Mother 3 has been added to Switch Online’s GBA catalogue in Japan

21.02.2024 - 16:51 / videogameschronicle.com / Chris Scullion / Nintendo

Nintendo has released Mother 3 on Switch Online, but only in Japan.

The cult Game Boy Advance title was released in 2006, and was the third and final entry in the Mother series.

The first game, Mother, was released on the Famicom in 1989 and finally got an official English translation in 2015 as EarthBound Beginnings.

Its sequel, Mother 2, was released in North America as EarthBound. As such, the first two games are available on Nintendo Switch Online in the west.

However, Mother 3 is the only game in the series that has yet to get an official English translation, and today’s news doesn’t change this yet.

Two years ago, after the English language versions of the first two gameswere added to Switch Online, Mother 3’s producer Shinichi Kameoka called for the GBA game to receive a similar translation.

“As a lover of games, I will continue to wait for Mother 3’s release worldwide release [in English],” he said at the time.

Shortly after this, former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé said players shouldn’t hold their breath for an English-language version of Mother 3 or more games in the series.

“While [former Nintendo CEO] Mr Iwata was alive, he really understood the passion that fans had for the Mother series,” he said. “And you need to remember that it was under his watch that Earthbound Beginnings was first brought on to the Virtual Console platform.

“And so, the company knows that there’s a lot of passion for that franchise, but thinking about how to make it current, thinking about how to make it bigger than just the, you know, let me call it the relatively small group of fans that desperately want to see Mother 3 or something next in the Earthbound series.”

He later said that the reason Mother 3 never came to the west wasn’t because of any of its content or subject matter, but because it didn’t make business sense.