Mother 3 English Patch Released!
Mother 3 — the long awaited sequel to the SNES RPG masterpiece Earthbound — has finally been translated into English thanks to the plucky efforts of the Starmen.net translation team.
This has been a longtime coming. Earthbound (otherwise known as Mother 2, and the only Mother game to be released in the States) was released in 1995, and ended on the whiff of a sequel, but Mr. Saturn's Japanese drooglings didn't get to see Mother 3 until 2006, when it was unceremoniously released in Japan.
It was bad timing for an American release: the original, while a cult classic, did not sell well, and the game came out at the very end of the GBA's life cycle. But the Mother 3 Translation Team has been toiling away for the last two years, posting regular blog updates along the way, describing the challenges of hacking the non-conventionally programmed game and translating the quirky text into English.
The process for patching the game is simple: you will need to have a Mother 3 ROM (presumably — but, you know, not necessarily! — from your own legally imported copy of the game) and download the Translation Pack, which contains a one-step patching program for Windows, OS X and Linux. It's really very elegantly done. And make sure to read the translation notes: they're fascinating.
I've been waiting for about thirteen years for this. I'm positively giddy: instead of a weekend spent grinding through a stack of newly arrived Xbox 360 games, I will be lying prone on my couch, taming spiteful crows, battling zombies and hippies, chasing magic butterflies and dodging the incoming charges of Rhinorockets. Who'll be joining me?
Mother 3 Fan Translation Project [Official Site]
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Oh, wow! THANK YOU for posting this. I played Earthbound for the first time last year and it's now my favourite RPG of all time. It holds up surprisingly well! I've been waiting for those guys to finish translating Mother 3 so long I forgot they were even doing it.
I have been polishing my frying pan for this moment!
Stop it! I have lots of work to do this weekend!
nice! just installed a gba emulator on my xbox gonna check it out now.
I've been following this for a long time now. Tomato and Jeffman have done some incredible work in hacking this game, and the blog archives are a great read for anyone interested in how romhacking is done.
I have a feeling it's going to be difficult to pry me from my laptop this weekend.
Cool!
YAY! Have been watching this as well. I'm so impressed that they followed through with it and were frequent with the web-updates. So many hacks and mods fall through the cracks. My girlfriend will probably steal my DS once she finds this game on there...
meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
SMAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!!!
I'm playing through Earthbound with my girlfriend right now, since she never got to play it, but I will sure as hell be all over this once we're done.
Just a heads up: playing this via most emulators induces a small lag in the sound playback that can make the battles trickier (the basic combat is heavily rhythm-based). Still very playable, and you can learn to compensate, but it's even better if you can play it via a flash cart.
I bought a flash cart just to play this game.
It's very, very worthwhile - it's got a lovely style and humor that I feel like I miss in a lot of newer games.
Mato, Jeffman and the rest of the crew have done english speaking fans of the franchise a huge service and it's just turned out so amazingly professional!
I just played through Earthbound for the first time in July (borrowed it from a friend.) It was thoroughly enjoyable, although I rushed through the last 3rd or so after getting past a part I was stuck at in Fourside.
So naturally I acquired this patch today and played through the game a little bit. I lol'd when I fought the bat for the first time. Itoi, you cheeky bastard.
Man, putting Lucas in [i]Super Smash Bros. Brawl[/i] has to be the biggest cockblock ever perpetrated by Nintendo on fans outside of Japan. The salt in the wound is that there isn't a [i]StarTropics[/i] reference to be found anywhere in [i]Brawl[/i], which I think would be only fair seeing as those games were never released in Japan.
@9 if you'd like to avoid the lag, turn off all frame skipping in your emulator. The game might run a little odd, but getting those combos is very easy.
Mother/Eathbound papercraft: http://paperkraft.blogspot.com/2008/10/earthbound-papercraft-mr-saturn.html