MOTHER 3 (Game) Archive

Everyone’s Dad & Uncle Works Somewhere

I recently announced a new book about Mother 3 that I’ve been working on – it actually started out in Jan. 2017 as a small article for EarthBound Central, grew too big to be an article, so I was gonna turn it into its own special page, but then it got too big for that too. It wound up book-sized, so I figured okay let’s make it into a book, and with 2018 being the 10th anniversary of the translation patch, it’d fit pretty well.

The book’s not about Mother 3’s translation or Mother 3 itself, but rather the cycle of rumors and hoaxes and hopes and expectations and disappointments that have persisted for 23 years now. Tony the book guy suggested trying to go for a “crazy conspiracy” theme with everything linked together like someone investigating a bizarre mystery. So I threw together this crappy concept pic in about two minutes.

I doubt the end product will look anything along these lines, but it’s a funny premise to think about!

Come Watch Me Play and Translate Japanese Games Live!

If you enjoy my Legends of Localization site, you might also be interested in some recent stuff I’ve been streaming!

Here’s just a quick look at stuff I’ve done recently:


MOTHER 3 Beta Testing / Translation Notes

A few months ago I started working on an update for the MOTHER 3 fan translation patch. Before releasing it, though, it needed to be tested – so I played through the game on Twitch! While testing the game and fixing bugs, I also shared translation notes, memories of the project, and more. We also had guests on, including fellow team members. Even Marcus Lindblom, the head localizer for EarthBound, participated in the chat a few times!

This was pretty much our first time streaming so everything was pretty rough around the edges, but if you like MOTHER 3 or if you’ve wanted to know more about some of the translation choices that went into the patch, give it a watch. I also sometimes discussed professional experiences and the like, so if you’re into that sort of thing, you might like it!

The MOTHER 3 stream was a lot of fun, so my wife and I have gotten into streaming games more regularly. Here’s just a quick sample of recent stuff:


Live Translation of a Japanese Final Fantasy VI ROM Hack

More recently, I’ve been streaming a Japanese Final Fantasy VI ROM hack known as “Final Fantasy VI T-Edition”. It’s an incredibly extensive hack and one of the most well-known Japanese FFVI hacks out there, so I thought it’d be neat to play through it and live-translate all the new content for fellow fans’ enjoyment and future reference!

As of the time of this post, I’m about 48 hours in and I’ve STILL got a lot left to experience in this hack. While I’ve been playing it I’ve also been sharing bits and pieces of localization differences that I’m aware of. I’ve also been polishing my programming skills and making neat software that displays some translated text on the stream for viewers who don’t know Japanese. And, to everyone’s surprise, the Japanese creator of the patch showed up in the chat and has since become a regular. All in all, it’s been a really great experience and I hope you’ll join us sometime if you’re into Final Fantasy games!

I actually hope to share more Japanese ROM hacks like this in the future, so if you know of any that you think would be neat to get the live-translation treatment, let me know.


Live Translation of Japanese Games About America

To celebrate America’s Independence Day, I streamed a bunch of Japanese games about America. I want to get practice doing live-translations of Japanese games, so I thought this would be a good start. Despite my bumbling around, it was a lot of fun – way more fun than I expected it to be!

I’m hoping that if I keep doing these sorts of streams, I’ll continually polish my live game-translating skills and be able to “streamlate” (yes, I just made that up, feel free to groan) more complicated Japanese games with ease!


Live Translation of Japanese Hobby/Indie Games

I’ve always been curious about the Japanese side of games made by hobbiests and indie developers, so I’ve started to play through some of those games and translate them live. Since they tend to be pretty short and bite-sized already, they’re perfect for this style of streaming. Already I’ve seen lots of neat, weird stuff that I never would’ve experienced otherwise!

I’m especially fond of this Japanese hamburger RPG:

And this game written entirely in English by a Japanese native:


Live-Translating Other Games for Weird Events

We also stream games for odd holidays and special events. Usually we end up playing a bunch of weird Japanese games and I’ll translate them live. For example, a friend of ours got married a few weeks ago, so after the wedding we played a bunch of wedding-themed games!

On my wife’s birthday, we streamed a bunch of Japanese yokai/youkai games, which I tried to translate:

And for World Population Day, we played a bunch of mostly-Japanese games with the word “world” in their titles:

We also did something similar for World Cat Day. We tried to have a “Sneak a Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day” – which is a real day – but couldn’t find any zucchini games, sadly.


Anyway, this is all to say that if you’d like to see more things like this, be sure to follow me on Twitch and follow me on YouTube, as that’s where all the fun and translating is happening. This streaming stuff isn’t always 100% Legends of Localization-related, but sometimes the two interwtine – my MOTHER 3 stream is on the MOTHER 3 localization section, for example. Some other things I’d love to stream in the future include:

  • More extensive Japanese ROM hacks
  • Streams of other games I’ve fan-translated, so I can share memories, translation notes, secrets, and more
  • Streams of games based on anime and IPs that I’ve translated professionally. There are tons of Dragon Ball games, Lupin games, Detective Conan games, etc. out there, so it’d be neat to try them out finally!
  • It’s not translation related, but I have some neat hack ideas that would work best on stream
  • We have a huge box of random Japanese Famicom games – it’d be neat to play through them one at a time and give each one a real, genuine try!

Of course, if you have any suggestions for things we can try sometime, let me know on Twitter or in the comments here. and if any of this sounded interesting, I hope you’ll join us sometime!

– Clyde

A Year of Localization Articles!

I was just looking through the Legends of Localization article archive and realized that today marks one year since I started doing these single-topic articles!

The very first article, which seems like just yesterday, was about someone sending me a copy of Zelda II for the Famicom Disk System. Since then, there’ve been 145 articles, or about 1 article every 2.5 days 😯 I had no idea I’d written that many!

Anyway, that aside, here’s a quick site status update!

For a while there, I was able to keep the updates flowing at a good rate, and even managed to do the big Final Fantasy IV and AVGN updates once a month. But alas, the work of a freelance translator can get crazily unpredictable, so right now Legends of Localization is back in the hectic “update whenever a hole in time opens up” mode. More specifically:

  • Final Fantasy IV: I posted an intermission thing here a while back. I’m not as burned out on FFIV anymore, so I look forward to getting back into this when I can!

  • MOTHER 3: I get asked about this a lot – for now it’s on hold. I *have* started putting together the version 1.2 patch this past week, though. No expected release date yet. It’ll mostly fix a lot of bugs that existed in the original game.
  • A Link Between Worlds: I announced this a few months back. I’ve fully played through both versions of the game, gathered all the screenshots and videos and stuff, and even have a good amount of work done on the layout and content, but freelance work overload last month put everything on hold.

  • Blog posts: I get requests for one-topic article posts all the time – if you’ve sent any in, don’t worry if I don’t respond! I put every single request in a spreadsheet, so you haven’t been ignored. The spreadsheet’s getting pretty big, it’s amazing!

Now that I think about it, I did recently do some small updates that you might’ve missed:

Pretty much every day I wake up thinking how swell it’d be if I could monetize Legends of Localization somehow so I could focus more time on it. I fear that a Kickstarter wouldn’t succeed, and I don’t think Patreon would have enough backers. If anyone has any suggestions, though, let me know! There are a million things I’d like to dig into and write articles about sometime – just off the top of my head:

  • Final Fantasy VI
  • MOTHER / EarthBound Zero
  • Pokemon
  • Shadowgate
  • Other English->Japanese localizations
  • The Wizard
  • Gitaroo Man
  • Symphony of the Night
  • Ninja Gaiden
  • Sonic stuff
  • Phantasy Star
  • Alex Kidd games
  • Pretty much every game ever I guess, especially 80s/90s games 😛
  • Maybe look at how some American shows got handled in translation
  • Live translations (on Youtube or wherever) of Japanese-only games

Anyway, while that’s the dream, in reality I’ve been working on lots of really cool and rewarding professional translation projects too, the most recent of which I can mention is Attack on Titan!

It’s crazy to think back to when I first started learning the language so many years ago, and now millions of people are watching the result of those studies. It’s actually kind of stage fright-y!

Oh yeah, and Legends of Localization is apparently in the running for top professional language blog of 2014 at some language site… even though I write about poop jokes and horse wieners.

Oh, and there was a Polygon article the other day about fan translations, which includes some snippets about MOTHER 3 and some interview bits from Jeffman and me. Check it out here!

So that’s the latest so far! If you wanna keep up with more of my goings-on, follow me on Twitter, where I often post stuff that’s too small to write a whole article about here, like:

– Clyde