Well Here’s A Good Opportunity For Nintendo To Release Mother 3

Yesterday, Mother 3 was out for Wii U Virtual Console in Japan. Now it’s time for Australia to have its day too.

Granted, fans have been making this request of Nintendo for almost a decade, but it feels more realistic now. Consider this: In 2013, Nintendo pulled off a surprise release of Earthbound — aka Mother 2 — on the Wii U. It sold well enough to justify the even-more-surprising announcement of Mother 1 just before E3 this year, which nobody expected because that original Famicom game had never come to Australia in the first place.

So now it feels like it’s finally time for Mother 3 to have its day. Originally released in 2006 for the Game Boy Advance, the lone successor to Earthbound is generally considered to be one of the greatest RPGs of all time, an emotionally stirring game that plays with music and genre cliches in some really cool ways. In 2008, fan translators released an excellent English patch of the game, but there’s no way to play it legally, which is a real shame.

The folks behind that fan translation have offered to let Nintendo have it for free, which seems unlikely — a brand new Treehouse localisation feels more in line with Nintendo’s modus operandi — but at this point, Mother fans would be excited about any kind of English release. Nintendo of America has taken on a bunch of other big JRPG projects for 2016 — like the 3DS game Bravely Second as well as Dragon Quests VII and VIII — so it’d be very cool to see them add Mother 3 to the pile too.

I can only assume that Nintendo decided to publish Square Enix’s lovely Bravely Default in the United States because I kept bugging them about it, so maybe this will work.