For some time now the community of Nintendo I expected Mother 3 be added to the catalog of Game Boy Advance on the Nintendo Switch Online service. After all, this is a cult video game that, despite its popularity, has never been officially published outside of Japan. Well, it has just been revealed that it will be added to the service, but that it will be exclusively in the Japanese version of it, which caused frustration among fans of the franchise.
Why isn’t Mother 3 officially localized by Nintendo?
Yesterday, the new Nintendo Direct: Partner Showcase was posted on YouTube, which was full of exciting announcements for video games coming soon to the nintendo switch. However, there was one announcement in particular that caught everyone’s attention and that was only present in the Japanese version of this event: Nintendo announced that Mother 3 will be added to the GameBoy Advance catalog on Nintendo Switch Online, but only on the Japanese version of the platform. This frustrated and disappointed all the people who thought that this new digital video game service would be the perfect opportunity for the rest of the world to finally try this RPG officially.
Mother 3 is the third installment of the Earthbound saga, created by Shigesato Itoi. Despite its exclusivity, the rest of the world was able to become familiar with this game when the protagonist, Lukewas added to Super Smash Bros Brawl. This caused many players to decide to try their original game, through an excellent translation made by fans. With its moving story, charismatic characters and absurd world, Mother 3 became a critical success among those who were able to try it. Because of all this, the community has been asking Nintendo for years to localize it and publish it officially outside of Japan, but it seems that the company is not listening to their requests.
All this commotion led to Shigesato Itoi himself commenting on the situation. On his official Twitter account, he said: «Please talk to Nintendo about it. No with me”. This means that he is aware of the situation, but that, at the end of the day, Nintendo is responsible for deciding whether they are going to localize Mother 3 or not. The strangest part of this story is that 4 plushies of the game’s characters were also announced (Luke, claus, Duster and Kumatora) to celebrate the launch of its version on Nintendo Switch Online Japan. Many fans are wondering if this new focus on the GameBoy Advance classic means they have something else planned for the near future.
It should be noted that any Nintendo Switch user can access the Japanese Nintendo Switch Online catalog by changing the region of their console. However, Mother 3 is a dialogue-heavy video game, so we do not recommend experiencing it this way (Unless you know Japanese) Fans continue to express their sadness at not receiving an official port or remaster of this beloved video game. But you never know, maybe one day Nintendo will end up surprising everyone.
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