Reviewing v1.0

While the first Seiken Densetsu appeared on English speaking shores as ‘Final Fantasy Adventure’ (Gameboy) was a single-player jaunt, the famous ‘Secret of Mana’ was a three player action RPG that no doubt got many people to buy a multi-tap for their SNES just so they could take advantage of the full cast.

It would seem a reasonable bet that the sequel, appearing on the same system, would sport similar features but this was not the case; the vanilla SD3 was only 2 player. Obviously, this hack corrects that.

However, as handy as the hack is, it seems to have been given little continuing attention by the original author in the two and a half years since it was uploaded. Unlike FuSoYa’s 2 player hack for Secret of Evermore, which FuSoYa has been regularly updating when errors crop up, this patch remains the same without any follow up work from Parlance.

Someone on the Gamespot forums has reported an error during the Ghost Ship stage where the coding that drops out a PC temporarily doesn’t know how to cope with three controllers. I haven’t been able to confirm the error myself but I attempted to alert Parlance to this report some time ago through the e-mail given in the readme and have yet to receive a response. Until Parlance takes notice or someone makes an addendum, if this bug affects you the best workaround is probably to just tackle the Ghost Ship with only P1 and P2’s controllers to avoid the player input protocol kerfuffle.

This is a good hack, one that many will appreciate. It is unfortunate that for the moment the author has been less thorough with overseeing the integration of their code than FuSoYa has with his comparable SoE multiplayer hack (even though the first update for that took 4 years).