Don't you just love finding out new stuff about your favourite games decades later? Just when you think you know everything about a game, something like this happens, and it rekindles your love for ii all over again.
Take the hidden secret inside the Mothma Tamagotchi that remained hidden for decades, or the deleted scene from the Spider-Man PS1 game that everyone thought was lost forever. We might deal with retro media form our youth, but it's still surprising us now we're adults.
Secret of Mana: Reborn V2.5 is a new game patch that puts two levels that didn't make the cut on the original game back where they belong. Fans of the SNES classic have never seen these in the games 32 year history, making this a momentous moment for Mana players.
The first of the two levels is the original path that goes from the Water Palace to Neko's, an area that was used a lot in official marketing materials when advertising the game but was ousted from the game when it arrived. I don't know why you would use something so heavily for promotional purposes and then ditch it, but there we have it.
The second level is the concept for the Moogle Village, again removed from the original relase after being featured in magazines like Famitsu. Both levels have been painstakingly recreated with great attention to detail by The SAP Team, ammending the world map for the new areas, recreating areas from pictures used in promo shots, and crafting the interiors of buildings never shown after drawing upon inspiration from other areas in the game.
According to the project's page on ROMhacking.net, the patch brings the first complete retranslation of the original Japanese script. It also has some minor alterations that fix inconsistencies in the narrative, as well as providing new events and content taken from other promo and external materials that were never translated into English for Western gamers.
This patch brings versions of both the American and Japanese game releases together for players to experience for the first time. It's the ultimate enhancement loved by gamers the globe over for more than three decades.
To utilise this patch, you'll need to patch it to a legally-sourced ROM of the USA version of Secret of Mana. Head to the official project page for more information!
