Mother 3’s anti-capitalist message still resonates two decades later

This month marks 20 years since the launch of Mother 3 for the Game Boy Advance, the RPG sequel to the cult classic Earthbound (known as Mother 2 in Japan). It’s still never seen an official release outside Japan, but Mother 3’s unflinching critique of capitalism feels more relevant than ever today.

Mother 3 opens in the bucolic Tazmily Village. There’s no crime and no concept of currency — all the items at the trading post are free for whoever needs them. Within the first couple hours, an army of masked, portly pigmen wearing tactical gear set the nearby forest on fire and start performing experiments on the local wildlife, resulting in the death of protagonist Lucas’s mother and the disappearance of his twin brother Claus. Fast-forward a few years, and the Pigmasks have introduced railroads, factories, money, and TV-like “Happy Boxes” to Tazmily. The once-happy villagers grow bored with the lack of stuff to do (and buy) in their hometown, and relocate en masse to the glitzy and gaudy Pigmask metropolis of New Pork City, where they enjoy the “freedom” to work ceaselessly in order to buy more junk.

Aesthetically, Mother 3 has a lot in common with Earthbound: endearing sprite art, pun-laden dialogue, toe-tapping tunes, oddball enemy designs, and trippy battle backgrounds. Thematically and tonally, Mother 3 is a very different animal. If Earthbound is The Last of Us for quirky 16-bit RPGs, Mother 3 is The Last of Us Part 2 — it’s gonna ruffle some feathers. It’s far more serious, far more upsetting, and in many ways far more ambitious than its SNES predecessor.

For two decades now, Mother 3 has been the subject of an almost occult fascination among English-speaking Nintendo fans, inspiring a longstanding online effort to “localize Mother 3.” When Nintendo wouldn’t do it, a group of fans — who happened to also be professional translators — took on the project themselves. Back in 2013, they even offered their English script to Nintendo, free of charge. No dice.

Online speculation ran rampant about why Nintendo wouldn’t bring the game to international audiences, even via digital-only platforms like the eShop or the Switch Online retro collection. (Mother 3 came to Switch Online in Japan back in February 2024.) Many observers concluded that Nintendo’s decision was due to the game’s “controversial” content, like its critique of capitalism, or its depiction of a group of genderfluid people with magical powers.

Throughout his 15-year tenure as the head of Nintendo of America, Reggie Fils-Aimé was asked countless times about Mother 3. In 2022, once he’d retired from the company, Fils-Aimé finally gave Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier an answer about why the game hadn’t been localized. It wasn’t because the Pigmasks routinely make a gesture that looks suspiciously close to a Nazi salute. It wasn’t because of a certain character’s very dramatic suicide. “That is not at all the issue why Mother 3 in particular never made it to the West,” Fils-Aimé told Bloomberg. “It was all based on the business needs and the business situation at the time.” The Nintendo DS had already been available in North America since late 2004. The time and effort involved to port a niche title for older hardware “just didn’t make business sense” at that point, Fils-Aimé said.

For many “localize Mother 3” diehards, Fils-Aimé’s comments finally put the issue to rest, even if it wasn’t the resolution they’d long hoped for. Still, with the game’s 20th anniversary looming — it debuted on April 20, 2006 — there are sure to be some folks getting out their trusty clown makeup one last time. After all, if Nintendo can bring back the Virtual Boy, the company’s biggest hardware flop of all time, a long-awaited English translation of Mother 3 doesn’t seem so impossible. Right?