Reggie Fils-Aime and Shigesato Itoi have a message to Mother/Earthbound fans. And that message is, to leave them alone.
As reported by NintendoLife, both have responded to fans on Twitter about bringing Mother 3 to the West. Itoi’s message, translated from Japanese to English by Google, is simply:
“Please talk to Nintendo about that, not me.”
Reggie Fils-Aime’s message is similarly succinct. Quoting an article with a caption that it’s no longer Itoi’s decision, he said:
“No longer mine as well.”
As we had reported, Mother 3, which has yet to be localized to the West in either US or Europe, was added to Switch Online in Japan. A localization would have to be produced from scratch to make a US release possible.
Reggie Fils-Aime, who was president and COO of Nintendo of America from 2006 to 2019, had once said that the company hadn’t been able to commission a localization because of the business climate of the time he was asked. At this point, Earthbound and Earthbound Beginnings, which both already had English localizations, were released on the US and Europe eShops for 3DS and Wii U.
Shigesato Itoi, who is famous in Japan as a copywriter and for his Hobonichi Techo organizers/notebooks, had also chimed in on the issue in a documentary. The writer for all the Mother/Earthbound games revealed that he knows about the long notorious fan translation for Mother 3, and revealed that Nintendo turned down the offer to use it.
While fans have long speculated on the reasons that Mother 3 was never localized to the West, the truth is Nintendo have kept the reasons for this close to their chest. No one really knows the real reason except for people within Nintendo themselves.
Perhaps the reason is more obvious than many of us think, as this title was really the end result of the painful failed attempt to make a cutting edge Earthbound game on the Nintendo 64, via its hard drive peripheral, the 64DD. All of the Earthbound games deeply involved Itoi, Shigeru Miyamoto, and the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.
They all blamed themselves deeply for their failure to get Earthbound 64 off the ground, but three years after its official cancellation, Itoi was convinced to restart work on the game for the Game Boy Advance. Itoi had already closed his own game studio APE, but worked with Brownie Brown instead to make a throwback 16-bit sprite graphics game on a 2000s portable.
While the fans would really want to see Mother 3 get localized to the West eventually, the fact that Iwata is no longer with us to fight for its release may be why we just aren’t getting it. Unlike Earthbound Beginnings on the Famicom or Star Fox 2 on the SNES, Nintendo doesn’t have a ready localization or complete game that just needs to be rereleased.
Even with the Nintendo Switch’s record-breaking success, it took years before Nintendo found it feasible to return to Pokemon Snap or GoldenEye 007 on the platform. I would love it if we were all wrong, and Nintendo has secretly finished their Mother 3 localization, perhaps to release this April on its 21 year anniversary. But for now, all we know is we have to keep asking Nintendo.
