I'll keep this as spoiler-free as I can, but it really is a great game, I've cleared it. Anyway...
It all comes down to the Magypsies. They're aliens that look like drag queens...Mother games are weird.
You change the name, it's censorship.
You leave the name, Twitter explodes about an "anti-Romani slur."
You leave the sprites alone, it's anti-tranny stereotypes.
You change the sprites, it's LGBT erasure.
Nintendo's in a bind. So they just don't release it, because dealing with the "give us Mother 3" crowd is better than dealing with the SJW Twitter mob.
Nah, people have been asking for Nintendo to give Mother 3 a North American release for over a decade. For what it's worth, Nintendo is well aware of the fanlation patch and hasn't done anything to strike it down. Frankly, I think Nintendo are just cheap bastards who don't want to spend the money doing what a bunch of people did for free.
Fully aware--believe me, I was one of them.
But in Current Year, they'd ruin it.
Agree to disagree? When it comes to problems with the Big N (word), their biggest is how economically retarded they are. Either refusing to actually fix their Joycon drift permanently and instead kick the can down the road, making not enough of their Classic Consoles to go around, or just straight up removing the 3D Mario Anniversary collection from the eShop, Nintendo strikes me as too far out of touch to do any of the changes to 'cater' to an audience.