Trivia / Trials of Mana

• Fan Translation: Quite possibly tied with Mother 3 for the title of most famous fan translation effort in history. It was one of the earliest high-profile fan translations, one of the first with a truly high quality of hacking (especially given how Neill Corlett had to crack text encryption once thought nigh-uncrackable by the hacking community) and a very solid script... and it gained the dubious distinction of being one of the oldest fan translations to not be answered with any kind of official release. The patch was first released in July 1999, was polished by 2000, and went on to serve the fandom well for nearly two decades when there wasn't even a word from Square, and later Square Enix, of an official English localization. Although after the Compilation Re-release on the Switch in Japan was released in 2017, people from Square Enix were acknowledging a demand for a localization, leading to the official international release of the original version of the game in 2019, plus a full remake in 2020, both featuring an all new translation done in-house.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: While pretty much every other Square or Enix release from the Super Nintendo era^note not counting their ones developed by other studios such as Quintet or Secret of Evermore's American team, and even then... received a re-release via Virtual Console, Video Game Remake, or a Polished Port of some fashion during the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Generations of video gaming, Seiken Densetsu 3 was not reissued in any way whatsoever for twenty-two years until the Seiken Densetsu Collection on the Nintendo Switch in Japan in 2017. During that two decade gap, the only ways to experience the game were either the second-hand market or outright piracy—and if you wanted the game in English, then you needed the fan patch or you were pretty much up a creek. It's probable that the game's bugs and technical issues contributed to this. As of June 11th, 2019, this was (finally) averted, as not only did the Collection of Mana for the Switch come to the US, Seiken Densetsu 3 came with it, now under the title Trials of Mana.
• Late Export for You: At this point one of the crowning examples. The gap between the original Japanese release (September 30, 1995) and the multi-language Switch release (June 11, 2019) was twenty-three years, eight months and eleven days. But, praise the Mana Tree, late is infinitely preferable to "never"!
• Newbie Boom: Two, both in 2019 when the Collection of Mana was finally released outside of Japan, and when the 2020 remake was released on April 24th, 2020.
• No Export for You: Prior to the SNES version's shocking release on the Switch, Trials (then Seiken 3 ) was one of the most infamous examples of this phenomenon, made worse by misleading media coverage:
  • Nintendo Power announced that "Secret of Mana 2", an English version of SD3, was planned for release at one point in 1995. The game infamously appeared on the cover of Super Play Magazine in Britain under that name (and featured a gigantic article about the game, complete with interview snippets from Koichi Ishii), was mentioned and covered by GameFan multiple times in '95, and was even listed in the Sears "Wish Book" catalog of 1995 for a '96 release. All of this would prove premature; SD3 became the only major (i.e. non-mobile) World of Mana game to not have an official English version released during its own console generation (with Nintendo Power quietly noting the cancellation in December 1995), and for decades Square and then Square Enix seemed in no hurry to correct the situation.
  • Part of the problem was that, due to the size of the game (at 32 megabits, it was one of the heftiest games for the SNES of the day), it would have needed the more specialized (and far more expensive) 32-mbit cartridge, and it would've been ready for release in '96, at the very tail-end of the Super Nintendo's American lifespan; things were moving pretty quickly at that point, and purely 2D games fell out of favor for a long time.
  • There are now-well-known technical issues with the game that, apparently, made localizing the game at the time prohibitively expensive; there were bugs/glitches (Duran's shields do nothing, evade/critical doesn't work) that wouldn't have passed Nintendo of America's certification requirements, and there's the infamous issue with the character limit in player names (and how trying to change it evidently causes problems throughout the entire game without an immense amount of labor). The Nintendo Power Dec.1995 article seems to corroborate this (noting the cancellation was due to "trouble of a technical nature and the cost [to fix it] may be prohibitive").
• Urban Legend of Zelda: There was a long-standing rumor that Secret of Evermore was what Americans got in place of the SNES versions of Trials of Mana. That game has never been released in Japan; it was developed specifically in America for an American audience. In truth, Trials wasn't ported over to America at the time for reasons that had nothing to do with Evermore or its development. The SNES was already on the way out at the time that Trials and Evermore were released, with the announcement of the Nintendo 64 just a few weeks away. And Trials had so many glitches which needed to be fixed before Square could even think of porting it to the West that they decided it just wasn't worth the trouble.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Super Famicom release was going to have a giant squid as the boss of Volcano Island Bucca. The boss sprite and its attacks are still present in the game data, but they aren't used. There were plans to include the boss back in the remake according to a datamine, but it still remains in the cutting room floor.
  • The 2020 remake began development as another Shot-for-Shot Remake, like the Final Fantasy Adventure and Secret of Mana remakes. The team wasn't satisfied with the result and scrapped it. The unpopularity of the Secret remake was also a factor. The 3D remake would have been the only version of Trials to be translated if Square Enix's western division hadn't pushed to localize the 16-bit version, as well.
  • The 2020 remake was originally going to feature two new boss fights vs. Lord Flamekhan and Queen Valda according to the datamine. Only Gauser, the King of the Beastmen, can be fought in the final release.

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