The MOTHER 3 development discoveries never stop, don’t they? It was only a few years ago now that Lorenzooone, the user behind the Italian Fan Translation unearthed the extended debug rooms. If you happened to think that would be the end – prepare to be amazed!

On March 2nd, 2022, hacking community PPG restored additional debug menus for the overworld and battle system, pulling the curtains back on a handful of new development info on the game!

According to PPG, “The battle engine/overworld engine were written by different people. Former is C++/latter is C.” It’s long been common knowledge that MOTHER 3‘s coding is a mess, which resulted in several hurdles during the development of the English Fan Translation. An additional interesting fact by /PPG/ is that parts of the battle engine were recycled in Magical Vacation, another game by Brownies which was released overseas.

The overworld debug menu includes several options, such as: changing the background music, the amount of DP held, toggling collision and enemy encounters off, and the ability to load different sprite tables.

One of the most interesting aspects however, is that the menu includes a leftover from an earlier iteration of the game – as noted by fellow site contributor Snowwood, DP in the menu is referred to as “coupons.” This is a reference to a cut mechanic, as detailed in this hidden memo:

“Let’s say an enemy drops a coupon when it is defeated in battle. In your case, what would you do with it? Use it as a bookmark or something? That may be a wonderful way to make use of it. But take it to a redemption center, and they will actually cash it in for m-m-money! Each shop has a different rate, so be sure to think about it before you trade. You can redeem up to 100,000 Porkyupons at a time.”

The presence of coupons here suggests it may have been a late change in development to simplify things over to DP through Save Frogs, with the developers not bothering to change the term in the menu.

The menus themselves aren’t all through, as some of it’s functionality reveals other leftover elements too, such as unused animations when stunning NPCs!

Of course, If you’d like to try out the debug menus for yourself – you can! Lorenzooone has already created an English Patch for it. You can enable the menus by pressing start and select at the same time, more info on said patch and a download can be found here!

If you’re interested in reading more behind the scenes MOTHER 3 info, please check out these pages on The Cutting Room Floor for cut content and prerelease info.