Trivia / Mother 3

• Accent Depundent: The English Fan Translation makes a brief quip about a sparrow's fluency in game lingo being "rarrow", before correcting itself to "rare". This gag makes no sense to accents without the Mary-marry-merry merger.
• Approval of God: Shigesato Itoi himself gave his blessing to the Fan Translation, citing that it's unlikely the game will ever receive an official English localization.
• Content Leak: The game's ROM surfaced online just hours before it officially hit store shelves.
• Creator Breakdown: When the game was still being produced for the Nintendo 64, developer Shigesato Itoi suffered from major depression that contributed to the game's plot being even more bleak than the final product. By the time the game shifted to the Game Boy Advance, Itoi's depression had subsided to a degree and gave the planned ending a happier feel to it.
• Defictionalization: Someone actually made pork chips in real life. It's about as healthy as you'd expect. The blog itself does this for a lot of Mother-series foods.
• Development Gag: Near the end of the game, the main party runs into Flint and discover that he's "bald as a bean" beneath his cowboy hat. This is a nod to the April 1999 issue of The MOTHER 3 Times, a promotional newsletter put out during the development of the game's Nintendo 64 incarnation, which encouraged fans to send in letters theorizing about what's under Flint's hat.
• Dummied Out: There are ungodly amounts of unused content in the game:
  • In terms of enemies, we have a giant bear, a tree monster, and the Alkaline Man, along with lots of unused entries that don't have any data to them.
  • There's a ton of unused music.
  • There are lots of unused lines of text in the game. Notable examples include an exchange with the producer of something called "Mr. Pirkle and Ms. Lardna's Love Nest", mentions of a New Pork Island, a conversation with the seventh Magypsy, Locria (who evidently had different development), and some end-game conversations with Kumatora and Duster (asking Lucas how having a mother felt like, and discovering all of their memories were fake.)
  • Unused sprites and animations, unused (and sometimes very terrifying-looking) battle backgrounds, a picture of a gas station, and a giant pig balloon of some sort are just a fraction of the unused graphics in the game. Some of the sprites even bear an odd resemblance to a certain Universal Cosmic Destroyer...
  • There are unused cutscenes. Three of them seem to be flashbacks meant to play during the final battle (Lucas's childhood memories), while two of them appear to be from the ending (dealing with the ultimate fate of Salsa and Alec, who were the only ones left behind when everyone moved to New Pork City, surrounded with burnt animal corpses and falling meteorites.)
  • A "memo" feature, which would give detailed information on various aspects of the game, was abandoned late enough in development that it completely works, aside from some incorrect info (presumably referring to how the game was at that point in development) and not actually being able to access it in the final game. The fan translation restores access, but doesn't fix the outdated descriptions.
• Fan Translation: Nintendo's decision to not release the game internationally led to a group of fans doing an extremely extensive localization project that took two years and thousands of hours to complete. Released in 2008, the Mother 3 fan translation stands as probably the most famous example of a fan translation in gaming history, rivaled only by the 1998 fan translation of Final Fantasy V and the 1999 fan translation of Trials of Mana. These awesome guys extensively hacked the game front-to-back to provide as close of an experience to a hypothetical official localization as possible, aided by the fact that it was all spearheaded by Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin, previously a subtitler for Funimation. The end result was one of the most widely acclaimed fan translations ever made, and its presence within the fandom has galvanized its status as the definitive way to experience Mother 3 in the west (and not just among fans either; even Wikipedia accepts the fan translation's terminology as close enough to official, with the article on the fan translation even getting 'Good Article' status). The online readme, about halfway down the page, starts a very, very long list of every hack that had to be programmed in order to make the translation work. Buried in there is this gem:
  The game only had enough memory for 40 letters of battle text on the screen at once. Fixing this was assumed impossible, but a fix was figured out anyway, allowing for infinite text per line.
• Inspiration for the Work: Mozart's Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 21, which he wrote after the death of his mother, served as composer Shogo Sakai's inspiration for "Confusion", which plays over Flint's reaction to Hinawa's death. He discusses the specific influences from the Mozart piece on his YouTube channel.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The Deluxe Box, which contains the game, a special edition red Game Boy Micro, and a replica of the Franklin Badge. Naturally, these go for ridiculous prices on auction websites.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": Super Smash Bros. Brawl marked Lucas' international debut due to Mother 3 infamously receiving no official release outside Japan, with his arrival bringing with him several instances of Late-Arrival Spoiler.
• Moved to the Next Console: It's a rare case of an example that involves a major style change. It moved from the Nintendo 64 to the Game Boy Advance, going from a fully-3D title to a sprite-based one. It technically began development on the Super NES.
• No Export for You: Probably the most notable example in Nintendo's library. Lucas and other elements of the game have appeared in the Super Smash Bros. series since Brawl, but his home game has never seen a release outside of Japan. Nintendo is very much aware of the vocal fanbase's demands for an official Western release, even joking about it during an E3 press conference, but executives have stated that the main concern is that they can't justify translating a lengthy Eastern RPG into English without knowing for certain that they'll recoup costs. They did briefly consider the idea of putting the original Japanese version of the game onto the North American and European Wii U Virtual Console, but such plans were scrapped entirely when the console flopped.
• Role Reprise: In v1.3 of the fan translation, Lani Minella provides the sound clip of Lucas saying "ready, set, go!"
• Saved from Development Hell: The game was first proposed as an SNES CD-ROM game, then started development as a standard Super Nintendo Entertainment System title shortly after the release of EarthBound. The game was then moved to the 64DD, then the standard N64, then delayed several times until finally being canceled. It was ultimately revived for the Game Boy Advance and finally finished.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: One of the guesses as to why Mother 3 remains a case of No Export for You is due to intellectual property concerns. While EarthBound faced similar speculation that was eventually proven false by its Wii U Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch Online releases^note While EarthBound does indeed sample numerous pieces of music, sampling remains a copyright grey area, especially if the samples are transformed to the point of unrecognizability like most of EarthBound's are., the issues with Mother 3's music are more egregious since several of its tracks are very recognizable homages to many popular songs. This, along with numerous Shout Outs to various other works that may also be infringing, probably would prevent a release even if Nintendo thought it would sell well enough. A detailed explanation can be watched here.
• Sequel Gap: It came out a good twelve years after EarthBound's Japanese release.
• Trolling Creator: The battle song MROB-6720M is similar to GENE163-1425 except that the latter has more tempo interruptions which makes it seem like the song was intentionally designed to trip up the player who was expecting the same rhythm pattern as MROB-6720M.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Using the silver dragonfly item against Negative Man is said to yield an extremely rare and valuable item. For those wondering, Negative Man does actually have a 2% chance of dropping a Meteotite which is worth 2500 DP, but this is unrelated to whether or not you use the silver dragonfly.
• Vaporware:
  • The N64 prototype was featured heavily in Nintendo Power, but it was never released.
  • Mother 3 was announced for a Western release on the GBA, but remained in Japan.
• What Could Have Been:
  • MOTHER 3 started life as a Nintendo 64 title, which was rather widely previewed and received significant press attention both in Japan and internationally, and Nintendo of America seemed pretty dead-set on giving it an international release.
    • The N64 game was also supposed to be even darker than the final product—mostly due to the fact Itoi was suffering from depression at the time. This version of the game was widely called EarthBound 64 by both Nintendo and gaming press, so more often than not it's still called that in discussions to differentiate it from the released GBA version. Despite its extensive previewing at various Nintendo and game events, it never got very far. It was stuck in Development Hell for a very long time, and Shigesato Itoi was, not being very knowledgeable about computers, very ambitious with the project. Due to these and other factors, it ended up being cancelled and restarted several years later for the Game Boy Advance.
    • One of the most famous sequences from the N64 version which didn't make it into the GBA game was a sequence where Claus and Lucas rode a cart through a mine shaft. In the game, they're separated in Chapter 1 and never reunited until their duel at the finale.
    • Early video footage of EarthBound 64 depicts a character◊ similar in design to Ninten and Ness. Common fan speculation placed this as an early design for either Lucas or Claus for years before an old interview with Itoi was dug up where he revealed the character was simply a placeholder put in early screenshots and footage to make the game more recognizable as a Mother game.
    • DCMC was originally supposed to have a female vocalist, and Kumatora's outfit was surprisingly more Stripperific; most of the cast's appearances and clothing were fairly different. Ness may have been set to appear in it, or perhaps Lucas was intended to look identical to him much as Ness was identical to Ninten.
    • In a June 26, 1997 interview with Weekly Famitsu, Shigesato Itoi announced that the game was going to be twelve chapters long; this was cut down to eight in the final game nine years later.
    • The January 1998 issue of The MOTHER 3 Times stated that one planned location was the Great Scale Village, which is terrorized by a Kraken that kills Lighter's wife, Tobacco. In the final game, the Great Scale Village, the Kraken, and Tobacco are all absent, and Tobacco's fate is instead met by Hinawa, who gets fatally mauled by the Mecha Drago.
  • Not even the Game Boy Advance version is free of this trope. Some sprites were found with Porky in a different machine and some of those sprites of him in that machine when put together make a glass shattering animation which looks like his defeat was different from the final version which could mean that you originally were able to kill him off before they changed it to where he escapes in and traps himself in the Absolutely Safe Capsule forever.
  • Claus has a number of unused sprites showing him getting killed, Strapped to an Operating Table to be cyborgified, and a finished version looking like a Starman. There's also a number of very disturbing and morbid battle backgrounds pertaining to Claus which caused fan theories to run wild once discovered, with some suggesting it was an unused boss or possibly even Giygas. While the true purpose of the backgrounds remains unknown, comments from Itoi suggests they were from an earlier version of the final battle with the Masked Man/Claus, which was meant to be told using only nightmarish and symbolic imagery.
  • There's also unused sprites of Flint actually killing the Mecha-Drago instead of leaving it alive, which suggests that he was going to turn out similar to the beast, as well as sprites of Kumatora in different outfits not seen in the final.
  • An unused menu called "Memos" exists in the data of the game, and from the text found would have contained gameplay tips and background information on various characters and items. This was removed so late into development that almost all of the code is completely functional, allowing the fan translation to re-enable it with relative ease.
  • Judging by the text of some of these memos, nuts were going to be used as pre-timeskip money, while post-timeskip it would come in the form of "Porkyupons" dropped by enemies.
  • Also judging from the information gathered by hackers, Flint is able to equip some of Lucas's strongest weapons, which may suggest that he was going to either be a permanent party member, or rejoin the party late in the game.
  • A partially unused stat called "Kindness" can be found in the data of the game. Unused text suggests it could have influenced story events depending on how high it was. The stat still exists in the final game, but is not used in any meaningful capacity.
  • Unlike in EarthBound, there's only a single set of "Don't Care" names... the game is still programmed to cycle through seven sets of names, just like in EarthBound, but the same names are copied into all seven sets.

---