Reggie Fils-Aime And Shigesato Itoi Tell Fans To Ask Nintendo About Mother 3
Reggie Fils-Aime and Shigesato Itoi have a message to Mother/Earthbound fans. And that message is, to leave them alone.
As reported by NintendoLife, both have responded to fans on Twitter about bringing Mother 3 to the West. Itoi’s message, translated from Japanese to English by Google, is simply:
“Please talk to Nintendo about that, not me.”
Reggie Fils-Aime’s message is similarly succinct. Quoting an article with a caption that it’s no longer Itoi’s decision, he said:
“No longer mine as well.”
As we had reported, Mother 3, which has yet to be localized to the West in either US or Europe, was added to Switch Online in Japan. A localization would have to be produced from scratch to make a US release possible.
Reggie Fils-Aime, who was president and COO of Nintendo of America from 2006 to 2019, had once said that the company hadn’t been able to commission a localization because of the business climate of the time he was asked. At this point, Earthbound and Earthbound Beginnings, which both already had English localizations, were released on the US and Europe eShops for 3DS and Wii U.
Shigesato Itoi, who is famous in Japan as a copywriter and for his Hobonichi Techo organizers/notebooks, had also chimed in on the issue in a documentary. The writer for all the Mother/Earthbound games revealed that he knows about the long notorious fan translation for Mother 3, and revealed that Nintendo turned down the offer to use it.
While fans have long speculated on the reasons that Mother 3 was never localized to the West, the truth is Nintendo have kept the reasons for this close to their chest. No one really knows the real reason except for people within Nintendo themselves.
Perhaps the reason is more obvious than many of us think, as this title was really the end result of the painful failed attempt to make a cutting edge Earthbound game on the Nintendo 64, via its hard drive peripheral, the 64DD. All of the Earthbound games deeply involved Itoi, Shigeru Miyamoto, and the late
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