[Image: Nintendo]
When the Nintendo Classic Mini Super Famicom was announced for Japan earlier this year, there was one glaring omission: Mother 2 (Earthbound in the West). Nintendo recently explained to Famitsu why this is.
Mother 2’s omission surprised many people! It was one of the titles that came up with Japanese developers said what games they would have added to the Super Famicom Mini.
The localised version was included on the SNES Mini, which is perhaps the first time a Mother game got a release in the West that it did not get in Japan.
According to Kazuyoshi Nishi from Nintendo’s general affairs department, the idea was to balance out the games according between various genres and titles people loved. But that doesn’t exactly explain why Mother 2 was left out.
“It’s not simply because it’s Japan that we didn’t include Mother 2,” Nishi told Famitsu, “but with the balance of genres, IPs and characters, there were lots of other RPGs we wanted to compile besides Mother 2.”
“The concept this time around was that this was something to be played with kids and friends.”
Famitsu replied that Nintendo didn’t want to increase the number of single-player RPGs. Nishi agreed, and Famitsu then added that if there weren’t boundaries, then they’d end up wanting all the games on the Super Famicom Mini.
“Naturally,” replied Nishi, agreeing. “If it were possible, I’d want to include all of them.” If Nintendo put lots of RPGs, action RPGs and sim games, then folks would end up playing alone. That’s why sports games like Super Soccer were also included in Japanese release instead of Mother 2.
Takao Shimizu, who helmed Star Fox 64, worked as UI director for Famicom Mini and Super Famicom Mini. For him, if players think titles are lacking, they can buy them on Nintendo’s Virtual Console.
“Meaning that I don’t think it’s necessary for these products to be perfect,” Shimizu told Famitsu.
But this is Japan! Players love role-playing games. Wouldn’t it make sense for an iconic role-playing game like Mother 2 be included with the Super Famicom Mini instead of the SNES Mini? Guess not!
Comments
6 responses to “Nintendo’s Excuse For Why Mother 2 Isn’t On The Super Famicom Mini”
I’m still not sure why they restricted themselves to 21 games on the SNES Mini when the NES Mini had 30 games. If the SNES Mini had 30 games, and included titles such as Chrono Trigger, DKC 2/3, KI, Terranigma, The Lost Vikings/TLV2, maybe Stunt Race FX, Something like Battletoads or TMNT: Turtles in Time, and maybe an official English translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 to top it off, it would have been perfect and I don’t think there would have been any complaints from anyone.
There’s easily space for 9 more games on it so it’s still kind of confusing to me why they didn’t do this.
Pretty sure the extra space is required to support 4x rewind (1 per save state) per game.
I have to eat my words here. I’m getting confused between the original games and the games you can add on via the hack – original games are in a read-only partition and don’t compete with save states for space. So yeah, no idea why 21!
It’s already selling like hotcakes without the extra effort of licencing more titles and translating games. Seems like smart business from their end?
I may be wrong about this, but I would guess it comes down to a licensing issue, specifically costs. I imagine older software (eg. NES games) would be cheaper to license then newer software. With unit prices being similar more games would drive the unit cost for the SNES mini up. But that is just my guess
That would have been fine by me, I would have gladly paid a little extra to get those games I mentioned onto it.