Nintendo has a new set of icon customizations to the Switch Online service which have caused a bit of a commotion amongst fans of the Mother / Earthbound series.

The new set of icons belongs to Mother 3, the third entry in the franchise which never saw an official release outside of Japan. Much to the dismay of many fans of the game, the icons were made exclusive to the Japanese version of the service, meaning that players outside of that region would have no way to obtain them. Nintendo presumably did this because Mother 3 still remains exclusive to Japan, even being added to the Japanese Switch Online games catalogue and not in any other region.

[MOTHER 3]

MOTHER 3 profile icons are now available for NSO subscribers… but only in Japan.

(I was curious about this, since EarthBound icons were available globally for the last 2 weeks. The answer was that they would be region locked, like the game. Dunno what I expected.) pic.twitter.com/OuqfiQAxIf

— OatmealDome (@OatmealDome) March 7, 2024

Even more unfortunately, players who attempt to switch their account region to get their hands on the icons will find themselves running into a critical error. Should they switch regions and buy the Mother 3 icons, they will not be able to use the icon customization feature at all once they switch back to their home region. Presumably, Nintendo never considered that players might do this as they had never made regional exclusive Switch customizations before.

Lmao I think they did a quick hackjob to try and block Mother 3 icons outside of Japan so if you cheese the system it's just bugged. This is hilarious#MOTHER #MOTHER3 #EARTHBOUND pic.twitter.com/SwbYf44pfh

— Blueberry (@PKBlueberry) March 7, 2024

At the time of this writing, Nintendo has yet to acknowledge or make attempts to correct the issue. Stay tuned for more updates as they come.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

[UPDATE]: The aforementioned bug has since been fixed, and players interested in picking up the Mother 3 icons should be able to change their region to Japan and back with no issues.

https://twitter.com/mywonderfulroom/status/1765693857549971780