Introduction to Notes

Welcome to the MOTHER 3 Translation Notes. I call it "notes", but it's probably more like a commentary. If the game were a DVD, this would probably be done via a commentary track. Instead, it's going to be tons and tons of text and pics. It's a lot of text, but I think it'll be interesting for many big fans of the series, and hopefully it'll show a nice inside look at the translation side of the process. It'll make a good companion to the blog, which was an inside look at the hacking side of things.

With each portion of the translation notes, I'll try to include videos of the corresponding section, complete with rare/hidden/hardly-known stuff. Check 'em out if you want to see things most people would probably miss, and to see strategies and such that I developed over the course of the translation's development.

This probably goes without saying, but just to be safe: there will be spoilers in these notes! These are meant to be read as a post-game extra.

Anyway, these notes will be an on-going thing, so check back every so often to see if any new pages have been added. I hope you'll find these notes to be interesting, entertaining, and insightful.

Accompanying Video

We start the game and go through the prologue. There isn't too much here, since it's only the first 10 minutes of the game. But there may be some things you haven't noticed before or didn't know about.

NOTE: These accompanying videos are meant to show little things you might not have noticed in the game before. They also show off some of the things discussed in the notes below. You might even catch a few tricks, shortcuts and strategies. If you've played the game in detail before, you can probably skip these videos, but they're here for added enjoyment and details.

Game Intro

The very first thing you might notice when you start the game is that the health and safety intro screen is in English. We went through the trouble of replacing the Japanese version with the English version. This was actually done before the project merge. It seemed strange to me that the other people started by working on this unimportant stuff rather than the more important stuff, but in any case, this was apparently pretty easy to hack. Jeff had to change some values to get the flashing thing at the bottom to be a little higher up like on the official screens. But this was all very simple.

The next screen, the "disclaimer screen" as we call it, is something we added in near the end of the project, though I had always had plans for it from the start. We spent some time thinking of just the right wording to use. Rather than say a bunch of negative stuff about not selling the translation, blah blah blah, we decided to ask fans to support the series in any way possible. We also included language and version info on the bottom, because this will become important once future patches are out and bug reports are coming in.

Jonk was the main graphic designer for this screen, and it was Jeff who programmed it all to work. Jeff made it so that the screen will stay on for at least two seconds if there are no save games. Otherwise you can skip the screen immediately by pressing the A Button. What's weird is that people, mostly Mac emu users, would get stuck on this screen because they didn't know what the A Button was mapped to on their keyboard. Most often it was the "Z" key. This resulted in a number of bug reports, when it wasn't a bug at all. In future versions we'll probably have it so you can press any button to get by it, not just A.

Immediately after this intro screen fades out, there's one single frame that has a bunch of strange black dots. One frame is like 1/30th of a second (approximately), so most people won't notice, but even so, it taunts me every time I see it.

The Title

The title of the game has always been a major question for fans. MOTHER 2 was called EarthBound in North America, so it seems logical to think that this sequel, if it had been released outside of Japan, would've been called EarthBound 2.

We left the title as MOTHER 3 for many reasons. First, the technical reason: replacing the existing title screen with a worthy EarthBound 2 logo would've been annoying to do. Many fans made mockups of what the logo should look like, but most of them were pretty bad and ignored the idea of the wood and metal together in an unnatural way. Also, you can't just drop a .bmp into the game to change the title screen either -- it's compressed data, and it also involves things like tilemaps and palettes, all of which add extra technical limitations. It wouldn't be too hard for someone with good hacking skill, though.

Changing the title would also require redoing the entire logo animation that happens after the prologue, and that would be hard to do well and make it all fit back into what little room is left in the ROM. On top of all that, you'd also have to edit the final screen of the game. That's a lot of work for something someone will see for a few seconds at most. That's not to say it's impossible, so if you feel like giving it a shot, go right ahead! Note that you'd also have to change all the instances of the title in the main text, too. That's a lot of work.

There's also the fact that the game has been regularly called MOTHER 3 by fans and news sites and magazines since it was announced back in 2003. The project itself was called The MOTHER 3 Fan Translation, and was located at mother3.fobby.net. The game is also called Mother 3 in Smash Bros. Brawl everywhere, including the Smash Bros. Dojo site. While changing the name wouldn't hurt all this too much, it seemed to fit better if we left the name untouched. If Nintendo ever decides to release it in English, they can choose whatever official name they want.

Speaking of which, publicly-available financial documents (see here) actually list the game as "EarthBound 3". Is that because they simply translated "Mother" to "EarthBound" so investors would know? Or would they actually have tried to fix the numbering scheme had they released the game in English? This is very reminescent of the Final Fantasy series and its crazy numbering in the old days and just adds to the confusion.

One can also argue that the title of "MOTHER" is actually a major theme that runs through the story. If you've played the game, you can probably understand this. There's even an unused line (well, at least it hasn't been found in actual use yet) from near the end of the game where Duster or Kumatora actually mention that it's a strange coincidence that all three of the main characters are without mothers. You can probably find many more subtle things where the title comes into play, but in any event, that's another reason for keeping it the same.

The idea of having multiple patch versions was brought up by a few fans, but to keep sanity and to make the release seem a litte more official-like, we opted to go with just one patch.

There are probably many more reasons for staying with the existing title, but at this point this is just getting too long. We did name the .zip file MOTHER3_EarthBound2(whatever).zip so that people who've been living on Mars the past 5+ years might notice it, though. I thought about adding subtitle text under the big MOTHER 3 logo on the title screen that said "EARTHBOUND 2" all cool-like, but I don't think there'd be enough room. I can't remember, plus I'm not very good with manipulating sprites and OAM and all that. Maybe in a future version, I dunno.

Naming Screens

The naming screens are always a big part of the MOTHER games, so we put a ton of work and thought into them during the project.

First, and probably most important, are the names themselves. Strangely enough, the game only has one "Don't Care" name for each character... In actuality, each person has seven possible names, but the designers made them all the same, probably per Itoi's request. The favorite food thing and favorite thing have many different defaults though, which is why it seems so strange I think.

Incidentally, all the descriptions for these characters also appeared on Itoi's MOTHER 3 World preview site, so it was neat seeing all these things coming together.

Now for the names themselves.

Lucas

Lucas' name comes from a character in Agota Kristof's novel, The Notebook. In the English translation (as demonstrated in Smash Bros. Brawl), his name is pronounced with English pronunciation rather than French pronunciation, which leaves the "s" off when said aloud.

Claus

Claus also gets his name from the same novel; Claus and Lucas were brothers in the book, too. This information is actually very old, there are Itoi interviews dating way, way back where he discusses this. (example) There are other similarities and themes from this book that are used in MOTHER 3, but as I haven't read the book myself, I can't go into further detail.

Flint

Many characters in this name are based on themes. Flint is one such case. He gets his name from a type of gun: a flintlock.

Hinawa

Hinawa gets her name from a type of gun too: the "hinawa juu". This is apparently an "arquebus", or you could just say "matchlock" for simplicity's sake, since I've never even heard the word "arquebus" before.

Because of this name theme thing, we considered localizing her name as something else. One that I still remember is "Amber". Flint and Amber... it would've been a different theme, but there'd be a theme, plus her name wouldn't be as scary-Japanesey.

I was hesitant to change her name at first, since people had been playing the game for almost two years and had grown accustomed to the name. Changing it would cause mass hysteria. But I realized that on the other hand, the translation was for people who HADN'T played the game to death yet, so it was troubling. I decided to wait on it and figure it out later. But then Smash Bros. Brawl showed up and threw a bunch of MOTHER 3 stuff in there. Since millions of people would be playing it, and since it was from an official source, I decided to go with what Brawl named her, which was "Hinawa".

I considered instead giving her "Amber" as one of her alternate default names, but then that'd be strange that she had alternates but no one else did, and I didn't want to come up with things for all the others.

Even now, I'm still not sure it was best to stick with Hinawa, but having her name match with Brawl and Japanese MOTHER 3 will at least avoid confusion. Plus you can name her whatever you want anyway.

Boney

Boney's name is strange. It's unclear if his name comes from anything. A very small handful of people think that maybe it comes from "bonfire" to try to match with the Flint/Hinawa thing or possibly the Lighter/Fuel thing, but it seems a bit iffy to me. Fans have called him Boney since the old Nintendo 64 days though, so I just went with it. It's a pretty straightforward romanization, too.

Favorite Food

Because you can generally say more in Japanese than in English with a few letters, some of the favorite foods were slightly altered to fit in the maximum length. The full translations of the foods would have been:

• Fluffy omelettes
• Peperoncino
• Piping hot gratin
• Croquette rolls
• Soy milk stew
• Peach gelatin
• Plain rice

Croquette rolls wouldn't fit at all, no matter what. Which is a shame, because Itoi is crazy about them. They appear in the game in a few places, and he even has a page on his site where people can list their favorite croquette places or list new croquette places that have just opened up and are good. It's an obsession he picked up during this game's development, as we learn in a secret message later in the game.

Anyway, besides having to alter some of the favorite foods, I also had to take into account how favorite food would be mentioned in-game. There are many lines in the game where grammar would be affected by favorite food. One example is in a vegetable garden with a sign. In Japanese it says "[fav. food] seedlings." But if you put something plural there, it'd be strange. So I had to always be aware of this issue whenever your favorite food was referenced. One easy way was to say "pile of [fav. food]", since that makes it singular in all cases. Though that wasn't always applicable.

Even a simple thing like this favorite food screen had tons of thought put into it.

Favorite Thing

Similar to the above, there wasn't enough room for full translations of the default "favorite things". Here are the full translations of the Japanese defaults:

• LOVE
• Home run
• Mach
• Top of the line (as in consumer electronics)
• Mt. Fuji
• Cameras
• Watering (with sprinklers or a watering can)

Other Things

The naming screens use "sprite text" heavily, and this was a big hurdle for the hacking side of the project. We eventually got sprite text to do what we needed, but at a price - every time text changes, we have to do a tiny re-initialization that takes a few milliseconds. This slight pause will sometimes make the music click for a second, as you can hear each time a new character description appears. Most people don't notice it, but I can't not notice it ;)

Even worse is the name summary screen, when the screen is fading out. The music stutters horribly for a few seconds, even after all our optimizations. I even had the game completely skip huge chunks of our hacks for that specific fade-out, yet it still sputters there. I don't know why a fade-out is so CPU intensive, but I was worried that people would get to this part and then stop playing, thinking the whole game would be hacked this poorly.

Welcome

After you name your characters, the very first line of text says, "Welcome to the World of MOTHER 3". People often ask why I changed it from the original, which was already in English: "Welcome to MOTHER 3 world". There are two reasons.

First, this text was used on lots of merchandise and official sites, but was very often accompanied with the Japanese version, "ようこそ、『MOTHER3』の世界へ". Which is basically the same thing, but in proper Japanese. So you could say I'm translating it as the Japanese text intended. Second, if the very, very first line of text was such strange "Engrish", players would definitely not expect much from the rest of the text in the game.

Nowhere

A common question is why I called the place "Nowhere Islands" instead of just "Nowhere Island". I actually had it named "Nowhere Island" up until about a month before the patch was released, but in the back of my mind it was always bugging me. Eventually, I looked further into the issue and realized it was bugging me because the Japanese instruction booklet had already labeled it "Nowhere Islands" in plain English (see here). I also found that the official Japanese site also called it that. You can see this for yourself at:

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n08/a3uj/nowhere/index.html

It's plural because there really are other islands besides just the main one you're on most of the time, as can be clearly seen on these maps. There was even supposed to be a New Pork Island in an early version of the game. So it's kind of like how you can use "Hawaiian islands" to refer to the whole group of islands, or you can make it singular to refer to the specific main one. The plural version makes more sense in this intro because we're shown a full view of all the islands just seconds before we see the name of the whole place.

Tazmily?

The katakana for the village's name would normally be written as "Tatsumairi". As there isn't any kanji or any definitive explanation, we can't be certain if this should mean anything or if it comes from anything. It's definitely possible that "tatsu" here could mean "dragon". "mairi" could be anything, and you can probably come up with anything you want. One thought is that it could mean "worship", but I like to play the "ateji" game, so I would say that maybe "mai" could be the kanji for "buried" and "ri" could be the kanji for "village". Before the project merge, the name "Dragonstep Village" had even been considered for the translation. But without Itoi's word, it's all just speculation, and it could very well have no meaning at all.

What's interesting is that the village had an official English spelling even in the Nintendo 64 days. It's not very well-known, and only crazy fans would remember, but you can see proof of the village's spelling on this archive of Nintendo's site. "Tazmily" also appeared in this really old EarthBound 64 preview.

Because of this past, official precedent, I went with Tazmily for the translation. What's funny is that NOA translated it as "Tazumili" in Smash Bros. Brawl, but Nintendo of Europe had caught the mistake in time, so the European version has it as Tazmily.

Sunshine

"Teri no mori" became Sunshine Forest. Because "teri" was in katakana, it seemed like it was probably meant to be a name or something like that, along the lines of "Telly" or "Teri". But it was equally as likely to have been 照り, which means "sunshine". It wasn't written in kanji because when it's referenced in the main script, kanji wouldn't be available. A similar situation happens with a few other location names in the game later on.

Misc.

I've never been happy with the pigs' lines in the prologue. It just seems off to me. I'm not sure why. I also think it would've been better if the pigs' lines had been swapped, because I think people would talk to the left one first most of the time.

The save frog by Alec's house gives a little speech about memories. It's actually kind of nice in Japanese, almost reminds me of a poem, but not a poem. I always worried that I wouldn't be able to translate it well enough, but I've seen people quoting it and saying they liked it, so that's good. I think the subtle nuance of the flow of the line is lost in translation, but if you want all these super-subtle things, the original version will always be the only way to go. But in the end, I'm pleased with how it turned out.

The frog's line is supposed to show up again later, near the end of the game. A frog inside one of those green test tubes is supposed to say it while having trouble breathing. But it looks like that line was left unused, and a regular frog message was stuck in its place.

The scene at the table was tough to translate to sound well. I don't think I did a very good job making it sound natural, but maybe that's just me overthinking things.

Hinawa's letter was one of the dreaded "Block 0" lines and was one of the last things I translated, even though it's one of the very first things in the text dump. All the scrolling text was difficult to do - not because it was hard to translate, but because it was hard to make it sound natural while also not making stuff up or leaving too much out. And since this letter is an important part into our view of Hinawa's relationship to the others, it was important to keep the English-reading player feeling what the Japanese-reading player felt. The very last line, where she puts her name, would've sounded pretty awkward in a straight translation though. It would've been something like, "From the Hinawa of you and our children".

Closing Thoughts

Oh god, this took a lot longer than I thought. I think once the game gets rolling, all these big explanations will start to disappear, though.

I'll try to add new notes once in a while, but if you have specific questions about translation choices and things like that, you can ask over at the MOTHER 3 forum for a quicker response.