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secret of mana

Secret of Mana, known in Japan as Seiken Densetsu 2, is an action RPG for the Super Nintendo developed and published by Square. Secret of Mana is the sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure for the Game Boy and the second installment in the Mana video game series. The game was originally going to be a launch title for the SNES CD add-on. After the project was dropped, the game had to be altered to fit onto a standard game cartridge. [Infos from Wikipedia]

Robert Seddon has made us to notice that according to this article, Square was intending to port the game to the Wonderswan. Given that their Romancing SaGa port featured material cut from the original, it’s a shame the Seiken Densetsu 2 port didn’t happen. You can also read more about he beta differences of Secret of Mana on ManaRedux!

In the gallery below you can see various beta screenshots from that Luis has shared with us: there’s an early version of Potos and Pandora Village, different World Map, many unknown locations, the characters that walk in a river (that is not accessible in the final game), an unused character with pink hair, different HUD, beta Gaia Navel (if you have more infos on the differences in these screens, please let us know!), the hero in a weird place in Water Palace and much more! Also, as you can read in the scan the original title for the english version of the game was going to be Final Fantasy Adventure 2.

In the video below the gallery, recored by Shernoubi, we can notice various unused sprites and a debug room!

Thanks a lot to Luis & pantalytron for the contribution!

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Nes / Famicom, Nintendo

Seiken Densetsu: The Emergence of Excalibur [NES – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

14-04-2008

4 Comments

This was to be a massive RPG which would encompass an impressive, Riven-esque five disks for the Famicom Disk System (a floppy drive add-on for the Japanese NES). By that point, though, the FDS was waning in popularity and Square lacked the resources to develop such an ambitious epic for a fading peripheral. The game was reportedly killed before it even got underway, and Square apologetically informed consumers that perhaps they should spend their money on the upcoming Final Fantasy instead. The company then slapped the Seiken Densetsu name on an upcoming GameBoy adventure — to save the expenses of registering a new trademark and hiring someone to do up a new logo, perhaps?

The first Seiken sold well enough to warrant the creation of a sequel, which was planned as Square’s debut title for Nintendo’s PlayStation CD-ROM system being developed in collaboration with Sony. But once again, the medium spoiled the message; when Nintendo pulled the rug out from under Sony’s feet and decided to axe the idea of a Super NES CD-ROM add-on altogether, SD2 was hastily repurposed as a standard SNES cartridge game. Presumably, this accounts for the rather noticeable game glitches which plague the game and its US counterpart, Secret of Mana. A different Seiken Densetsu appeared on the Gameboy in 1991. – [info from GAF?]

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