Why Did Seiken Densetsu 3 Take So Long to Reach the West?

This is not a case of a game nobody considered. During development the game became known abroad as Secret of Mana 2. Square stated in a 1995 issue of its North American newsletter that it planned to release the game during the second half of 1995. Next Generation previewed it in August 1995, noting the six characters, the calendar system, and a world three to four times the size of the previous game. The plan was real, dated, and printed.

A second Next Generation preview in February 1996 reported that the North American release had been cancelled by Square’s American branch due to programming bugs deemed impossible to fix in a timely manner. Nintendo Power, a few months after the Japanese release, put the probability of a North American release as low, citing issues of a technical nature and a production cost that would have been far too high at the time. Brian Fehdrau, lead programmer on Square’s American made Secret of Evermore, later confirmed the game carried software bugs that would have hindered Nintendo of America certification without extensive work.

In 2020, series producer Masaru Oyamada gave the mechanical reason underneath the others: the game was so large that the cartridge was pushed to capacity, leaving no spare room for localization data. A translation was not only a text job; it was a storage problem on fixed hardware. Retro Gamer added the market reason in 2011: localizing the game for North America or Europe would have cost a fortune just as the competing PlayStation and Sega Saturn diminished the benefit of spending that much on an SNES title. Lackluster overseas sales of Secret of Mana have also been proposed, and the page records that as a proposal, not a documented decision.

A durable fan belief holds that Secret of Evermore was released instead of this game. The record says otherwise. Secret of Evermore was built by a new team at Square’s Redmond office hired specifically to create it; Fehdrau stated that nobody on the Evermore project would have been involved in a translation of Seiken Densetsu 3. One game did not take the other’s slot. The slot closed on its own, for bugs, space, and money.

English speakers played the game anyway: a fan translation led by Neill Corlett was completed in 1999. The official return began with the Japanese Switch release of the Seiken Densetsu Collection on June 1, 2017, which showed Square Enix the overseas interest. Localizing the original required revisiting the original SNES development environment, with assistance from Nintendo, and took about a year; the Switch’s expanded storage removed the old cartridge problem entirely. Koichi Ishii asked that the Western title carry the number 3, and Square Enix chose Trials of Mana: the trials of the protagonists, three heroes chosen from six, and the prefix tri for 3.