Tonda Gossa! This is Kody NOKOLO back with another Mother Forever Almost Monthly News for February and March! Watch it in video form or read it below.

Well, it finally happened: MOTHER 3 is now available on Nintendo Switch Online. Of course, it’s only in Japanese, but you can download it by any region just by either creating a new Japanese account to access their store or by changing your own account’s region.

Reactions to the news came from across the world, not just Japan. Many fans and former developers reacted to it with posts like MOTHER 3’s producer and now head of Brownies studio Shinichi Kameoka and this funny story from composer Shogo Sakai about hurting his foot during dev discussion frustrations. Former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime weighed in too.

Lone and I also translated a letter that Itoi wrote about the rerelease.

To celebrate this rerelease, over the past two weeks, MOTHER 1 and 2 icons have been available on the Nintendo Switch Online points store. Of course, Nintendo of America made no announcement about this, so it’s something just for fans like us. Right now, MOTHER 3 icons are available, even outside of Japan, so if you have Switch Online, get them all right away! I’ll also link a guide to get some quick points if you don’t have enough.

To top it off, new issues of Famitsu have been scanned and posted by Bultro on the Internet Archive, revealing beta versions of the first MOTHER with some slight differences!

Community member Biozilla and I also finished posting the rest of the art and scans from every known MOTHER guidebook and Famimaga reference, except for one guidebook we’re still looking for.

Mike Takagi, artist of the original box for EarthBound, recently showcased the original artwork for the box too! It’s incredible to see it still intact after all this time.

Itoi’s thoughts on the name “MOTHER,” and the life behind an artist’s work

On the day after MOTHER 3’s rerelease, Itoi wrote about why he chose the name MOTHER on the front page of his website, where he usually posts a piece of writing every day.

Usually these aren’t archived, but it seems like the Hobonichi MOTHER Project noticed the overseas fans interested in MOTHER 3’s Japanese release and posted it on their Twitter for fans to machine translate. Thankfully, Tokyo translator furdmatt provided a real translation for us.

If you’ve been attentive to our news videos, you might notice that Itoi’s embarrassment about being treated differently due to his mother was something I discovered in a book not too long ago. It’s clear that this was a driving factor in MOTHER 3, and it probably influenced much more than that. Now that we know it, it’s easy to see in his work like that, but it’s strange to think we really had no clear details about Itoi’s childhood besides having an absent mother before last year, and only now has he let us know more about how this childhood ties into the name of the series itself.

When a game or any work is new, I do believe having a separation of art from the artist can be important then. I think if something like MOTHER came out and you knew every detail of Itoi’s early life, a lot of people might not see that art as its own “person,” if that makes any sense. It might be like meeting a celebrity who you have preconcieved notions about. You can try to look beyond it, but it’s definitely tougher to understand someone for the first time without using what you already know.

I think artists’ lives are better off more private because of that while they’re still actively creating. And if an artist wants to keep their life private forever, that’s their choice, and it should stay that way.

But, long after we can establish the “personality” of a work on its own like MOTHER has had all this time to do, it’s valuable to know the experiences that shape the art we meet. We know now that Itoi’s embarrassment about his mother directly led to the title of MOTHER, but we’ve had enough time to separate that from the “person” the series has grown up with us as.

Anyways, all that said, the moral to of all this: make something you can put your life into! Your experiences can become a game, a video, or the work you do now for a job or school. Maybe we can talk about your work next, and maybe the experiences that brought that work to be!

GNOMONIC Update

Hope you enjoyed my thoughts on that. Speaking of things I’m making, I wanted to mention something about my game, GNOMONIC, that I said in the last news video. After talking more with the MOTHER developer contributing to it, there was a misunderstanding, and I won’t be able to put out an interview or anything else regarding what I asked him about when I met him for his own safety. I hope you understand. Maybe I’ll be able to talk more about our meeting someday, though.

All that said, that MOTHER developer will still be contributing to the game of course, and you’ll be able to back the game on Kickstarter soon enough and support the game and that person’s work! You can wishlist the game on Kickstarter now to be notified when it’s live, so please be sure to go there if you’re interested! The artist for the game, my fiance JSpinz, made this awesome banner for it too! I can’t wait for you to meet these characters and learn more about the game soon!

Shogo Sakai Album & MOTHER 3 Plushes

On a totally unrelated note, did you know Shogo Sakai is releasing a new album online in about a month called “Necos Calm Me?” We’ll share it on our social media when it’s live!

And one Hobonichi merchandise update:
New MOTHER 3 plushes for Lucas, Duster, Kumatora, and Claus are going to be available in May! I’ll be sure to post on our social media near their release so anyone interested can get them! Join our Discord or keep an eye on our community posts here on YouTube for the latest updates!