Casio Made a Mother 3 Watch and It's Yellow

It's yellow.

That's the first thing you need to know about the new Casio G-Shock celebrating Mother 3's 20th anniversary. Yellow like the GBA cartridge that never officially existed outside Japan. Yellow like Lucas's PSI attacks. Yellow like the sunflowers in the intro that, if you know, you already feel something when you think about them.

Casio is selling this thing on the Hobonichi store — the same store run by Mother series creator Shigesato Itoi — and they're shipping internationally. So yes, you can buy a watch commemorating a game Nintendo refuses to localize, from a company that has nothing to do with Nintendo, because the creator of the game set up his own store to sell the merch Nintendo won't make.

That's the Mother series in a nutshell. Always finding a way.

The watch itself

It's a standard G-Shock square — the DW-5600 model, which is the one everyone recognizes. Yellow band, yellow face, yellow everything. The backlight shows a little Mr. Saturn when you press the button. The case back is engraved with the Mother 3 logo and "20th Anniversary." It costs about $150 before shipping.

If you've ever owned a G-Shock, you know what you're getting. It's a tank. It'll survive things your phone won't. It's the kind of watch you buy and then forget you're wearing until someone asks about the yellow thing on your wrist, and then you get to explain the whole Mother 3 situation to someone who has no idea what they're in for.

That's actually the appeal. This isn't a piece of gaming memorabilia you display on a shelf. It's a tool you use every day that happens to be a tribute to a game you love. The Mr. Saturn backlight is a secret handshake. You press the button in a meeting and the guy across the table sees it and nods. You just found a friend.

The 20-year gap

Mother 3 came out on April 20, 2006. That's twenty years ago. I was in high school. I played the fan translation on an emulator on a laptop that weighed eight pounds. I remember thinking, "Well, this will be officially released in the West within a year or two."

I was wrong. We all were.

Twenty years. The GBA is two generations dead. The DS is dead. The 3DS is dead. The Switch is nearing its end. And Mother 3 still sits in Nintendo's vault, officially unplayable in English unless you know where to look and how to patch a ROM.

Here's the connection nobody's drawing: the same year Mother 3 came out, another Japanese RPG series made its Western debut. Dragon Quest IX wouldn't hit the DS until 2009, but 2006 was when the localization pipeline for that series really started moving. Square Enix figured it out. Nintendo didn't.

And the thing is, Nintendo knows. They know the fan translation exists. They know it's good. They know people want it. They've acknowledged it in interviews, vaguely, like a parent who knows their teenager is sneaking out but doesn't want to have the conversation.

Who is this for?

This watch is for people who have already made peace with the situation. You've accepted that Mother 3 on official hardware in English probably isn't happening. You've played the fan translation three times. You've cried at the ending. You've argued with strangers online about whether the Claus twist was telegraphed or not. You don't need Nintendo's permission to love this game.

But you'll take the watch.

It's also for people who never played Mother 3 but know the legend. The unreleased sequel. The game that EarthBound fans have been chasing for two decades. The one with the rhythm-based combat and the story that supposedly hits harder than anything else in the genre. For those people, the watch is a statement. You're claiming membership in a club you haven't fully joined yet. That's fine. The watch will still tell time.

The deeper thing

What strikes me about this is that it's happening at all. Casio, a Japanese company, making a watch for a Japanese game, sold through a Japanese store, with international shipping. Nintendo isn't involved. They don't need to be. Itoi's relationship with his fans bypasses the corporate machinery entirely.

There's something beautiful about that. The creator of the game, now in his 60s, running a store that sells merchandise for a game his former employer won't touch. It's not defiance. It's just... continuing. The same way the game itself ended. Life goes on. The world keeps spinning. The sunflowers keep growing.

I ordered one. It arrives next month. I'll wear it until the battery dies, and then I'll replace the battery. And every time I press that button and see Mr. Saturn's face light up, I'll remember that some things don't need official permission to matter.