Mother 3 Not Coming West in the Near Future

The former Nintendo of America president, Reggie Fils-Aimé, has just released a new book filled with dramatic details surrounding his tenure at the game giant. Fans of the Mother series–or the Earthbound series, as it’s known in the West–may be extra interested in the bonus content given to those who preordered the audiobook version of Disrupting the Game. In it, Reggie sits down with his close friend Geoff Keighley about Mother 3, which was released in Japan in 2006. The title has never been localized or released outside of Japan, and it looks like that won’t change any time soon.

Fans were hoping that Mother 3 would finally be making its way West after Earthbound and Earthbound Beginnings were announced to be added to Switch Online’s SNES and NES apps.

“While Mr. Iwata was alive, he really understood the passion that fans had for the Mother series. And you need to remember that it was under his watch that Earthbound Beginnings was first brought on to the Virtual Console platform,” Fils-Aimé said, referencing the former Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, who passed away in 2015.

“And so, the company knows that there’s a lot of passion for that franchise, but thinking about how to make it current, thinking about how to make it bigger than just the, you know, let me call it the relatively small group of fans that desperately want to see Mother 3 or something next in the Earthbound series.

That’s what the company I’m sure has been thinking about and they just haven’t figured out yet the solution to that, or at least they haven’t been prepared to talk about it.”

Earthbound Beginnings, the first game in the series, was first released in Japan in 1989. It made its way to the West in 2015 for the Wii U, a console with highly disappointing sales numbers during its lifetime.

“Who knows? If Mr. Iwata had not passed away, if maybe the Wii U had done better in the marketplace, maybe the Mother 3 game would have made it at that point,” Fils-Aimé said. “So there were certainly conversations, but it would have needed to have been done the right way.”

Mother 3 was originally released in Japan in 2006 for the Game Boy Advance. The game was re-released for the Wii U in 2016.

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