Mother 4 Fan Game Rebrands as Oddity with New Trailer

The team behind the long-awaited Mother 4 fan game has reemerged to reveal that the project has been rebranded as Oddity.

The re-reveal comes via a teaser trailer that also shows off the game’s pixel art visuals and provides some brief glimpses at the exploratory and combat gameplay. More pertinently, the rebranding signifies a clean break from the Mother brand, a decision announced back in 2017 to avoid a potential cease-and-desist order from Nintendo.

The development team describes Oddity as “a surreal urban fantasy role playing game set in the Seventies,” as well as “a roadtrip full of oddball characters and serious challenge with lots of heart.” Players take the role of Travis Fields, who must save the world from a plethora of peculiar dangers, including demons and a secret society.

The trailer concludes with a note that the game will “be out when it’s ready,” though development began in 2010, so any date is almost impossible to estimate. Similarly, the trailer does not reveal target platforms, though back when the project was Mother 4, the team was aiming to have it available on Windows, Mac, and Linux-based PCs.

Mother is an RPG series from Nintendo, known predominantly in Western markets for EarthBound on SNES, which is actually Mother 2. The third game in the series has never officially been made available outside of Japan, while the first game only arrived on Western shores via the Wii U Virtual Console in 2015, despite launching in Japan on NES in 1989. It was retitled EarthBound Beginnings in an effort to avoid brand confusion.