MOTHER/Earthbound

[KABOOM]

http://earthbound.nintendo.com
http://earthboundcentral.com

MOTHER, MOTHER 2 (called EarthBound outside Japan), and MOTHER 3 are a trio of RPGs for NES, SNES, and GBA respectively. They are famous for giving Ness and Lucas to the world, being very strange and trippy, having an extremely devoted fanbase, and continually being screwed over by Nintendo; the first and third game still haven't been officially released outside of Japan, and after EarthBound's SNES release (in Japan and North America only) it too was never seen again outside Japan...

...until today! For today, EarthBound has been re-released on the Wii U Virtual Console, not only in Japan and North America but in Europe as well, for the first time ever! If you have ten dollars and a Wii U, you should get it - it would send a good message to Nintendo (who appear to have put a lot of work into this re-release), and it's quite fun, too.

Unfortunately, MOTHER and MOTHER 3 still haven't seen the light of day outside Japan, but if you scour the Internet you can find prototypes and fan-translations allowing you to play the games in English. And, of course, if EarthBound sells well on the Virtual Console, perhaps things may change for the better...

Discuss the games, the translations, and my awful summary here.
While checking to see if this had already been made, I found an old topic called "Who here despises Lucas and Ness?" Shame on you all.

[Bomberman101]

You forgot Ninten. (I hear that's how he's called in MOTHER 1)

I've been playing Earthbound lately. Pretty fun.

If they start giving GBA games for the 3DS they should give an english version of Mother 3.

[KABOOM]

I mentioned only Ness and Lucas because thanks to Smash Bros. they're pretty much the only characters in the series that anyone outside the series knows or cares about. (Well, there's Jeff and Porky, but they're not even as well-known as Ness and Lucas.

[Bomberman101]

Makes sense.
Smash Bros. was how I got interested in playing Earthbound anyway.

[Zunar]

(Would it count as advertising if I mentioned that I head the project of translating the GBA version of EarthBound? I mean, I have a sigbar for it in my sig, so I guess I don't really need to mention it, but since it's relevant to the topic... Well, if it's advertising, somebody let me know and I'll take this out)

I don't have a WiiU, but if I did, I'd definitely get it. EarthBound is one of my favorite SNES games, and it's great that they finally re-released it on the VC. I wonder if it has any changes, I've heard there was a lot of copyright stuff and that's why it wasn't out sooner.

[Bomberman101]

Your sig says you're translating Mother 2. The only game that's out that's english...

[Zunar]

The GBA version isn't. Plus EarthBound was censored a ton, so we'll be re-translating it from scratch, plus it'll be portable. The music and sounds are kinda bad, but I don't think that's enough of a reason to not play it.

In case you didn't know, it builds on another translation of the first game, since both are included in the GBA port. Coincidentally it was done by the same guy who led the fan translation of Mother 3. Earthbound Central has details on that, there's a link in the first post.

[Bomberman101]

What was censored in the game? (PM me it if you want)

[Zunar]

Swearing, harsh words (Death and dying for example; they wrote around those words, so the theme is implied but not directly stated), Ness being naked in Magicant, graphcis that are similar to copyrighted material, things like that. Mato has an extensive article in his comparison at Legends of Localization. Check it out if you want more details.