What is the Mother 3 fan translation?
The project began only when the official door closed. Mother 3 reached Japan in April 2006, and the Starmen.net community waited: first came word that Nintendo was not interested in an English release, then, in November 2006, confirmation in an interview with Nintendo of America's own Treehouse localization group. Within days, the fan translation was announced. Reid Young, a co founder of Starmen.net, framed it plainly at the time: a fan translation was not about the fans. It was about the game.
The work was professional in everything except pay. The team was led by Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin, a professional Japanese to English translator whose paid work includes games such as Kingdom Hearts II and anime such as Dragon Ball. The roughly dozen people who worked on it were vetted by Mandelin and had prior localization experience. Between them they put in thousands of hours, built their own tools for the job, and translated about 1,000 pages of script. The team estimated the theoretical freelance cost of the work at $30,000. It was released as a patch, a file that transforms a Japanese copy into the English one, which kept it a fan work rather than a product.
It did not arrive alone. Alongside the patch, the community released a fan made, full color, roughly 200 page player's guide of professional quality, an echo of the guide Nintendo of America had once packed into EarthBound's oversized box. And the story has a coda that states the project's spirit exactly: in April 2013, as EarthBound's official return was being celebrated, Mandelin published an open offer to let Nintendo use his translation files for any use at all, completely for free, editing or retranslating as needed, just to get an official release out. Nintendo did not take him up on it. Nintendo also, by the team's account, never intervened against the patch itself, though its highest levels were reported to be aware of the project.
So this is the translation's accurate status, two decades on: unofficial, unchallenged, and, for English speakers, definitive by default. Japan has since rereleased Mother 3 twice, in 2015 and 2024. Both times, Japan only. The English Mother 3 that exists is the one the fans built.