Posted by Bob Mackey
Ever since Nadia Oxford started writing about the Earthbound soundtrack, something keeps popping up in my mind that I've been trying to supress out of sheer impatience: the unofficial translation of Mother 3--for you non-Earthbound fanatics, that's essentially Earthbound 2. From all of my lurking in Earthbound fandom over the last decade, I can tell you that the translation couldn't be in better hands; it's being guided by a fellow with the hacker alias "Tomato" who--along with a few other folks--basically orgazined the online Earthbound fanhorde just as the Internet started taking off.
Back in 2006, I assumed that the translation patch for Earthbound would be out days after the game's release in Japan; but I had no idea how hard Tomato's team (one of a few who took a crack at the game) was working, or about the unhackable nature of Mother 3's code. If you check out their to-do list, you can see just how far the translation team has come in the last two years--all that's left to do is testing. Here's a video from Tomato himself showcasing some of the work they've done on the game so far. Note how faithful it is to the spirit of Earthbound's awesome localization:
If you're interested in knowing how thorough these guys are when it comes to translating, check out their most recent blog post:
Finally finished the sound hacking thing on the to-do list. Two tiny sound effects needed to be changed into English. One is when you use an item that tricks enemies into turning around. It says, “Look over there!” in a goofy, 0.4 second-long clip. The other is 1.2 seconds long and plays during an unusual version of rock-paper-scissors.
The game stores this sound data as 8-bit, signed, stereo raw PCM data at 8000-ish Hz with some extra info thrown in. In normal people terms, that means it’s low quality and sounds scratchy, as you can hear from the original Japanese clips here. I’ll refrain from posting the English clips, even though I’m happy with them, because for some reason people have a kneejerk reaction to stuff like this. Had there been actual, full-fledged voice acting in this game, like if this had been a Playstation RPG, I would have definitely found a way to subtitle it (hell, that IS what I do for a living :P ) but these are more like two quick sound effects that would otherwise make players go “wtf was that” and we’d have to translate it for them anyway. In fact, the people who did the Japanese voices didn’t even get credited for it (or if they did, they were just in Special Thanks).
I--I love them.
Related Links:
Earthbound 2/Mother 3 Fan Translation Nears Completion
Whatcha Listening To: The Earthbound Soundtrack
Earthbound and Back Again
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About Bob Mackey
For a brief period of time I was Bull from TV's
Night Court, but some of you may know me from the humor column I wrote for Youngstown State University's The Jambar, Kent State University's The Stater, and Youngstown's alternative newspaper, The Walruss. I'm perhaps most well-known for my bi-weekly pieces on Something Awful. I've also blogged for Valley24.com and have written articles for EGM, 1UP, GameSpite and Cracked. For all of my writing over the years, I have made a total of twenty American dollars. It's also said that I draw cartoons, which people have described with words such as "legible." I kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby and am looking to do so again in the future.
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