Tonda Gossa! This is Kody NOKOLO back with another Mother Forever Almost Monthly News for April! A lot of new information has come out, and my feature for this month is centered on new info I’ve found about Itoi’s childhood from a biography published by Hobonichi. Watch it in video form or read it below.

I have one new thing to announce: I started a Patreon for myself, the YouTube channel, and this website! It’d be great if things like website hosting costs could be covered each year, but don’t worry, it’s not urgent that you support this or anything, I’m doing fine paying for it. I just wanted to give people a way to try supporting me and those costs if they’d like. It’d be nice if I could use this funding to buy more MOTHER magazines and merchandise to show you all too. And this new Patreon has a few rewards, like special access to an exclusive Discord channel on our server, first looks at stuff I’m working on, and… translation commissions! Yep, the higher tiers allow you to commission me for translations if you want something specific translated. There are some limits, but I’ll try my best!

Now to the news. First, some research updates. Looking through documented scans on archive.org, researcher PineappleCarl also found MOTHER 3 related 64 Dream scans from June 1998 and an interview from the March 7 1997 Famitsu where Itoi mentions how he had the “Forest of Chimera” subtitle in mind for MOTHER 3 while 2 was being made. DaEgg123 also found an interview with Shogo Sakai from a Nintendo Dream in January 2002 on the archive.

A new MOTHER audio drama and talk podcast debuted on May 14th, Mother’s Day! It’s called “MOTHER,” She Wrote, and it retells the story of the games as lived by the characters. Learn more about it here!

I have a few updates to the MOTHER 3 HQ Sound Mixing Hack too. If you haven’t heard, it’s a hack that allows for the ROM to improve how it processes music. A downloadable patcher is now available for the newest version of the patch, so try it out with your ROM to hear the difference!

Now onto our feature for this month… What was Itoi’s childhood like? Some background first. A year before I helped start Mother Forever, I studied abroad in Japan. I bought a couple books while I was there, and one of them was a biography in which Itoi is asked about his life called Koga Fumitake ga Matometa Itoi Shigesato no Koto, which I’d translate to Shigesato Itoi Stuff Collected by Fumitake Koga. I forgot I even had it until someone recently asked me how much we actually know about his childhood – which was not very much until now. In this book, he talks about his childhood and so much more. It’s going to be a little heavy, but I hope you’ll enjoy my summary of Itoi’s childhood.

• Itoi’s dad was a part of WWII and had Itoi in 1948 after returning from the war.
• Itoi’s name was based off of the Japanese pronouciation of the name Julien, specifically Julien Sorel, who is the protagonist in the book The Red and the Black.
• His mother left him when he was young, so he was raised by his father and grandmother.
• In school, on Mother’s Day, kids would give red carnations to their moms, but for kids without moms, they’d be given white carnations. Itoi felt singled out and embarrassed by it as a kid. He tried his best not to cry about it.
• His father remarried around 2nd or 3rd grade, but it was hard for Itoi to call her mom.
• People treated him with a lot of pity when he was a kid because he didn’t have a mom.
• He has no memory of ever being hugged, “after all, I couldn’t hug myself.”
• In the 1980s, he saw John Lennon hugging Yoko Ono on the cover of a Rolling Stones book and he really understood that feeling after going through all he had and remembering Lennon’s song, saying, “It’s MOTHER!”

That’s all for this time. I think this really gives us more insight into why the protagonists’ families in MOTHER are the way they are. Don’t you think so too?

Moving on to new Hobonichi updates: a Mani Mani statue went on sale at Hobonichi suddenly just during March! Orders for it are shipping from May to July. It’s a polyresin statue that Shigesato Itoi says he’d like to come with a seal sticker that he’ll put all his heart into and ward off any of its bad effects! Lots of other new merchandise is being sold at a new, in-person pop-up store called “MOTHER Street,” like a full sized version of Paula’s Plush, Ness’s Yoyo, a Guardian Digger shirt, new hats, and there’s a preorder for MOTHER skate decks. The skate decks are the only part of this that are online right now, but the rest will be online eventually. And did you notice? The Guardian Digger shirt uses a localized line from EarthBound! It’s the first merchandise from this new line of stuff that’s incorporated the localizations.

Besides that, disappointing news about the games themselves happened in March: the 3DS and Wii U eShop closed at the end of March, preventing any new copies of any of the MOTHER series from being sold digitally, including the only available digital resale of MOTHER 3 on the Wii U. But it’s not really a big deal at all, that never stopped MOTHER fans before! If you’re interested in learning how to make full use of your old 3DSes and Wii Us now that almost all support for them has officially ended, it’s really easy nowadays.
3DS Hacking Guide: 3ds.hacks.guide
Wii U Hacking Guide: wiiu.hacks.guide

Not being able to play MOTHER 3 won’t stop us from celebrating its anniversary! And if you need to play MOTHER 3 in your own language, use our online Mother International tool to easily patch it.

It’s about time we celebrate all that fan translation patch creators have done for us too, right? This year is actually the 15th anniversary of the first MOTHER 3 Fan Translation, and to celebrate every fan translation, we’d like any artists to submit to the 2023 Mother Forever Art Bash! Send in any MOTHER 3 character doing a pose on a transparent background, and we’ll put all your characters together in a picture to celebrate 15 years of fan translations that will be showcased in Mother Direct 2023. Good luck submitting yours!