A Question About Importing Games

[EarthBound08]

...particularly Mother 3 and Mother 1 + 2.
My birthday is coming up in May and I've been considering importing these two games from play-asia.com, but I've been wondering if there's a way to change the language to English. Seeing as I can't read Japanese and I only take Latin in High School, it could pose a slight problem if I have no idea what to do.
Help!

EB08

 

[DJcream]

quick answer: no

Since these games were made for I believe the SNES, they cannot hold enough space to add an english translation on those carts. If you really want to play them, just use a FAQ.

 

[Livvers]

Yeah, just find translations online. Here's one I found: http://m3world.fobby.net/full.html

The Mother games are popular, so there should be plenty of stuff out there.

 

[motherfan]

I don't know any Japanese and I've beaten MOTHER3. I only found myself looking at a guide a couple of times and it usely turned out that it was something I overlooked and had nothing to do with the language barier. Definatly import them!

 

[Mic_128]

There was an English version of Mother 2 (Earthbound) and even Mother 1 (i think. Called Earthbound Zero) however a real copy of the english ones are very costly.

 

[LordLocke]

Despite some of the stories of the dedicated here, the fact of the matter is that the Mother games are very, very language dependent, both for playing the game and for fully enjoying them. If the language barrier is a problem, then I would, honestly, track down a copy of Earthbound for the SNES, or possibly hold out for the VC release we may or may not ever see.

Mother 3... well, unless you're willing to wait for the fan translation hack, you'll probably have to decide whether or not it's worth hazarding a journey when you'll mostly be playing it next to your PC with a translation FAQ open. Nintendo of America's shown next to zero interest in releasing Mother 3 out here, so best of luck.

Earthbound Zero/Mother 1 has obvious answers out there already that I won't talk about because even mentioning they are there is skirting around the TOS.

 

[gangstajuice293]

nice thread!! I don't think there is importing unless you have a JP Wii!!

 

[Mic_128]

Mother 2/Earthbound is one of the "Masterpieces" in brawl, so there's at least some encouraging signs that we'll see that on the VC.

 

[S2]

Has it been confirmed that the Earthbound "Masterpiece" is in the US version? Because I know they left it out of the US site, while it was listed on the Japanese one.

As for importing... I dunno, its up to you whether using a translation faq is going to be enjoyable. RPGs are kind of relient on the actual in-game text. I've imported plenty of games before, but for some reason imports of RPGs kind of suck some of the life out of the games. The language barrier makes a much bigger difference on an RPG than on say, Naruto GNT4.