Ahhh, the famous Seiken Densetsu 3. Calling this game “Secret of Mana 2″ in front of the romhacking “scene” elite will earn you a quick correction, let me tell you something. Just think, all the newbies just take it for granted that SD3 is in English. You guys didn’t have to endure the sheer pain that came before. The dull, empty void. Such is the way of all translations, I suppose.

So yeah, this is Seiken Densetsu 3. This installment is unquestionably the best. Sure, Secret of Mana may give it some competition, but I couldn’t stand SoM for some reason. And the less said about Sword of Mana the better.

SD3 uses the old Squaresoft crutch of multiple playable characters within the same timeframe (see: Rudra, RS3). The whole “see the same events from a different perspective” thing works out really well here, it turns out. I seem to say that about every game, though. As far as gameplay, if you’ve played Secret of Mana you know what to expect. If you’ve played the others in the series, like Legend of Mana or Final Fantasy Adventure… well, you still know what to expect: run around and hit things with your sword. In realtime. It’s like Zelda, Squareified, for a complete lack of a better comparison.

Hiroki Kikuta returns (I think) to compose the music in SD3. The end result is gorgeous. The game comes highly recommended, but play the game for its music, if nothing else.

Some call it “the best Super Famicom game ever”, some dismiss it as just another boring action game. But most people agree that Square made a grave mistake when they decided not to market Seiken Densetsu 3 overseas - especially after the success of its predecessor, Secret of Mana.

Around 1996 and 1997, the growth of the internet, combined with the increasing popularity of video game emulators, sparked a number of unofficial game translation projects. Several of these came into fruition; most notably the RPGe translation of Final Fantasy 5, and Neo Demiforce’s Final Fantasy 2 project. These groups proved that such projects were not only possible, but feasible as well.

Some of the more complex games, however, have proven too big a challenge for the fan translation community. Seiken Densetsu 3 obscures its text behind numerous layers of compression, putting it well out of reach of the casual hex editor.

In April of 1998, the RPGe web site announced that Richard Bush had quit his Seiken Densetsu 3 translation project. Neill Corlett decided that his effort would be well- spent in seeing this project through, overcoming all the technical obstacles, bringing to the English-speaking world a game we should have had in the first place.

With technical issues out of the way, translator SoM2Freak went to work. He finished the enemy names, item names, spell names, menu selections, and a small portion of the script itself, before leaving for Japan in spring of 1999. Translators Lina`chan (whose work includes the unofficial Magic Knight Rayearth translation) and Nuku-nuku finished the remainder of the script.

It’s a shame that Neill Corlett isn’t really into ROM hacking anymore, because he did a hell of a job. Also a hell of a script edit.

• Seiken Densetsu 3 (J).smc
• CRC32: 863ED0B8
• MD5: 58EBD7CBF28CEADC03AEC4F448956A0B
• SHA-1: 209C55FD2A8D7963905E3048B7D40094D6BEA965
• SHA-256: AE5055BB59AEE22BA9E9AC0A3A7D2B03479BAEEF49C9CF0E06CF470588A6B677