(Possible spoilers but the game has been out 18 years so don’t be mad at me, we all make choices in life) Me, April 21, 2006. I pre-ordered Mother 3 on play-asia and paid an extra $45(?)+ for overnight shipping. I played it with no translation using only the very simple “guide” that was continually being updated on statemen.net hour by hour. I played it on the gameboy player using a Hori controller I bought specifically to play Mother 3 from the store I worked at (it was the only one we had and I bought it the day we got it) because I wanted my experience to be as close as possible to playing earthbound on SNES. I didn’t know any Japanese at the time but I could still figure out a lot of what was happening in the story despite that. The sprites are animated so perfectly and it is very clear. Despite the language barrier, I still cried when Lucas chased after his mom in the sunflower fields and when Claus woke up, apologized and ended it in front of me. Hatred grew inside of me for Pokey and the pig army for introducing a fascist dictatorship and industrialization to the poor people of tazmily village, corrupting them. I was wowed when I realized that not even pokey knew how far in the future he actually traveled when he ran away during Ness’s battle with Giygas, and wondered what actually happened to the world between 199X and Mother 3. I completely lost my shit when I saw Pokey’s shrine to Ness (total fan service). My jaw dropped when I watched the world end. Nintendo of America will never release this on US soil. It’s just too heavy for the Western Nintendo audience. All of that is just a tiny fraction of the crazy shit you see in this game. Thank GOD for Tomato-san and all of the others who wrote one of the greatest localization patches known to man, allowing all of you to play it. (And if you haven’t, I have to ask, wtf are you doing with your life?) The GOAT @itoi_shigesato is the story-telling genius of the century and I am so glad he chose games as the main medium to share these. Mother 3 was the perfect end to it all. Masterpiece.