The story of Mother 3 does not seem to link back to the past games in the series, despite the fact that the end of Mother 2 lead to a sequel. The story involved a small family living in a hick-like community in the midwest (or something like it.) The main character appeared to be a cowboy named Flint who had two twin sons, named Ryuka and Kraus. The spellings of their names change on however they're translated, but that's the basic idea. Flint also has a dog, Boney, who accompanies him.

The story starts with a UFO crashing nearby the town which Flint lives in. Flint goes to investigate the noise. In the playable demo at Spaceworld, Flint went through various different landscapes, starting with traditional-RPG desert canyons and underground dungeons, but then Mother 3 went into a completely different direction, as a giant green dragon runs through the landscape and runs alongside... a futuristic bullet train. This blend of various elements, from a hick town to a bullet train, is something that is only something which one would see in the Mother series. Spaceworld also showed other elements of Mother 3, such as a very interesting Mine Cart scene with Ryuka and Klaus riding through an old mind shaft. Finally, a rock band known as DCMC plays some nice music. You can find information about spaceworld here.

However, while the story was well planned storyline-wise, the development team was not used to working with 3D graphics. They had trouble developing it, and the game suffered delay after delay. It ran into further delays when, around 1998, it was announced as one of the launch titles for the 64DD, a disk-drive attachment for the Nintendo 64 which planned to enhance games. As the 64DD met it's doom in Japan, Mother 3 moved off of its list of games. Mother 3 made an appearance of Spaceworld in 1999, showing screenshots, a movie, and a playable demo, and with this, it looked as if Mother 3 would finally come out.

All these signs of completion showed nothing. The game suffered further delays following spaceworld, when finally, in late summer of 2000, it was announced that Mother 3 was cancelled. The shock hit the Earthbound community hard, but Mother 3 simply had too many problems at the time. It was full of bugs and still not completed. It was also losing interest, as the new Gamecube system made the Nintendo 64 obsolete. More information about Mother 3's cancellation can be found here.

4/15/2003: Updated the news section with all the AWESOME NEWS concerning the Mother anthology on GBA. Also, updated Fanthoughts with all the AWESOME NEWS concerning the Mother anthology on GBA. (And put up the battle system fanthoughts.)

3/06/2003: Added a Mother 3 timeline made by Jonk. Also put some of the latest news in the News section.