The Mother 3 fan translation is a full English version of the 2006 Japanese video game Mother 3, created by members of the EarthBound fan community under the leadership of Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin. The original game was released in Japan after many years of delays. When official plans for an English version did not happen, fans from the EarthBound website Starmen.net announced their own translation in November 2006.

Twelve fans worked on the project. They were carefully chosen by Tomato and had experience with translating games before. The team spent thousands of hours modifying the game's data and translating 1,000 pages of dialogue. They created their own tools to help with the work. The finished translation was released in October 2008 as a patch. The patch was downloaded more than 100,000 times during its first week. A fan-made, full-color, 200-page guide was also released with the translation.

Fan community

After many years of problems like delays, lower quality, and cancellations, the game Mother 3 was released in April 2006 for Japanese players. It is the Game Boy Advance sequel to the 1995 Super NES video game EarthBound, which was called Mother 2 in Japan. The American EarthBound fan community supported the series by organizing events and collecting signatures on petitions. One petition used special software and carefully checked names, and the 819 pages with 31,000 signatures were sent to Nintendo's Japanese and American offices, along with fan art. Although the gaming community supported the game, Nintendo did not respond. Because of this, the release of Mother 3 became a reason for fans to come together. 1UP.com wrote that "no other game in history had such strong demand for an English version."

The fan community did not expect an official English version of Mother 3 when it was released in April 2006. Four months later, they learned Nintendo was not interested in creating one. In November, an interview with Nintendo of America's "Treehouse" localization group confirmed this. Soon after, a fan translation was announced on the EarthBound community site Starmen.net. Reid Young, a co-founder of the site, said the fan translation "was as much about the fans as it was about the game."

Development

The Mother 3 fan translation project was announced in November 2006. It was led by Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin, a professional game translator who previously worked on anime like Dragon Ball. A group of about 12 people translated the game from Japanese to English over a two-year period, spending thousands of hours on the work. Most of the team had already helped with other fan translation projects. Tomato’s experience in the fan translation community helped the project get the tools and support it needed. Tomato worked on the project as "a second full-time job" while also working full-time as a translator. Young, who handled public relations for the project and was not directly involved in the work, estimated that Tomato spent over 1,000 hours on the project, Jeffman nearly 1,000 hours, and even the smallest contributors between 50 and 100 hours. No one officially tracked the hours. The team chose not to change the game except for adding a new intro screen, which meant they did not include their names in the credits. The translation involved two tasks: modifying the game’s data (ROM) and translating the scripted dialogue.

Modifying the ROM required making detailed changes to the game’s code. Young compared this process to teaching someone a new language by slowly changing their DNA through trial and error. Some technical changes included adjusting fonts, graphics, and creating custom software. The game was designed in a way that did not have enough memory to display the needed text on the screen. Japanese characters all take up the same space (monospaced), but English characters vary in size. To fix this, the team had to custom-code the English characters to fit properly. Tomato said that "no text display routine wound up untouched," meaning the team had to manually adjust the code for variable-width fonts. Graphics changes included the new intro screen and images from the English version of EarthBound to keep the game’s features consistent. For example, an octopus statue pun from Mother 2 was changed to a pencil statue in the EarthBound translation and updated in Mother 3. The team also created custom tools to help with translation, such as a cross-assembler and software for handling scripts and patches. Members of the hacking team included Tomato, Jeffman, byuu, and sblur.

About 1,000 pages of text were translated, which Young described as a large amount compared to other role-playing games. The team estimated the cost of hiring someone to do the translation as $30,000. Young said Tomato was very detail-oriented and kept the translation team small to avoid slowing progress. However, he asked for group input on certain parts, like puns, where more ideas were helpful. For example, the character Yokuba, named after a Japanese word for "greed," was renamed Fassad, which relates to the Arabic word for "corruption" and the English word "facade." The team also changed mice characters from a Japanese dialect to a thick Cockney English dialect.

The team reported that the highest levels of Nintendo of America were aware of their project, though Nintendo did not stop them. In February 2007, Reggie Fils-Aimé, president of Nintendo of America, said he had heard about the translation. The team stated they would stop the project if Nintendo announced plans for the game. While the legality of the translation was unclear, Young said it was not fair to call the project reckless or unfair. The team also opposed software piracy and encouraged people to buy the game legally or import it from Japan. A Square Enix employee supported the translation. At the end of the project, the team believed the fan translation might lead to more restrictions on similar projects, not more support. Tomato said he struggled to appreciate his work because he knew every line so well, but he hoped this would change in five years. The project gave Tomato a deeper respect for the skill of writing.

Release

The localization patch was completed in October 2008. Although Tomato estimated the game would be downloaded "a few thousand times total," it was downloaded more than 100,000 times during its first week, excluding downloads from other countries. The patch requires a ROM image file of the game to function. Along with the translation, the team released the Mother 3 Handbook, an English player's guide for the game that had been developed since June 2008. Wired described the full-color, 200-page guide as similar to a professional strategy guide, with quality comparable to guides from Prima Games and BradyGames. Tomato updated the patch in 2009, 2014, and 2021. The patch is currently being translated into languages such as French, Italian, and Spanish, with translation tools made available in 2014.

Reception

Frank Caron of Ars Technica stated that the "large project … was a major success" and that the fan translation fulfilled the hopes of many gamers, including himself. He said it is hard to understand why Nintendo did not release an official English version. Kotaku’s Mike Fahey noted that the translators were incorrect in advising players to buy official merchandise when import copies were not available to justify piracy. The Verge noted the two-year fan translation of the game Mother 3 as evidence of the fanbase’s commitment. Dustin Bailey of GamesRadar+ described the translation as "excellent."