Mother 3 and games with delayed features

With my first post here comes something that I’ve been looking forward to for so long: THE MOTHER 3 ENGLISH PATCH! According to the latest blog update the patch is just about finished and will be ready by the end of the week. Is that Friday, or Saturday? I don’t know, I don’t care, I just want it now. I guess if I’ve waited this long, I can wait a few extra days.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, Mother 3 is the third game in Nintendo’s RPG series known as Mother in Japan. And while the NES original was never released here, we did get Mother 2, or as it was called out of Japan, Earthbound, in 1995. While it wasn’t exactly Nintendo’s most popular release, it certainly gained cult status, and is remembered by many (myself included) as one of the best games to find on the SNES. Sure, the gameplay wasn’t as polished as a lot of RPGs at the time, what it had was something most RPGs lacked: charm, and more importantly, a sense of humor. Earthbound was one of the funniest games to ever be released, and even today, I have yet to play a game that has made me laugh as much as Earthbound did.

As strange as it may seem, I think I had more fun playing Earthbound than just about any SNES game at the time (the two exceptions being Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past) and it was solely because of just how great the world was, how imaginative the characters were, and how the game never lost its sense of humor. And much later down the road, Nintendo released Mother 3 for the GBA, but with no signs of a US release. This is basically what led to the start of a fan made English patch, and yes, Earthbound fans everywhere just can’t wait for this week to finally end.

I have played Mother 3 (with a translation guide), and I can guarantee it’s just as good, if not better, than Earthbound. Although thanks to nostalgia, I don’t think it will ever surpass Earthbound as one of my favorites. But NOW, now I’ll get to play it with the English IN THE GAME. So this will be the first time I’m truly experiencing what is easily the best GBA game around.

One more thing I want to touch on, something that is not Mother 3 related, is how some games are being released without all of the features promised originally, and these featues are going to be released as patches or updates shortly after the game’s release. Fable II is the best example of this, because originally, the game was going to ship without the co-op feature on the disc. And while they have this problem pretty much sorted out now, things like this make me wonder…would I rather have the game released a week or two earlier, minus a feature or two, or have it delayed so that the game will ship with everything originally promised and planned on? Personally, I’d go with the latter, but I hope that these delayed features, such as a few in LBP, don’t start a trend.

I don’t want to see Gears of War 2 released without any co-op, or minus a multiplayer game mode or two, only to have to wait for it to be released later that week, the next week, or maybe even the next month. Of course, some would say they would rather have the game now, finished or unfinished, and enjoy whatever it has to offer while waiting for features that were going to be in the retail copy of the game to be released as updates. I can’t agree with, and I really hope I’m not the only one. Let’s just hope the rest of this year’s releases will be released without a hitch.

And if you want more on this, here’s a great video from Adam Sessler of X-Play discussing and pretty much agreeing with what I’ve had to say here: (And if the video does not display, which sometimes it doesn’t, here is the direct link)

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