What's different about the MOTHER 1 translation? Why should I care? For many (most?) Western fans, the first game in the series is really hard to get into. My goal was to create a translation of the game that tries to make the game more palatable. Some of the things I did were: Retranslated the script from scratch. The EarthBound Zero ROM has a good number of changes, censoring, and mistakes with plot details and dialog. The text in the EarthBound Zero ROM is also very dry due to limited NES resources. Doing a retranslation with this GBA version allowed for a lot more text, and censoring/changes weren't necessary. The result is a script that should hopefully be more engaging and natural-sounding.

Expanded many text boxes, allowing for more dialog text at a time, making the text more natural, more presentable, and easier to read

Expanded menus and names wherever possible, allowing for more natural-sounding text

Improved the font for better readability

Added a gift box with an "Easy Ring" to Ninten's room for those who don't like to grind for experience and money. This item, when equipped, greatly increases the experience and money you win from enemies while also reducing the amount of random battles. It makes the game much less of a chore, which is one of the main reasons EarthBound fans have a hard time getting into the game.

The GBA port already included a number of extra features - for example, the L Button acts as a shortcut key now, just as it did in EarthBound

Some of the bugs in the Japanese GBA version have been fixed

Connections with EarthBound and MOTHER 3 have been left intact, so fans of the series will surely appreciate that. The EarthBound Zero translation had changed a lot of things, which broke many of these connections. This WAS just a Famicom game originally, so it's not as if all of this will suddenly make it an entirely new game, but my hope is that it will at least make it easier for fans to get into and enjoy.

Why didn't you translate the MOTHER 2 part too? Can't you just stick EarthBound's translation into the ROM? Short answer: if it were that easy, it would have already been done a long time ago. Long answer: It's a LOT more complicated than what you can imagine. It would probably take me just as much time - if not more - than the MOTHER 3 project took. I don't think it would be worth the effort; the GBA version of MOTHER 2 has a bunch of bugs, the music and sound effects are significantly inferior, the programming is a nightmare, etc. etc. Still, if I had a lot of free time and/or money I'd love to work on the MOTHER 2 side of the game so we could have all three GBA games fan-translated. But I don't think that'll ever happen. For more details, I wrote up a thing about it here.

I equipped the Easy Ring in MOTHER 1. How do I take it off? The only way to unequip items is to equip something in its place.

I want to translate this into my own language! I've released all the files, tools, and source code I used to make this translation. I designed this project with other languages in mind, so it should be very easy for anyone to translate the MOTHER 1 part! You can download the tools here.