The History of Seiken Densetsu 3

Production began in 1993 with a long period of trial and error in which several prototype designs were created and scrapped. The original intent was a continuation of Secret of Mana; the team ultimately discarded what they had built for that game and constructed this one from scratch as a more action oriented title, reusing some monster designs that had been cut from the earlier game. The finished cartridge was very large, pushed to the system’s capacity, and a planned volcano dungeon boss was dropped for lack of time.

The late Super Famicom schedule made staffing a fight. Tanaka remembered competing with Hironobu Sakaguchi for programmers, as staff were pulled into Chrono Trigger and Romancing SaGa 3 to get those games finished. Unlike Secret of Mana, whose existence had been kept quiet, this production could not be prolonged or hidden with the next hardware generation approaching. A downloadable demo received a limited release on July 1, 1995 through the Satellaview broadcast peripheral.

Ishii named the theme independence: characters who keep their own problems and share them, building camaraderie out of separate lives. Manga and anime artist Nobuteru Yuki produced the character concept artwork from Ishii’s designs, aiming at a picture book softness rather than realism, and each hero was built around a paired gameplay and narrative archetype, the earnest swordsman Duran against the trickster Hawkeye, the transforming Kevin included because the team wanted a character who changed form.

The player chooses three of six heroes at the start and leads with one of them; the other three appear as supporting characters, and the main storyline, its villains, and its final dungeon follow the leader. The three pairs share one world: Duran and Angela against the Dragon Lord, Hawkeye and Riesz against the Dark Majesty, Kevin and Charlotte against the Masked Mage. Two players can play at once, one fewer than Secret of Mana allowed.

Progression runs on choice. At level 18 a character changes class at a Mana Stone toward Light or Dark, and again at level 38 with a rare item, each branch granting different skills and stat growth while the plot stays untouched. A calendar turns underneath everything: each weekday belongs to an elemental spirit whose magic strengthens that day, nights open a black market and change the enemies abroad, and Kevin fights as a werewolf after dark.

Hiroki Kikuta composed the score as he had for Secret of Mana, and again he performed the sound selection, editing, effect design, and data encoding himself, working near twenty four hour days in his office. Rather than use ready made samples, he built his own MIDI samples matched to the Super Famicom hardware so he would know exactly how the music would sound on the system. Critics heard a more refined and matured version of the Secret of Mana sound, bouncy and serene by turns, with piano and drums to the front.

The 1995 album Seiken Densetsu 3 Original Sound Version collects 60 tracks across more than three hours. The track Meridian Child was performed by the Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra at the fifth Orchestral Game Concert in 1996, while the game itself was still a Japan only release, an early sign of how far this score traveled without its game.

The plot divided reviewers in a consistent way: the structure of choosing different leads was praised for replayability, while the characters and storylines themselves were called flat and cliched, with 1UP.com judging the story not terribly engaging and Next Generation calling the multiple storylines an innovation attached to a formula plot. Combat drew the same split, admired as more strategic than its predecessor and faulted for chaotic battles and computer controlled partners with no sense of tactics. The settled verdict across the retrospective record is the graphics: detailed enough, one preview wrote, to put nearly every recent 32-bit RPG to shame.

For twenty four years this was the most famous absence on the Super Famicom shelf: a sequel to a Western hit, previewed in Western magazines, planned in a Western newsletter, and never shipped. Its afterlife reversed the usual order, fan translation first, official localization second, remake third, so that many Western players met the 2020 remake of a game they had already loved for two decades in a language Square never gave it. The Library keeps the original name on this page because the original is the subject: Seiken Densetsu 3 is the 1995 Japanese game; Trials of Mana is what the West finally called it.