Secret of Mana — The Cut Game

Secret of Mana was conceived as a launch title for the Super Nintendo CD-ROM add-on — the collaboration between Nintendo and Sony that famously collapsed, and whose wreckage produced the PlayStation. When the add-on fell through, Square was left with a contractual obligation to deliver the game and nowhere to put it but a standard cartridge, a medium with a tiny fraction of the storage the team had designed for.

What followed was months of demolition. Square stripped the game down to fit: large sections of the game world were removed, the script was shortened, the plot was adjusted, and a great deal of dialogue was rewritten or deleted outright. The music had to be recomposed with compressed instruments to fit the SNES sound format. The scars are still visible in the finished game — there are places on the world map that look as though they should be landable but are not, because whatever was once there is gone.

Some of that discarded material found a home. Much of the content left on Secret of Mana's cutting room floor made its way into Chrono Trigger two years later, which is a small mercy but underlines the scale of what was lost.

Then came the localisation, and it fell to Ted Woolsey — the translator responsible for much of Square's early Western output and for a distinctive, witty prose voice that a generation of players grew up on. He was given thirty days. He has said the job "nearly killed" him, and that roughly 40 percent of the text had to be, in his word, "nuked" because there was simply no room for it: the game's dialogue windows and memory budget could not hold a faithful English rendering of the Japanese script.

The conditions were worse than a tight deadline. Woolsey has described being handed the text organised in a bizarre, non-logical order, forcing him to translate the game one arbitrary chunk of dialogue at a time with no knowledge of how individual scenes fitted into the overall story. He was writing dialogue for characters whose situations he could not see, under a hard character limit, in a month.

Given all that, the remarkable thing about Secret of Mana's English script is not that it is compressed but that it has any character at all. Woolsey's terse, economical lines — sometimes cryptic, occasionally strange — became beloved in their own right, and the "Woolseyism" is now a recognised term of art among localisation enthusiasts for a translation that departs from the literal in order to preserve the spirit.

The episode is a useful corrective to the assumption that localisation problems are failures of care. Secret of Mana was mangled by a cancelled hardware deal, then compressed by cartridge economics, then squeezed through a thirty-day schedule and a text box too small for it. That the game emerged as a beloved classic anyway is a testament to what survived the process — and a reminder that a great many of the games remembered fondly in the West are, in truth, the salvaged remains of something larger.