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It's just not "Seiken Densetsu 3" unless Lise is called Lise.

And this translation delivers that to everyone.

I would highly recommend this!^_^

This was for a long time the only way to play the original trials of Mana that we never got here. Honestly it was a good transition that got the job done. In my opinion however the Square Enix official Trials of Mana translation from 2019 has made it obsolete. Unless you need the specific original trials of Mana for compatibility with a certain hack such as the praetorius bug fix suite, than it's hard to recommend this one now. If you can't play or won't play the official Translation, I think this one is definitely suitable for a play through. Apparently due to compression that was used in the game, this existing is a technical marvel. This is a piece of romhacking history.

I played through this despite knowing that the official English release is on Switch via Collection of Mana. There's a couple of things why (wall of text incoming):

• Fan translation

To be honest, with a fan translation that is over two decades old, you would think by now (or perhaps before Trials of Mana was released) that there would be like a revised version of this translation, especially since standards of fan translations has changed so much throughout the years - but apparently no one thought of actually doing it (perhaps it's too difficult and tedious for such a task? Other languages were made many years later using this as a base for developing their own quite a ways before other official localizations came out, so why not this one?), so it got left as it is. Still, the translation in the main story does get the story across, but like the other guy said, it really is dated. A good example of this is in the story intro - I mean, I feel like there were certain sentences that got TOO literal on its translation and it got left as almost unnatural and just felt like a jumbo of words. The official localization did do it properly to an extent, but some people's opinions on the official release are left mixed, some examples I hear are how "God-beasts" in the fan translation got localized to "Benevodon" or how Charlotte's (she's called Carlie in the fan translation due to text limits) cutesy dialogue made her talk like she's Elmer Fudd. However, like I said, you should definitely still play it, especially when the internet was at its earlier beginnings, imports of stuck-in-Japan games being not as easy to come by, and that the only way to experience the game fully was to learn and read Japanese back in 2000 when this was first released - because not only did everyone else who played Trials of Mana had this fan translation, it also made the documentation of the game revolve around it. Speaking of which...

• Old online walkthroughs, guide documentations, and websites

Because the English fan translation has been largely untouched for more than two decades now, older online walkthroughs and guides are centered around it. Compared to the official translation, plenty of spells, upgrades, equipment, etc. are named differently from each other. Yes, Fandom exists as a Wiki for the Mana series, and the names are documented from both the fan translation and the official translation, but there are a lot more websites, especially old GameFAQs guides and other old websites like squarehaven that reference the fan translation more often, and sometimes they're a lot better at documenting the details on each of them and navigation of these websites and guides are sometimes simpler. Because the official release is super recent, there's not much referencing the official names of the spells, upgrades, etc. outside of the Fandom Wiki. In fact there will be some times where you have to search for Seiken Densetsu 3 because Trials of Mana would sometimes refer to the remake instead of the original version! Now that makes things confusing to deal with, ain't it?

• Original hardware functionality

I will be honest here, the game's English Trials of Mana ROM on the Collection of Mana release has two issues:

1. Navigating the menus is actually more laggy (even on original hardware) versus the SD3 fan translation

2. The text is too skinny and cramped, making it hard to read for some people (I personally don't have a problem with this however), but the fan translation's text is bigger and more readable (to be fair though, the original Japanese version has really cramped text too, but some parts are still a bit of a challenge to read especially if you're playing the game on a lower video quality like composite)

2a. Even if somehow you got the Trials of Mana ROM from the CoM cartridge and get it running on original hardware via flash cart or otherwise, you would still get the similar issues said above.

Now of course, original hardware compatibility helps a lot, but honestly that can get you so far. However, since the official version is really just a modified version of the original Japanese ROM, it still retains the bugs and other flaws that got left in, like how the Dexterity stat STILL doesn't raise your evasion and Energy Ball being as useless as it is because critical hits very rarely happen since '95. If only there was a way to fix that...

• ROMhacks

In my opinion, while Trials of Mana is a great game itself, it too, has plenty of flaws going on, gameplay jank aside. Notably, it has plenty of bugs to begin with. Thankfully, so many ROMhacks were built around the fan translation, and so with that, it makes Trials of Mana much less cumbersome to play, and is one of the biggest reasons why you would want to play through the fan translation. Praetarius' bugfix edition hack will actually fix a lot of these issues, and this is one hack that is actually NOT compatible with the official English release, so that's a big reason to play the fan translation. Personally, I myself got hmsong's Less Grinding hack since the game highly encourages you to have you and your team match the same level as your enemies, playing the game vanilla will make you grind plenty. It made going though the game like it's reasonably fair to deal with in difficulty. This is one that is compatible with the official version, but not very many ROMhacks will have that luxury. There's also a bunch of other hacks that you can mess around with to enhance the original game, so there's that. This includes the 3-player hack too (but even that is plagued with soft locks, to this day no one has actually bothered to do such a fix. Perhaps make the game force player 2 and 3 disconnect when player 1 talks to an NPC?).

• Game availability and patching

I'm a sucker for playing on original hardware, but the Super Famicom version is the only original release, and as a result, that is easily accessible and dumpable. So with that, people would have to dump the imported SD3 cartridge and patch it with the fan translation and maybe more too (and most likely play it on a flash cartridge like the FXPAK Pro like I did. Should work with the Super Everdrive too). The CoM version is not only more cumbersome to get (as of writing this review) due to the involvement of needing homebrew to dump switch cartridges (unless you got the official Trials of Mana release by, uhh, *ahem* "other" various methods), but also not very many hacks would be compatible with it as well, as mentioned.

TL:DR It's old, but I would still recommend it because a lot of guides revolve around it, you can put other hacks (even bugfixes and balancing patches), the SFC version is more accessible to dump, and it's a notable piece of ROMhacking history.

This game is incredibly memorable (I can't even remember how many playthroughs I already have under my belt) and I rarely say this of any RPG, even big name ones.

Square-Enix took an insane amount of time to give us this in any official capacity, but, as usual, fans went and did it way ahead of time, and thanks to those efforts, we enjoyed this game for a long time before the localization and remake came to light.

Some may prefer the script of the localization (I don't), but that's purely a matter of preference.

Let's move on to a more practical angle: this translation is desirable because there are wonderful bugfixing and rebalancing patches that only work with this version, and not the official localization.

As far as I'm concerned, I'd much have rather a well-functioning game with as few bugs as possible (and even some optional variety on the side) than an official script with the buggy vanilla game behind it.

When Neill Corlett's hack first came out, it was a milestone in the translation community, and it was monumental at a time when no one could foresee this game ever having a stateside release. So when Trials of Mana made its debut in the Mana Collection, it left this two-decade-old translation in a strange place.

It's a solid translation that fluently and accurately renders each character's dialogue with clean, crisp text. It's also more performance-friendly than the official translation, which lags whenever you speak to anyone or browse menus. I would even argue that the typeface used for dialogue boxes is easier to read as well.

But as a product of its time, it has issues that were common in fan translations. Most characters speak in a single flavor of English that subdues whatever characterization that they should have. Compare Watts's line, "What's the world coming to?" to "What in tarnations is goin' on!" in the official release. Or Gnome's first line, "Hey, who's talking about me!?" to "Well! My ear done started burnin'!" Carlie is perhaps the only one whose personality really comes out through the dialogue.

Yet to be fair, characterization through dialogue is hard to get right, and it can give characters the wrong voices when done incorrectly. Case in point: Koren's edgy, hotshot attitude with lines like, "Hehehe, aren't you a sharp guy......." versus the same point in Trials of Mana where he says, "Oho, you are sharper than you look." This continues later in the game with openers like, "Heh, I remember you, kid." Granted, the Crimson Wizard is a cocky villain, but these kind of lines border on cringe, and read like the inner monologues of an internet badass.

Today, Trials of Mana's dialogue flows more naturally and provides much more robust characterization than this translation. But to Neill's credit, a lot of love and care went into it, and it's not a bad work by any means. It's still a great option for people who want to experience the original game in all of its old flair without the dialogue and menu lag, or Charlotte's Elmer Fudd accent.