Nintendo fangames have always had a shaky relationship with the company. While Nintendo has eased up on video content creators making content with Nintendo games, the company is still overzealous when it comes to fangames. Regardless of whether it’s free or complete, Nintendo’s known to deliver harsh DMCAs. Most infamously, in 2016, Nintendo DMCA’d Another Metroid 2 Remake and Pokemon Uranium, two popular high quality Nintendo fangames. With this heavy hand, people wondered: what will happen to that MOTHER 4 fangame? Well, the developers’ answer to that was to rebrand.

The MOTHER 4 fangame rebranded itself into Oddity, as revealed in a January 2nd trailer. It’s currently unknown how much of the original concepts will be carried on in this rebranding. Though, the base premise of the game and its player characters hasn’t changed. A young boy named Travis Fields finds mysterious metal spires coming out of the ground as aliens seem to invade, while also gaining psychic powers.

Granted, the psychic powers are now called VOX instead of PSI. With Floyd, Meryl and Leo, he goes on an adventure that now distinguishes itself away from its MOTHER origins. The rebranding was formally announced in a 2017 AMA, though there wasn’t enough concrete information to what it would become. In October of last year, the official Twitter (now @OddityRPG) alluded to the coming relaunch.

There was an official MOTHER 4 blog (which is currently still up) that used to have frequent updates that died off toward the end of 2016. In the blog’s last post, the developers addressed the possibility of getting a cease and desist, to which they answered: “If we do, we’ll do everything in our power to make sure you guys get a game even if we have to release under a different name after removing any copyrighted material and systems. Our goal is to respect and pay tribute to the Mother series, not fight the people who made it.”

Oddity started development in early 2008, with a bunch of projected release dates until deciding on a vague “it’ll be out when it’s done.” statement. Hopefully, it’ll soon be done without the threat of Nintendo’s lawyers hanging overhead.

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