Hey, friends. I'm ManaRedux of
www.manaredux.com, Secret of Mana: Redux. My good buddy ZeaLitY suggested I start a post in Gen Disc which I'm assuming is this.
I recently became an affiliate.
Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games, and I always loved the Compendium going back many years. Until a few years ago, it seemed that every JRPG like Secret of Mana had no shortage of info out there, but SoM remained a mystery. Lots of hints here and there, but hard to find a complete picture. It was a blog for five years until a few months ago when I launched the site. (In a way, it's still a blog)
One of the questions everyone has is...what exactly is the connection between Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger? They're two completely different games, and honestly, I see more similarities between FFV and VI and SoM than I do with CT. So one of my long term projects is solving that mystery. Most information comes to us from the 2006 Level interview. You often hear that content from Secret of Mana was moved to Chrono Trigger, or that Chrono Trigger's development broke off from Secret of Mana's, but the situation's a bit more complicated than that.
Right now, the site is nowhere near a finished state, not that it could ever be. There's a huge backlog of stuff to be translated, as well as more sources I'm trying to get., and so much design work to do. The big problem with SoM is everything's been sitting untranslated in Japanese for decades. We still don't have a proper retranslation. We're also in the process of conducting our first interview with a designer (Shinichi Kameoka), who may have more to share about the CT connection.
