http://mother3.fobby.net/ Download and play it, ****. iff you have a Digg account, Digg this: http://digg.com/nintendo/MOTHER_3_Fan_Translation_COMPLETE_Do_It_Yourself_Devotion
For the past year and a half a crack team of people from Starmen.net have been translating Mother 3, the sequel to the SNES RPG Earthbound, from it's original Japanese incarnation to a complete and professional English translation, as it became exceedingly clear that Nintendo had no intention of releasing the game officially in English. The translation is finally done, the entire game is in English now for you to enjoy.
Well, considering I haven't played the first two, do you know if they have the first two Mother games translated and avalible for download?
Mother 1 and Mother 2 were both officially translated by Nintendo, so, uhh, yeah. The Mother series is like Final Fantasy, each game is a story independent of previous games, except for subtle hints and connections to previous titles. So, playing Mother 3 without playing 1 and 2 you may be confused when the game makes a joke or reference to a previous title, but all in all the story is rather stand-alone that doesn't necessarily require knowledge of previous titles.
That's because it wasn't, Nintendo translated the game for NA release, but by the time it was done the SNES had already launched and releasing a new NES game was uneconomical, so the game was never officially released. Eventually a prototype cartridge of the game was discovered, and when analyzed they found that the entire game was fully translated, so the ROM was simply extracted and dubbed "Earthbound Zero" (since Mother 2 became "Earthbound", it's prequel was numbered 0)
