Mother 3/Trivia

• Development Hell: The game started out as being a Super Famicom game shortly after the release of EarthBound, and was then moved to the N64DD, then the N64, then delayed several times until finally being canceled. It was ultimately revived for the GBA.
• Fan Translation: These awesome guys! The online readme, about halfway down the page, starts a very, very long list of every hack that had to made in order to make the translation work. Buried in there is this gem:

The game only had enough memory for 40 letters of battle text on the screen at once. Fixing this was assumed impossible, but a fix was figured out anyway, allowing for infinite text per line.

• Limited Special Collectors' Ultimate Edition: The Deluxe Box, which contains the game, a special edition red Game Boy Micro, and a replica of the Franklin Badge. Naturally, these go for ridiculous prices on auction websites.
• Marth Debuted in Smash Bros: Infamously, Lucas debuted in the West in Super Smash Bros. Brawl and with him brought a truckload of spoilers to casually sling around as if it doesn't matter, including King P.'s identity and New Pork City. This did not amuse a large number of fans.
• No Export for You: Damn it, Nintendo.
  • To put it in perspective, Lucas is the only playable character in Super Smash Bros. Brawl that hasn't had his/her game released outside of Japan.
  • Brownie Brown has stated that if this game ever gets a rerelease, they will attempt to avert this trope.
• Sequel Gap: It came out a good twelve years after EarthBound's Japanese release.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Using the silver dragonfly item against Negative Man is said to yield an extremely rare and valuable item.
• What Could Have Been:
  • MOTHER 3 started life as a Nintendo 64 title, which was rather widely previewed and received significant press attention both in Japan and internationally, and Nintendo of America seemed pretty dead-set on giving it an international release.
  • The N64 game was also supposed to be a lot Darker and Edgier - mostly due to the fact Itoi was suffering from depression at the time. This version of the game was widely called EarthBound 64 by both Nintendo and gaming press, so more often than not, it's still called that in discussions to differentiate it from the released GBA version. Despite its extensive previewing at various Nintendo and game events, it never got very far. It was stuck in Development Hell for a very long time, and Shigesato Itoi was, not being very knowledgeable about computers, very ambitious with the project. Due to these and other factors, it ended up being cancelled and restarted several years later for the Game Boy Advance.
  • One of the most famous sequences from the 64 version which didn't make it into the GBA game was a sequence where Claus and Lucas rode a cart through a mine shaft. In the game, they're separated in Chapter 1 and never reunited until their duel at the finale.
  • DCMC was originally supposed to have a female vocalist, and Kumatora's outfit was surprisingly more Stripperific; most of the cast's appearances and clothing were fairly different. Ness may have been set to appear in it, or perhaps Lucas was intended to look identical to him much as Ness was identical to Ninten.
  • Not even the Game Boy Advance version is free of this trope. Some sprites were found with Porky in a different machine, and some of those sprites of him in that machine when put together make a glass shattering animation which looks like his defeat was different from the final version which could mean that you originally were able to kill him off before they changed it to where he escapes in and traps himself in the Absolute Safety Capsule forever.
  • Claus also had unused sprites showing him getting killed, Strapped to An Operating Table to be cyborgified, and a finished version looking like a Starman. There's also unused boss music and backgrounds showing him going through various stages of agony, well on his way into becoming an Eldritch Abomination.

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