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A lovely way to say: "Life is good, but it could be better", and while yes, Mother 3' Fan Translation is perfect as it is, it lacks some of the localization quirks that the franchise is known when it comes to official English releases (at least the people who likes consistent translations with other releases). My only complaint is that it is kinda "outdated", because it lacks the content present on the 1.3a version, since this hack takes the 1.2v as a base (It's not even compatible with the Lucas' canon voice patch); and that EarthBound 2, while an accurate title, feels odd compared to Mother 1's localized name (EarthBound Beginnings). What it needs is a revamped title that emphasizes on the fact that it is a new Earthbound game, like: "EarthBound Advanced" or something like that.

Besides that, great work on this "fan-localization", my favorite way to play.

I don't normally have a problem with Japanese names, and never even really considered the ones in Mother 3 to be much of a problem but now that this hack brought attention to them it occurred to me that, yeah, they were kind of jarring after all the other western-sounding names in the game... and never did sound quite right. It's such an oddly-specific thing to 'fix' but the game finally did feel right to me. A surprise because while I'm not fond of Kumatora/Hinawa as a name I still figured I'd find it too hard to adjust to something else. But not really. It was fine and the chosen replacements worked for me. Kudos

Gonna have to give a big "Not Recommended" to this.

It's not only a pretty bad idea to start with that is completely unnecessary, but even it's execution is not handled very well for what it is attempting to do.

Before getting to the flawed implementation of this hack, first off, this is just unnecessary and adds nothing to Mother 3, rather only subtracts from it. It actually sums up one of the largest problems with localizing Mother 3 to begin with, that being that any actual attempt by Nintendo would undoubtedly be inferior to Mato's work in a lot of ways.

And these are those ways. This shines a spotlight on exactly why an officially localized Mother 3 would be an inferior product. Mato, when making this translation patch originally, took great care and consideration when it came to what elements to adapt to the colloquialisms of the English language and which elements would be better suited to remain true to it's source.

No such care and thought was put into this. Rather it's just an attempt to pointlessly censor and remove elements arbitrarily that helps nothing, but harms the spirit of the game. It reverts a lot of the care that Mato put into his spectacular translation, to dull down the experience overall.

To paraphrase Ian Malcom from Jurassic Park: "Your patch is so preoccupied with whether or not it could that it didn't stop to think if it should."

But even if one was to play devil's advocate for a moment, and examine whether or not for the sake of argument that this patch even lives up to the pointless endeavor it's going for, we have to consider one thing:

"If this is truly made JUST to deliver an experience (albeit an inferior one to what already exists), then does this patch even accomplish what a "Nintendo localized Mother 3" would be?

No.

All this did was switch around a few names to less inspired and duller names for no reason. It doesn't even address any of the aspects that Nintendo absolutely would change even if they had released this game themselves. This patch makes no attempt to scale back or change any of the aspects of Mother 3 that Nintendo would alter to get the game released.

The controversial nature of Magypsies, the very dark and at times, brutal subject matter, and other elements that Nintendo would be forced to alter to get the game rated a more sales-friendly T or even E rating, is not addressed or even touched with this hack.

Now, changing these elements via this patch, would still be pointless and a fundamentally flawed idea that only gives a more watered down and inferior Mother 3 experience, but the point is that even the absense of this shows that this hack does not even adhere to it's own stated goal very well as providing a "What If" scenario, to say "What if Nintendo had released Mother 3". It would have much more of an extended re-write of the material and some graphical elements, if this was meant to be like that.

The concept is already not enjoyable to anyone who would play the game in this form, but it's experimental nature wasn't even given enough thought to be an accurately "westernized and Nintendo-localized" Earthbound 2. Which is what I believe was the end goal of this misguided effort in the first place, correct?

So what this patch offers is deeply inferior Mother 3 experience, based on the back of an esoteric "What if" concept that doesn't even properly succeed at doing that, because it doesn't even go all in, on THAT level, or do what an "official Earthbound 2" would be like.

There is absolutely no reason to recommend this hack at all, and I honestly cannot even see what the supposed merit of this was supposed to be at all. I would urge anyone to please ignore this and just play Mato's original translation.

Mato's original translation is already a properly localized Mother 3 that tastefully knows what to do and in what manner to do it that had much thought put in, while this is more or less, just a bland, inferior dumbing down and pointless desecration of that original work. Even if you are looking for an "official-seeming Nintendo-made Earthbound 2", you won't find that here. Because it wants to accomplish this task without bothering to even go far enough to accomplish this task.

In the end, I just can't see what this hack is supposed to add, what use it actually is, or even who this is supposed to be for. It takes a flawed idea and even executes it poorly, at that.

great romhack finally with western names along with the mothers name being amber now that good but the title screen looks kinda off tbh

As much I love the numerical progression of Earthbound (0, 1, 2), I should suggest doing a "Earthbound Beyond" title hack, so if fits with the first NES game which was localized as "Earthbound Beginnings".

Tomato's translation already localizes plenty, there's no meaningful gain from this unless you really cannot handle anything Japanese in your JRPGs.