I’ve become enough of a digital native by now that I find it virtually impossible to work without some kind of internet-derived distraction to listen to while I do it. This week, the algorithmic gods of YouTube decided to serve me the two hour official soundtrack for Mother 4.
Those not intimately familiar with the Mother (known as Earthbound in the West) community might not have realised there was a Mother 4. As I was soon to learn, there isn’t any more. Mother 4 began in concept as a fan project back in the heady days of 2009, in the wake of the well-received fan translation of Mother 3 and an arguably over-optimistic goal.
The team set out to capture the emotional strength and contemporary American quirkiness of the original Mother RPGs, helped out by a supportive fan community and the implicit blessing of the series’ creator turned stationery entrepreneur Shigesato Itoi. It was a tall order, given the hundreds of staff and over ten years dedicated to producing Mother 3.
A few changes of project staff and nearly a decade later, the project known as Mother 4 has rebranded, after copyright issues with Nintendo, but it has several working trailers, a fully fleshed out and professional sounding soundtrack, and a significant community of its own.
It’s up in the air whether it will ever be finished — certainly lacking the professional staff of a major studio will inhibit progress, as will a lack of financial backing and extremely high expectation — but the game remains, nominally, on the way.
So it’s disappointing to see that all the community focus is on some futile quest to have Mother 3 brought over officially, instead of backing this new creative endeavour — whether or not it bears the official name.
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It seems unlikely Nintendo will ever officially licence Mother 3 for distribution in the West, not least because of its sexual and abuse themes and dark plotline which don’t accord with their family friendly image.
There’s also the fact that while Earthbound and Earthbound Beginnings (Mother 2 and Mother 1) saw reasonably success on the eShop, they already had full English translations which made porting easy.
The blog entries from the Mother 3 Fan Translation are still available and detail serious problems which ran the project up to the two year mark, including character limits and complex idioms and puns which needed the work of a skilled translator.
Which brings me to the key reason localising Mother 3 is a blind alley. We have a game here which has been translated to a polished standard, true to the original Japanese, by a professional Japanese to English translator (Clyde Mandelin). Why would we need Nintendo to do it again, while censoring some of the more troubling parts of one of gaming’s most affecting plots, which touches on familial separation, guilt and parental abandonment?
It isn’t merely a case of legitimising the game, because in so doing it would be destructive to the creative endeavour undertaken. Already in the time since localisation in 2015, the term Earthbound Zero (the unofficial name for Mother 1) has disappeared from common parlance, and rendered the work that went alongside it — stories, art, music — somehow alien in the face of the official nomenclature.
All of this points to a problem with the fandom, and with Nintendo fans in general. It’s okay to take what you have, and let go. Nintendo releasing Mother 3 won’t make the game any more wonderful — that would be a tall order indeed. There’s a whole new world of creativity out there, inspired by Itoi and Mother, either undiscovered or waiting to be born.
What would be more true to the spirit of the Mother games than for Mother 4, or whatever its eventual title becomes, to finally see release? It would be the story of precious kids, none of whom went into it expecting the challenge that awaited them, finally coming through and saving their community.
It would break this curse which has hung over the Mother fandom, and over other fandoms, for too long — of constantly fighting against mean uncle Nintendo, forever denying us the localisation we crave. Instead, we would be a constructive force, adding to the canon for the generations of fans to come. I’m nearly ten years on from discovering the stories of Lucas, Ness and Ninten for the first time. I want kids in ten years to be discovering them too — alongside Travis, Meryl, Leo and Floyd.
