Review: Mother 3 translation October 20, 2008

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.

 

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Preview: Mother 3 Translation Project October 18, 2008

Are you my mommy?

The Mother series of games is a big deal to RPGers.  Known as the Earthbound series in the United States, these role-playing games are not another thud-and-blunder series, but instead are set in the West, albeit from a Japanese point of view.  Enemies range from aliens to hippies, your weapon is more like to be a Star Tropic-al yo-yo than a sword.  The series started in 1989 with the Japan only release of Mother for the Famicom. The second game in the series was released in the U.S. as EarthBound for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1995.

 

Mother 3 was in development for 12 years before it was released in Japan in April 2006 for the GBA. Ostensibly the most popular title of the series, it is similar to Dragon Quest IV in that it divides the tale up into several chapters. Each chapter features different characters whose stories all tie together in the end. The original game received a 35/40 from Famitsu Magazineand sold 205,914 copies in its first 3 days on sale.

 

Hello, World!

Earthbound 3 was announced as an N64 title, but was scrapped.  Ever since, fans have been clamoring for an English version.  As of today, they need clamor no more. A group of talented fan programmers known as Starmen.Net have translated and patched the entire game.  After two years of work, the translation patch was finally released today, October 17, 2008. Any fan with the ROM can run the patch and enjoy Mother 3’s humor in English. I intend to do just that this weekend and give a full review on Monday.