Finally, as Japanese kana can express more ideas in a small space than the phonetic English alphabet, Woolsey had to cut the script down several times, stripping the meaning of the text to its barest elements. The game was also on a tight deadline following its development quagmire, and Woolsey only had one month to translate a script that was still being edited at the last minute, and whose lines were all over the place in the game’s memory. First, Nintendo of America had strict content policies, which censored elements such as profanity, mature themes, religious references, and violence. While localizing Secret of Mana, translator Ted Woolsey faced many challenges as the sole translator for the American release.
To this day, it’s the only game of its kind without a complete translation. But even after the project split, developers still had to fight against the limitations of the SNES hardware as well as a late 1993 deadline, and the game was further cut.įurthermore, much has been written about the original English localization. I think almost half of what should have been there from the beginning had to be removed.” (2006 LEVEL intervew) A lot of material was broken off and reused for future Square games like Chrono Trigger. According to Hiromichi Tanaka, the game’s co-creator, “Quantities, and now I really mean quantities of materials disappeared when the CD-format was discontinued…we had to redo the game from scratch. This produced an irreparable rift between them, and the CD-ROM add-on was cancelled with the technology later being the basis of Sony’s first Playstation console.Īll of this happened during development, and what was planned for the game was greatly reduced. As the story goes, Nintendo didn’t receive the favorable deal it was hoping for with Sony, and went behind their backs and tried to get a better arrangement with Phillips. With the anticipated memory space, the reality of longer games with more complex elements was on the horizon. When the game was conceived, it was intended for the planned Sony CD-ROM add-on for the SNES. Until a few years ago, most conversations about Secret of Mana centered on its checkered development history.
Secret of Mana programmer Nasir Gabelli’s personal software manual, used during development