Yes, Nintendo. Taunt us some more. Please. We like having games of this calibre dangled in front of our noses while we weep softly in the corner. Mother 3 is still a Japan-only game, yet just yesterday Nintendo released the soundtrack on the U.S. iTunes store. Twenty six tracks across two albums (one is an arranged disc) for $9.99 each. That’s just great. Now we can listen to the music for a game we can’t even play.
A forum member at NeoGAF has a great theory: Maybe they’ll release the graphics and gameplay seperately? Are we looking at a brand new kind of microtransaction?!
Obviously there’s still no news of an English localization, and it’s doubtful this stunt is being uses to test the waters. Fan translations are underway, but who knows when they’ll be complete. At this rate, it will have been faster to gain a native-like fluency in Japanese than wait for the localization to come through.
An interesting factoid: this is the first official Mother-related merchandise commercially released outside of Japan since the original EarthBound game in 1995. Which, obviously, I bought. And I’ll buy this as well. Devotion is such a powerful economical tool.
