Fans are giving classic JRPG Earthbound the remake it deserves

Mother² - or Mother Squared, if you prefer - is a fan-made remake of the SNES classic Earthbound, and it continues to look extremely impressive in a recent trailer showing off recent development progress. 

Mother Squared is a from-the-ground-up remake of the original SNES game built by fans in the open-source game engine Godot. The art is very reminiscent of the original, but with substantially more detailed sprites and an expanded widescreen presentation. Perhaps most notably, the whole battle system has been revamped to be in line with the more robust battles of Mother 3.

This remake seems to be largely focused on smoothing out the rough edges of the original game, offering big UI and playability improvements to help make it more palatable to a modern audience. For a fan remake of a game as iconic as Earthbound, that's probably the best approach. There's no word on exactly when the project will release, though as you'd expect from a fan-game it's PC-only. Similar dev update trailers have been released annually since 2021, so clearly the devs are making progress.

The Mother trilogy is one of the most beloved series in Nintendo's back catalog, but it's one the publisher has historically not shown much support toward, especially outside of Japan. Mother 2 was the first - and for many years only - game released in English, bearing the title Earthbound on Super NES. Many years later, an official translation of the original 1989 Famicom game Mother was released as a digital download on Wii U. Despite years of pleas and an excellent fan translation, Mother 3 has never officially been released outside of Japan.

The Mother and Earthbound fandom is legendary even by the standards of retro game enthusiasts, and the new Mother Squared trailer comes as part of an annual presentation called Mother Direct. This hour-long video showed off tons of other fan games and other major art and story projects in the community, as well as a host of original indie games inspired by the series.

Mother 3 might never come West because of Robin Thicke.