Does anyone know if there has ever (or will ever) been an attempt to re-translate Secret of Mana from Japanese to English?  The game has such a loyal cult following that its sequel (Seiken Densetsu 3) was completely translated for emulators by fans. But Secret of Mana itself is known to have been poorly translated in a rushed 30-day translation to English, with much of its story and dialogue cut out. So, for such a legendary game with such a loyal following, why has there never been an attempt by fans to re-translate the original Japanese version of the game with its complete story intact?  Is there any possibility of this ever being done?

FuSoYa did an excellent hack several years ago - it fixed the font and changed quite a bit of the script, but I dunno if it was a real retranslation.

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/18/

Yeah, I've heard about FuSoYa's hack, but what I'm interested in is a re-translation of the original Japanese text.  For a game with such a loyal following, it seems like a good project for someone to do.  I bet there are many hardcore fans like me who don't know Japanese and would love to finally play the game with the complete original text.

We already had a thread similar to this a while ago. FuSoYa's hack was not a retranslation.

Even so, anyone who played SD3 would know that dialog was not the strength of the game. The same is true for SD2 (SOM).

You're not missing that much, even if that text were retranslated. It's not FF2 (SNES), retranslation worthy.

It is closer to being CT retranslation worthy than anything...

Sorry about the repeat thread. 

To answer the question of what real story elements were cut out, I wouldn't know, because I don't know Japanese and have only played the English version.  I was just going off of a Ted Woolsey interview I read (different from the one mentioned in the other thread) in which he said "There were a TON of stuff that got cut. The list is too long to go into!"

In my personal opinion, whether it was actual story that got cut, or just more detailed dialogue, an English re-translation would still be worthwhile for a game with such a hardcore following.  The point wouldn't be to clear up any major confusion based on the story having been cut, but simply to let hardcore fans play a version that is closer to the original Japanese.  Admittedly this would only be of interest to hardcore fans of the game--but there are a lot of those!

He's probably talking about stuff that got cut from the SNES CD version to make the game fit in a SNES cartridge.

You'd better get started on the hacking then so all this secret missing stuff in the Japanese version can be restored.

I would if I knew Japanese, or how to hack roms for that matter.  Not knowing how to do either one myself is why I thought I would ask here if anyone had attempted it or thought there was enough interest that it might be attempted in the future.  I guess it's just a matter of whether anyone with the necessary skills ever feels like doing it.  Still, I'm surprised that it's been done with games like Chrono Trigger but not with Secret of Mana (after all, someone above mentioned that CT and SoM are equally in need of re-translation, so if the need is small, why bother with Ct either?  I realize Chrono Trigger is very popular, but so is SoM.)