Yeah it might be. I definitely did a lot better on my legit copy, but it's still not easy.

Actually after playing a little more and putting some enemies to sleep I can do 16 hit combos, so I guess it's just hard.

Mother 3 peaked at #14 on the GameFAQs Top 100 chart. Not bad at all.

Yeah, but you're also talking about a game that 99.8% of people are just going to emulate. Anybody will play anything for free.

But for a 16-bit game that is a few years old. Gamefaqs indicates that people are actually playing it and not just trying it out.

Yeah, but again man, it's free. It's great that people are playing it and all, but people play Ragnarok Online too. When anyone can just grab it from the interweb without a pricetag, any measure of consumption won't really indicate popularity or success.

We're not talking about units sold here Kyle (after all, I buy games and never bother playing them, no sales isn't a great measure of popularity anyway). Cave Story is free, and popular. Are you going to downplay it's quality as a game because it was released on the interweb for free?

Not every free fan translation gets this much attention, even of larger games. Seiken Densetsu 3 pushed up to #1 on gamefaqs when it was released. A pretty big achievement considering emulation of the game wasn't even super great at the time.

Also, you can consider the fact that Play-Asia sold out of Japanese Mother 3 copies a few weeks before the patch came out. But that was just the random sales of the game, not the fact that there was a translation coming out or anything.

I'm pretty sure we can at least agree, that there is a measure of success, in the fact that enough people have downloaded it, and are playing it enough to have to go to gamefaqs to figure out what to do at some point, to push the game up to the #14 accessed game on the site.

No success for NoA of course.

I never once suggested that this had anything to do with the quality of the game. Please don't place words in my mouth. What's in question here is the meaning of this information.

I'm just not sure what the point is of highlighting how high a game is on Gamefaqs, particularly when there is zero barrier of entry to acquiring and playing it. I don't see it as a measure of success, I see it as people playing a free game, and the ranking can be attributed to any number of things.

Again, I'm not discrediting Mother 3, I've been playing it myself and enjoying it. I just really don't see what that information is supposed to say. It's got a following, sure, it was bound to. It also hit before the real holiday release schedule, and is available to anyone with internet access.

And, the last line of your post Joey is exactly why I question bringing this information to light. There is absolutely no way for you to correlate this to a potential commercial success, but that stretch in logic was bound to happen in this environment.

So at this point, I'll suppose I'll let you guys savor what you can from this and shut my filthy mouth.

All the information means is people aren't just playing this game, they're playing it and looking for help, because they want to finish it. Gamefaqs isn't an indication of the hype, it's an indication of actual interest.

Using the argument that Mother 3 got a boost in the rankings by being free assumes that all the other games cannot be obtained for free as well. Each game in the ranking encompasses paid players and pirate players looking to complete the game.

If anything, Mother 3 gets a boost from being a complex RPG with features and puzzles that may not be easily understood or solved, prompting a higher skewed rate of players to need to consult an FAQ as opposed to something like Bejewelled would prompt, and by the smaller support community focusing the skew of players onto GameFAQs specifically (Diablo II: LoD peaked at only 3rd, the same height attained by less-selling GTA for the PSP. Diablo's wide swath of support sites would have cut into the traffic to GameFAQs and kept the ranking lower than the actual market penetration of the game compared to the rest of the list.)

Steve: I won't deny there's an interest in the game, for sure, and it's well deserved. Mostly what my concern is is what Joey highlighted for me, the potential for this to be used, yet again, as evidence of Nintendo's failures. Having played the game, I can see why they would consider it a significant risk to bring over here. Not because it's a bad game, but because of the market.

Moik: I was referring specifically to availability as to why the numbers could be skewed, but that's only one factor. You've brought up some others as well, including simply the nature of the game, being a complex RPG. There's also to consider, as Joey pointed out, the import crowd, who if they didn't get the translation would need the FAQ simply to get through the game.

I mean, Mother 3 being popular on Gamefaqs wasn't surprising for me. Most new games leap up the charts at first, and when you take into consideration the anticipation for the translation, it's to be expected. But really we're talking about a niche of a niche. Gamefaqs users playing a very japanese RPG that was not officially localized. They seem to fit together well, and I still stand by my original statement that the ranking, while nice, really doesn't represent anything tangible.

I'm gonna leave it all at that. I don't think we necessarily disagree, but I just can't bring myself to instantly hop on the bandwagon with you guys, sorry. I'm measuring this information against everything else gaming related I absorb on a constant basis, and it just doesn't seem very significant in the long run. Nintendo's never gonna localize it here anyway, so it's all kinda moot.