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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Fun Fact: Secret of Mana was originally designed on the Play Station. Much of the game's content had to be cut to get it to fit onto a standard Super Famicom cartridge after the add-on was killed.[0]

[0]https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/co...

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Secret of Mana is my favorite game of all time and I always suspected it had been “edited” or “condensed”. When I first learned about the above it all made sense. The first 1/4 of the game is the pacing and intention that the rest always deserved. I have played sd3 and look forward to trials of mana BUT a “directors cut” of the original is my holy grail.

Do they have any further details of the cut content? Like images of cut content, what plot was removed, etc.? I've seen numerous applications mention the cut content but the descriptions are always very high level, like in this article.

I think the cut content is pretty obvious. It's almost all the second half of the game. You spend something like 15 hours getting the first four magical macguffins in the game and then suddenly the last four arrive within 45 minutes. I remember the "dungeons" where you get the last two are just empty towers with a room or two and no enemies.

I don't know why I seem to be the only one who notices how the second half of the game is obviously missing.

I always took the odd pacing as a way to mix up pacing. Break the mold that every magical macguffin required a dungeon with guardian like in many other RPGs of the time. The weapon orbs seem to be mostly well spaced out. I remember the last magical spirit seemed to have been given way too late to really notice the missing magical spell that ended up mattering in the final fight.

I wonder how much of it is just bad memory since it has been like 15 years since I last played the second half of the game (I've replayed it a few times but always stop around the mushroom kingdom).

In my experience, Squaresoft is pretty secretive about their development process. Their staff will talk on the record about the process and drop tidbits, like the interview above, about stuff that might have been cut, but it's pretty rare that they'll go into any great detail or provide "beta" screenshots. That stuff rarely happens unless we happen to find it dummied out in the game code somewhere.[0]

For the rest, we sorta have to look at what came later and work backwards from there to try to envision what the features might have looked like. For example:

> One of the most significant changes was the removal of the option to take multiple routes through the game that led to several possible endings, in contrast to the linear journey in the final product. [1]

Since this system eventually showed up in the game's sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3 (Now called "Trials of Mana" after its Switch port localization), we can probably assume that it would have worked something like that. It's also probably safe to assume that some of the other unused concepts from Secret of Mana eventually found their way into SD3. But I'm always hesitant to get too specific, since game developers change their mind all the time during development.

One of the best examples I can think of for this would be the Soul Reaver series, where the original title had a huge amount of content cut in order to deliver the game on time[2], instead ending on a cliffhanger and with the intention that Soul Reaver 2 would finish it up. We have a pretty good idea of what was supposed to happen in the original conception of the story, because we found a ton of leftover assets, voiceovers from unproduced cutscenes, and design documents. There's even a sequence of the main character "gazing into the future" with pieces of sequences that never occur (presumably they would have if the game had been finished as originally designed). By the time the sequels Soul Reaver 2 and Legacy of Kain: Defiance were produced, however, the story veered off into a much different direction. Some of the boss fights that were planned for Soul Reaver 1 ended up eventually happening in SR2 or LoK:D under very different circumstances, or were scrapped altogether.

[0]https://tcrf.net/Final_Fantasy_VII#The_Red_Man

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_Mana#Development

[2]http://thelostworlds.net/

If you're into this, I would suggest looking into the still-developing story of the defunct Fabula Nova Crystallis project (as well as FFXIV). What can be gathered heretofore is wild.

Square is no stranger to cutting huge swaths of content, with Xenogears being an early, infamous example. Final Fantasy XV suffers from the same.

Secret of Mana has a special place in history as part of its development was cribbed from the Square-Enix work on Chrono Trigger, or rather a different evolutionary path sprung from the same root.

Such a beautiful game. I recently checked out the book “SNES Omnibus” from the library and it provided for some nice nostalgia:

https://venturebeat.com/2018/08/01/the-retrobeat-the-snes-om...

Such a beautiful and accomplished soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGK3usiX31s

NeoTokyo has an awesome soundtrack too. It's a free HL2 source engine mod. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=408tWOubRDM

This is ridiculous. I have never even heard of NeoTokyo, but this soundtrack just blows me away. Thanks, man. I love stumbling upon completely random recommendations like this.

The NeoTokyo composer also did the soundtrack for Deus Ex's Breach mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RET2PzWKzNw

He also released an album recently called tgr fuel: https://edharrison.bandcamp.com/album/tgr-fuel

oh man i remember loving that game when it was in beta. do people still play this?

I've always thought so too. So many memories.

Thanks for sharing, I never would have expected that. As a kid, I spent a ton of hours completing everything there was to do in Secret of Mana. Recently I purchased a SNES Classic and threw that game on it to play with my daughter. We are both enjoying it greatly :)

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