize Mother 3. Anyone who has actually played the game will know exactly why: there were a number of important characters in the game, the Magypsies, that were these flamboyant, benevolent characters that resemble what we know today as troons:
View attachment 2201193
But they're not
actually troons, they're played as silly and vaguely magical. Plus, there's one scene later on in the game where one of them gives Lucas a PK power, and the screen fades to black as it implies that the Magypsy is
buttfucking Lucas. At the end, it's shown that that wasn't the case, but that was the joke. Imagine Nintendo officially releasing
that. Even if they omitted it, there'd be a fan outcry about censorship, so it's just all a shitshow that Nintendo has wisely avoided.
I seriously hope most of them aren't actually holding off on playing Mother 3 until an official release. Its been almost 13 years since the fan translation, and Nintendo's remastering games absolutely nobody asked for, like Famicom Detective Club. I don't think the Nintendo fanbase will ever appreciate just how important emulation is, due to their cultlike adoration for a billion dollar conglomerate. What a bunch of retards.
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