of place names and puns. The few dramatic changes included renaming some characters and locations. For example, the character "Yokuba", loosely derived from , was renamed "Fassad", loosely derived from the French word façade and, incidentally, the Arabic word fasād (فساد, "corruption"). The ROM hacking entailed assembly-level changes to the game code to support features such as variable width fonts. The team reported that "the highest levels" of Nintendo of America knew about their project, though they did not intervene. The localization team planned to end the project if Nintendo were to make an announcement about the future of the game, or if they were asked to cease development of the translation. They acknowledged that the legality of the localization was unclear since the final translation required use of an emulator or a flash cartridge. The localization patch was downloaded over 100,000 times in the first week following its release. Along with the translation, the team announced the Mother 3 Handbook, an English player's guide for the game that had been in development since June 2008. Wired reported the full-color, 200-page player's guide to be akin to a professional strategy guide, with quality "on par with ... Prima Games and BradyGames". The Verge cited the two-year fan translation of Mother 3 as proof of the fan base's dedication, and Jenni Lada of TechnologyTell called it "undoubtedly one of the best known fan translations in existence", with active retranslations into other languages. Reception Mother 3 received critical acclaim, it sold around 200,000 copies in its first week of sales in Japan and despite not having an English localization, critics imported it for reception and gave it mostly positive reviews. It was one of Japan's top 20 bestselling games for the first half of 2006, and received a "Platinum Hall of Fame" score of 35/40 from Japanese reviewer Weekly Famitsu. It ended the year with over 368,000 copies sold, the 36th highest of the year in Japan. Jenni Lada of TechnologyTell called it the "perfect" Game Boy Advance role-playing game. Reviewers praised its story (even though the game was only available in Japanese) and graphics, and lamented its 1990s role-playing game mechanics. Critics also complimented its music. Famitsu reviewers noted the level of detail from the game's direction, accessibility and wit of the story, unconventional art style, and conventional game mechanics. They considered the timed battles to be both useful and difficult.