We here at 61FPS looove Earthbound. And from personal experience I can tell you that being a mega-fan of the series is an extremely bi-polar experience; we have our good moments, such as the recent Mother 3 translation, but we also have our bad moments, like every time Nintendo completely ignores the possibility of us seeing any Mother games on the Wii's Virtual Console.
Now, we Mother fans are seemingly beset with more bad than good news, but a recent report from Earthbound Central may contain some of the best news we've heard in a looong time. In an article in the latest Weekly Famitsu about developer Level 5's unfortunately-named digital download service, Roid, the magazine hints at a possible new Mother game--though it doesn't drop any names. Here's what the amazing man behind EBC has to say about all of this:
The article doesn’t say anything about the screenshot in particular, except asking, “Could this be THAT RPG?!” and that really big-title names are scheduled to be released on it. It’s not clear if this screenshot is just concept art or what, though. If you know Japanese, you can do an interactive demo of how the Roid interface works here, but there are no game demos or anything of interest in relation to this image.
People didn't seem to believe Tomato's initial post, so, in Earthbound Central tradition, he overanalyzed the single, blurry picture of this mystery game to show how much of it was similar to EarthBound:
This could be an early April Fool's joke, but I doubt Tomato could ever be that cruel. And while it's unclear if Roid will ever work outside of Japan, you can bet savvy EarthBound fans will find a way if this news is really as good as we want it to be.
Related Links:
The Reason Why Mother 3 Never Came to America
Mother 3's Soundtrack Disassembled
OST: Mother