Well, let's talk about the Mother/Earthbound series, will try not to make this too long.
Now, my wife is fan of Shigesato Itoi's work, as you may know Itoi is the creator and writer of the Mother series, while he's mostly known outside of Japan for that, in Japan the man is a well known writer and a fairly famous person, not nerdy famous like Miyamoto or Kojima he's famous famous if that makes sense, there are people who love Itoi's writing yet don't know he ever worked in videogames. Throughout the years my wife has build a nice collection of Itoi's books and day planners, so when I told her that there were videogames based on that she was pretty interested, as somewhat of a collector she ordered all the games from Japan, that is Mother on the Famicom, Mother/Earthbound on the Super Famicon (needless to say she only got the Japanese version), Mother 1+2 and Mother 3 on the GBA, while she can read Japanese, or a good ammount of it, we decided to play the game together (I can't read Japanese, yet), so we I got a reproduction cart of Earthbound Zero and set up and emulator for Earthbound and we marathoned through the games.
As of this writing, we already beated those games, and while I try to make this threads more informative rather than opinionanted, none of us were very impressed by the games, however we needed to end the journey so we had to play Mother 3, however due to some financial problems that had to be postponed for some time, we just got the GBA games a few days ago and are yet to play due to time constraints. As I'm not a huge fan of the series I didn't knew some things about it so I got to some research and found some interesting stuff, especially the release date, why Nintendo released a game for the GBA and not the DS in April 2006? We'll get to that in a bit, first a history lesson.
Mother 3 started development after Mother 2/Earthbound became a financial success (in Japan), originally the title was to be released in the Super Famicom and was planned for a 1996 release, however as development went on they decided to make the game for the Nintendo 64 after seeing the work being done on Super Mario 64, the Mother 3 team wanted a part on the 3D revolution that title would have, this version of the game was to be released in 1998, however after they discovered that the system wasn't up to snuff to what they planned to do, a big part of the game had to be reworked which obviously pushed the release date even more, during this the game was then changed to the ill fated Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, this version was the one formally announced in the 1997 Space World Trade show, under the name Earthbound 64 (for the west of course). After the commercial failure of the 64DD the game went back to a regular cartidge for release on the year 2000, however after little info was released and the generation of consoles was coming to an end, Earthbound 64 was announced to be cancelled, its important to note, that Earthbound 64 wasn't canceled due to the failure of the 64DD, it was due to problems in production, Itoi's team was simply unhappy on how the game was turning out as he and his team were inexperienced in 3D games, it could also be speculated that Final Fantasy VII and the RPG boom that was happening on the PlayStation didn't helped and EB64 would look outdated compared to those titles.
The only EB64 footage known to exist.
Anyway, supposedly during the transition between the N64 and the NGC there were plans to restart development of the game on that system, but even more problems turned up and those plans were scrapped as well. What exactly motivated them to start development on the GBA is a mystery, but nonetheless Mother 3 was officially announced on a tv commercial in 2003 alongside Mother 1+2 a compilation of the first two games (if its not obvious), however the title wouldn't see the light of day until nearly 3 years after the official announcement, Mother 3 was released on the GBA exclusively in Japan on April 20th 2006, were it became a commercial and critical success, at first.
Here are the sales of Mother 3 in Japan, breakdown week by week.
While ~370k for a GBA game in 2006 is nothing to laugh about, it seems that it performed below Nintendo and Itoi's expectations. According to the Earthbound fan site, Earthbound Central, Nintendo shipped a total of 400k units in Japan, as we can see here, that's 30k units too much. Mother 3 hit bargain prices rather quickly for such a high profile release, and was even on clearance on Play-Asia, going for as low as 15$, while not a failure by any means, it wasn't what Nintendo had hoped for.
There's also something that neeeds to be said, Mother is not huge in Japan, not even close, not even on its heyday on the Famicom the series could be considered huge, right now the Mother series (or the first 2 games at least) are considered cult classics in Japan, no more really, and while it had a fair share of popularity during the 90s by the time Mother 3 released it seemed that most of that fanbase had moved on, its somewhat poor reception didn't helped either.
Now, don't take that the wrong way, while some of you might've heard that Japan hates Mother 3 or that the game is seen as the "black sheep" of the series over there, that's not entirely true, some fans do consider Mother 3 all that, but the vast mayority don't, what most Mother fans in Japan agree on, however, is that Mother 3 is the worst game in the series.
In fact the pretty much the only reason why that game (or the series as a whole) are still discussed today is due the fanbase in the west, Japan has all but forgotten about the series and after the dissapointing sales of the last game, it seems that neither Nintendo, Itoi or the fans in Japan are interested in a fourth iteration (Itoi has other reasons by the way).
So, what could've Nintendo made to increase sales Mother 3? Well I kind of answered that question already, I think that Nintendo should've made Mother 3 for the Nintendo DS instead.
So, first off let's rewind to the year 2004, here Nintendo planned to release their "third pillar" a new handheld with two screens that was supposed to co exist with their Game Boy brand of handhelds and their home consoles, originally the system was met with a lot of skepticism, all the doubters would be proven wrong however as the DS became the biggest money printer since actual money printers, hardware sales were crazy, software sales were crazy, but that wasn't always the case, the DS actually started somewhat slowly; for comparison, the first 52 weeks of the DS compared to the first 52 weeks of the GBA (note: the DS launched prior to the holidays in 2004, while the GBA launched in March 2001, this is Japan only of course)
Nintendo had good reasons not to move a high profile game like Mother 3 to the DS in case the DS failed, so for them to scrap the GBA version at this point wasn't a good idea, however after DS sales started to pick up...
Now, you don't really get a good sense of how insanely well the DS was selling at this point as I cut the graph, but that's so GBA sales would be visible; this graph right here is a comparison of hardware sales of the DS and the GBA from April 11th 2005 to April 17th 2006 which was when Mother 3 was released, DS sales were crazy, by this point the console had sold around 7.3m to the GBA's 15.2m, while still below it, the DS was pulling considerably more hardward and with that more software, not only that but if a game wasn't coming to the DS or the PS2 at this point it was next to ignored, this graph ends one month after the Nintendo DS Lite had been released too, and for those of you who don't remember it was the Lite that made the system's sales fly to the stratosphere, a couple of months after the launch of the Lite, the system was averaging 200k+ units sold PER WEEK in Japan alone, and software sales were even crazier.
Now some of you may argue "You could play Mother 3 on a DS", and you'd be right, hell even the box of the game tells you that, but people are more likely to buy games made for their new hardware rather than ones that just work on it, there's also to consider that the DS brought new audiences that had never played videogames before, much like the Famicom did 20 years before it, which was one of the reasons of the original Mother's success, what's to say that it would've helped Mother 3 too?
There's also to consider the somewhat troubled development of the game, technically speaking Mother 3 was worked on for over 10 years and some interviews with Itoi and other staff members agree that the game might've been a little rushed due to how the GBA was being phazed out and that it didn't lived to their vision, I'd argue that after the DS's insane success, the game should've been pushed back for maybe a year or so to be reworked on the system, it could've kept the original games great sprite art or maybe moved to a semi 3D enviroment similar to that of the Pokemon games on the DS, this extra time could've also been used to polish the game a little more, obviously fans of the series would've a little bumped due to the game not being on the GBA anymore, well I'd say Nintendo could've made proper 32bit remakes of Mother & Mother 2 for the GBA as to keep them happy instead of just straight ports which is what Mother 1 + 2 is.
With the DS being a megahit in the west they could've given Mother 3 a chance in the west, the localization could've taken its time and Mother 3 or Earthbound 2 if you will could've been released close to the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, raising awareness of the game, but now its just pure speculation on what could've been, bottom line Mother 3 wasn't what Nintendo and Itoi had hoped for and was for some a rather dissapointing end of the series.
Right now, there are only wouldda, couldda and shoudda, but whatever, let's just hope for NOA to do some localization of the game.
:T
