Coming from a Kotaku interview with translator Marcus Lindblom...

On the game's initial lackluster reception

"It was pretty difficult in some ways for those of us that had been involved. I guess the feeling at that time was—and this is not a lot different than today—graphics were a big important component to pushing forward the game industry. And a lot of people looked at Earthbound and considered the graphics to be fairly simplistic."

On his time with the project

"While it was a lot of work, it was probably the best project I ever worked on in a lot of ways. Just because it was really satisfying to know that I got to put things that were important for me just on a personal level, or things that I thought were interesting and funny. And to find out later that thankfully it translated to a decent number of people."

On the lack of legal issues

"We did sit down with our legal department and we were pretty certain that there weren't going to be any issues with a lot of this stuff because we were kind of protected to some degree by the parody clause you get. I think it was more just the fact that inside Nintendo, I kind of don’t know that they ever really understood that the game had as big a grassroots following as it did, so I think that they just—it was easy for them to say, 'We can make half a million maybe if we released it or something, but we can make half a million selling plush toys, so why bother?'

On the Earthbound abortion theory

"I think that this is a great instance of people reading in stuff that was probably never really intended. There’s certainly nothing wrong with people doing that kind of thing. In reality, as far as we were ever concerned, nothing like that ever came up."

Full interview here