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The day was April 28th, 2006. MOTHER 3 had just been released in Japan only eight days prior, and the question of whether it would receive a North American release was inevitable. Little did anyone know how quickly someone would break the question, when Reggie was asked if they had plans to localize it during a visit to the Nintendo New York store. His response was, “Not yet!”, as everyone muttered sighs of disappointment under their breath. These vague answers left the MOTHER community with uncertainty, inspiring them to take matters into their own hands. This mission, dubbed “The MOTHER 3 Fan Translation” is a fascinating journey of its own merit, filled with aspiration, conflict, and insurmountable success. 

Around November 2006, two separate MOTHER 3 translation projects were formulated on the Starmen.net forums. One involved site co-founder Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin, Zhi, and Neo Demiforce of EarthBound Zero fame. On the other side of the fence was Mother3.org, which PK Hack-enthusiast Jeffman contributed to. However, many community members were impatient on waiting for these translation projects to be completed, desiring to experience the game as soon as possible. This led a forum member named Illuminum to create an automated translation program which would generate an English translation of the game’s text from VisualBoyAdvance, the most popular Game Boy Advance emulator. The accuracy of said translation was humorous, to say the least, resulting in either broken English or unrecognized text in many cases. Alas, it was an option many players settled for during this time period while waiting to see how the two translation projects would progress. 

Somewhere in the graveyard of failed fan projects lies Mother3.org, as lead programmer Jeffman tells: “…We didn’t get that far with it, and unfortunately it started to drown in a pool of drama, and just stopped. People kind of lost hope, and [it] got abandoned”. However, Jeffman was nonetheless determined to culminate everything he had learned in the PK Hack community to a MOTHER 3 project, and set his sights on joining Tomato’s team. “I approached Reid Young about it. I brought up the idea if they’d be interested in combining our efforts. We had something, not a lot, but some stuff on the hacking and translation. We did have a couple of people we were cool with and not part of the drama. So I filled it in with Reid, to see if it’s something they’d be interested in, and to my surprise they actually were. I was skeptical because of the drama, but they were on board with it”.

Many of the liberal changes made for the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation had already been decided before Jeffman joined the project, one of them being the character name change from Yokuba (“Greedy” in Japanese) to Fassad. Tomato was hesitant on keeping names he perceived as sounding too “Japanese”, thus leading to this decision. Fassad was chosen for several reasons, the major underlying theme being the pun of the name itself —“facade”— representing how the character is not who they present themself to be, to the villagers of Tazmily or the player themselves. Throughout the entire duration of the project, there was much debate on whether or not they should change Hinawa’s name. One suggestion mentioned was “Amber”, to coincide with Flint’s name, but since the team could not agree on replacement, Hinawa was kept in the end. 

Names weren’t the only localization changes made to MOTHER 3, however, as several location names were completely changed as well, most notably Great Scale Beach (“Ouroko” in Japanese), an important location first revealed during the Nintendo 64 version’s development; it was given the new name “Cerulean Beach”. Tazmily Village itself was considered to be renamed to “Dragonstep Village” before Jeffman instigated the project merge, but upon reviewing several pieces of MOTHER 64 promotional material, they decided to go with Tazmily as Nintendo had originally translated the name. Without Shigesato Itoi’s confirmation, the meaning of “Tatsumairi” was only speculation anyway.

One of the first tools created for the project was MOTHER 3 Funland, which Jeffman created for Tomato in order to navigate through the game’s text in an organized manner. Despite the name, it wasn’t very fun at all! MOTHER 3 is estimated to have over 1,000 pages of text, and even with this tool at their disposal, it wasn’t an easy feat compiling the script. It wouldn’t be as simple and easy as changing the game’s text; a new font needed to be created. Originally, Mother3.org utilized the English font already provided in MOTHER 3 itself, but they quickly learned that wasn’t an ideal option, as the formatting was too large to fit enough characters on-screen. The team then set out to create their own variable width font that would solve this issue, but right when they thought they had things in place to view all their text in game, they found another enormous problem—each part of the game uses a unique code! While Jeffman was uncertain as to why this was, speculating that perhaps different programmers developed different pieces of the game (menus, battle text, dialogue), the team had no choice but to now create several variable width fonts to accommodate for all parts of the game. Once those were created, the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation team could finally view their progress in-game up to that point! 

As stressful as navigating the game’s text was, the project certainly had its fun moments when it came to localizing the enemy names. In the original Japanese version, many of the chimera names are literal to what animals they are made out of, examples being “Chicken-Snake” and “Rhinoceros-Rocket”. Tomato saw a wonderful opportunity here to engage the MOTHER community in developing new, humorous names for the chimeras to better reflect MOTHER 2’s localization. Henceforth, Slitherhen, Rhinocerocket, and many other memorable enemy names were born! Another notable contribution from the community was dubbing over one of the few voice clips in the game, where Lucas and D.C.M.C. leader OJ cry, “Janken pon!” when playing Stone-Sheet-Clippers. The original line references the Japanese equivalent to Rock Paper Scissors, but in order to familiarize the English audience, Reid Young and his wife Camille recorded a new voice clip, saying “Ready, set, go!”. Since the fan translation’s release in 2008, there were many people eager to have Lucas’ official Super Smash Bros.voice actress, Lani Minella, dub the clip, and in 2018 she finally did it upon Karmageddon’s request! Today, both versions are available on separate patches. 

The MOTHER 3 Fan Translation was officially announced as finished on October 14th, 2008, with a release imminent the following week. While many fans expressed their gratitude and excitement in the comments, behind the scenes one fateful, yet mysterious incident caused concern for the team. An anonymous email claiming to have been sent from somebody inside the gaming industry warned that the fan translation would destroy any incentive for an official release, as its quality outmatched what an official localization could provide. They implored the team to cancel the translation patch, despite only being a few days away from their promised release window. Neither Tomato nor Jeffman were certain about the credibility of the email, so they pressed forward and released the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation on October 17th, 2008. After two days, it received over 70,000 downloads—and that number only kept rising, reaching 100,000 within its first week. Everyone’s hard work had paid off despite all the drama, technical troubles, and elusive warnings. No one ever did find out exactly where that insider email originated from, the only lead being that it was not sent from within North America. 

Twelve years have passed since then, and the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation still remains the only option available to experience the game in English. Leading up to release, the team promised that if an official translation were to ever come out, the project would be canned. That promise is still kept to this day; if an official North American MOTHER 3 localization is ever announced, distribution of the patch will cease immediately. In April of 2013, Tomato famously offered Nintendo of America permission to use the team’s material, or even officially re-translate the game for the company all free of charge. Alas, Tomato’s offer was only met with silence.

Several years have passed, and although discussion of an official localization was once started in earnest, MOTHER 3’s future still remains as murky as it was back in 2006. Thankfully, due to the efforts of the Fan Translation team, MOTHER 3, at the very least, doesn’t remain a mystery like it was when it originally released. In fact, regardless of the unofficial nature of the patch, the MOTHER 3 Fan Translation is hailed as one of the greatest video game localizations of all time, neck-and-neck with EarthBound!