One of my favorite games ever made is Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time.

It’s a simple dungeon-crawling RPG with sprite-based graphics and MIDI music. Play it for the first time today and you might not get too much out of it—all of the levels are basically the same randomly generated grids with predictable enemies and repetitive visuals. Everything else holds up just fine, but for seasoned RPG players who have come to take big open worlds and variety for granted, they might just be left feeling dissatisfied.

When I was a kid, though, that didn’t matter. I loved it.

The charming sprites and portraits. The wonderfully-composed music that still holds up today. The story, the characters…all of these things absolutely mystified me as naïve fifth grader. Not since my introduction to video games had one game felt so important, so personal. It really felt like anything could happen in this charismatic yet harsh world created by Chunsoft for a spin-off game that would inevitably get overshadowed by whatever mainline Pokémon release was being hyped up at the time. This might be the first game in which I actually, fully fell in love with the story and characters, and all these years later, I believe I’m a different person than I would have been otherwise.

Now, say I had missed this game as a child. Would playing it today have anywhere near the impact? Would I still fall in love with Grovyle and the partner, would I still be engrossed in the rudimentary gameplay, would I still be terrified that a space-eating water dragon would visit me in the middle of the night and tell me to kill myself?

It’s tempting to assume I can never know for sure, but I do know. In 2016 Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon released on the 3DS, and despite playing and loving that game very much, the effect it had on me didn’t even come close to that of its DS predecessor. I don’t remember the story as well, and I could probably only recall about three characters. As fun and compelling as that game was, I was just too old to be truly swept away in the story it had to tell. I’ve seen all the tropes, and I’ve experienced more media. Some things are truly better when you’re young, quality aside.

All of this to say that I wish I’d played Mother 3 as a kid.

This game is delightful. Everyone already knows that, but very seldom do people really talk about why. It’s not just a fun RPG with a tragic story that makes you cry—it’s a vibrant, unpredictable adventure buttoned up with gorgeous 2D sprites and catchy but simple music. It’s a tragedy playing out in a world that is usually full of silliness and spontaneity. You come for the promise of fun and adventure in a universe of color and magic, but you stay for the gripping and personal story that these characters have found themselves entangled in.

In playing this game now at 22 years old, I’ve rediscovered what made Pokémon Mystery Dungeon so captivating to me in the first place. It’s all here in Mother 3—the wacky yet sympathetic and lovable characters, the beautiful cartoony art style, the whimsical music pushing the boundaries of MIDI limitations, and the tear-jerking tale that sticks with you. It’s an innocent charm that embraces the technology it’s on rather than attempting to “impress” the audience with advanced visuals or complicated gameplay mechanics, instead keeping things simple and allowing the player to just soak up the simple fun and quirky atmosphere the game has to offer. It didn’t feel behind the times in 2006 despite releasing on the Game Boy Advance two years after the DS hit the market, and it doesn’t feel even slightly dated now that we have Nintendo Switch and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and God of War 4. While many games from this era have now lost many of the charms they might have once offered—even 3DS games are starting to show their age by now—Mother 3 and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon have not depreciated in the slightest.

As much as I loved Mother 3 now, however, it is a tragedy (insofar as missing out on a video game can be considered a tragedy) that I didn’t get to play it when it was originally made. I can see it so clearly—opening up the box for the first time, naming my character something stupid, exploring this universe and becoming enraptured just like I had with PMD. Talking about the game with my friends at school. Playground rumors of hidden party members and overpowered weapons. Characters like Salsa the monkey and Duster the crippled thief would be forever ingrained into my mind just like Grovyle and Dusknoir and Primal Dialga. As impactful as it was to me now, I cannot even begin to imagine how it would have affected my elementary-age self, who hadn’t even seen The Lion King yet. This is a game that could inspire empathy and self-reflection in even the most cynical person, so why didn’t I take the opportunity to play it back when it would have had the greatest impression, back when it could have planted seeds of wonder and love in my immature little heart?

Oh yeah—it’s because Nintendo never released it here.

The fact that I had to buy a bootleg GBA cart on eBay with the fan-made translation already patched in (I’m sure a huge portion of this game’s charm had nothing to do with its developers, but rather its expert translators Chewy and Tomato) is just sad. Here I am, already well past the age where wonder and whimsy find their way to me on a daily basis, and I’m just now diving into this? Not only did I miss out on a great game, I missed out on twelve years of this story potentially finding itself among my personal greats. Pokémon Mystery Dungeon’s story probably isn’t anything that special to someone who didn’t play it until adulthood, but to this day it’s like a folktale to me—just second nature. Mother 3 would have absolutely joined it, becoming forever entrenched in the annals of my greatest gaming memories.

Playing it today…yeah, it was very enjoyable. Yeah, I’ll probably remember it for a long time. But the opportunity for it to truly shake me like I know it could have is long gone. Every game I play today is by default less memorable than it would have been for me a decade ago, just by the nature of growing up and experiencing more content on a daily basis than my brain could’ve handled back then. There’s no way to fully capture those feelings again, so the best we can do is attempt to make up for lost time. I love Mother 3, and I only wish I could’ve loved it for longer.

Nintendo of America, guys…I’m sure you had your reasons. I’m sure you could justify your position on refusing to localize this game at the time. But for crying out loud, whatever excuses you might have once had, they are gone now. Nobody will be offended by the subject matter you might have once deemed too dark or controversial. Indie games inspired by Earthbound are breaking sales records and reaching popularity that was once unheard of. Millions of non-Japanese fans online are clamoring for this game, desperately screaming for you to just give us this one tiny Game Boy Advance RPG. It will sell. It will get raving reviews. But most importantly, all of the kids currently falling in love with Breath of the Wild and Fire Emblem: Three Houses will not be deprived of that special magic you can only really find in a sprite-based RPG from the mid-2000s.

It’s not too late, Nintendo. Send us our Happy Boxes!

Oh, and give us Earthbound Beginnings on NES Online while you’re at it. That’s like, the one NES game I actually want to play. C’mon guys.