Mother 3

Mother 3 is a single-player role-playing video game similar to previous games in the Mother series. The player controls a party of playable characters who explore the game's two-dimensional fictional world, primarily shown from a top-down perspective. While navigating the overworld, the player may converse with non-player characters, obtain items, or encounter enemies. Winning battles against enemies awards experience points to the party, which is required for leveling up.

Leveling up a character permanently enhances its individual attributes such as maximum hit points (HP), power points (PP), offense, and defense. Weapons, armor, or accessories can be equipped on a character to increase certain attributes. The player can restore their characters' HP and PP or heal various status ailments by visiting hot springs which are abundant in the game world, and the player can save the game by talking to frogs. Currency is introduced in the later half of the game as Dragon Power (DP), earned by winning battles and used to purchase items.

Mother 3 is set in the fictional Nowhere Islands, an unknown length of time after the events of EarthBound. The game begins with twins Lucas and Claus and their mother Hinawa preparing to return home to Tazmily Village after visiting Hinawa's father, Alec, who lives in the northern reaches of the Islands. Before they can return, Tazmily Village is attacked by a mysterious military force known as the Pigmask Army, who bomb the nearby forest and start a forest fire. Hinawa's husband, Flint, is alerted to the fire and sets out to rescue his family.

He finds Lucas and Claus, but discovers that Hinawa was killed defending them from a hostile Drago, a normally peaceful dinosaur-like creature. Later, Claus leaves the village to take revenge on the Drago; Flint attempts to follow him, discovering and defeating the Drago, which has been turned into a cyborg, but fails to find Claus.

Development of Mother 3 began in 1994 for the Super Famicom with Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata as producers. By this point, Mother series creator Shigesato Itoi had worked on the series' earlier games and Itoi Shigesato no Bass Tsuri No. 1 and was experienced at pitching video games, so Miyamoto provided a team willingly. The team mostly consisted of members involved in the development of the previous Mother game, though several people left and the team grew in size.

According to Miyamoto, the decision to create Mother 3 was a commercial one due to the success of its predecessor. They forwent the usual prototyping phase and went straight into development expecting to create something unprecedented. Itoi said he wanted to make the game like a Hollywood film. Inspired by Super Mario 64, the team transitioned from the Super Famicom to the Nintendo 64, believing that they could also creatively flourish by making a 3D world without technical restrictions.

Mother 3 received critical acclaim. It sold around 200,000 copies in its first week of sales in Japan and despite not having an English localization, critics imported it for reception and gave it mostly positive reviews. It was one of Japan's top 20 bestselling games for the first half of 2006, and received a "Platinum Hall of Fame" score of 35/40 from Japanese reviewer Weekly Famitsu. It ended the year with over 368,000 copies sold, the 36th highest of the year in Japan.

Jenni Lada of TechnologyTell called it the "perfect" Game Boy Advance role-playing game. Reviewers praised its story (even though the game was only available in Japanese) and graphics, and lamented its 1990s role-playing game mechanics. Critics also complimented its music.

Multiple critics wrote that Mother 3 was one of the best role-playing games for the Game Boy Advance. GamePro's Jeremy Signor listed it among his "best unreleased Japanese role-playing games" for its script and attention to detail. Tim Rogers posited that Mother 3 was "the closest games have yet come to literature."

Nintendo has been heavily criticized for Mother 3's lack of an international release. IGN referred to the Mother series as "neglected" in regards to EarthBound being the only game to be released outside Japan for decades until 2015, with Mother being localized as EarthBound Beginnings globally for Nintendo Virtual Console, 26 years after the original game's release on the Famicom in 1989. Bob Mackey of 1UP.com wrote of Mother 3 that no other game in the history of time garnered such demand for translation, and Chris Plante of UGO Networks wrote that the lack of an official Mother 3 English localization was one of 2008's "worst heartbreaks". Frank Caron of Ars Technica said that the fan translation's "massive undertaking ... stands as a massive success" and that "one cannot even begin to fathom why Nintendo wouldn't see fit to release the game in the West".