Excellent, excellent, excellent. This will be a short review because there is little more I can say without being repetitve or giving spoilers.
Simply put, the folks at Starmen.Net have put together an excellent translation of this game that captures all of the humor and joy of the original. The game looks and sounds just they way you remember it if you’ve played before. If you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. Bright sprites and warm, well-composed music are the order of the day. The story holds up a few years later, and you’ll want to make LBP sackboys out of your Mother 3 family.
The only snag potential players may have is the technical aspect. You need to have a Japanese copy of the ROM to use the translation patch, and you need a ROM player to play it on. It is only legal to download the ROM if you ever actually owned the game. (Though the translators are working on a fully legal patched hard copy that you can order from them.) Some of the more popular ROM players, such as VisualBoy Advance, have known problems with save states. Mac users, for example, have to jump through hoops to get the game to save.
That all being said, if you can get the game to play and save, you should do so. This could be considered the “mother” of all RPGs (pun fully intended).
For being an excellent translation of a game I’ve waited for years to play, I’m giving the Mother 3 fan translation 5 Weiners out of 5.
Playing With My Weiner 