We have some potentially "history-making" news for Secret of Mana fans. A new update has just been released for Secret of Mana: Reborn, a ROM hack for the classic role-playing game from Square, featuring recreations of two previously unused locations cut from the finished game.
This essentially means that players can now go where no Secret of Mana fan has been in "over 30 years", including "the original path between the Water Palace and Neko’s" that was featured "extensively in prerelease images and magazine screenshots" and "the original concept for the Moogle Village", as it appeared in Famitsu shortly before being changed.
Secret of Mana: Reborn, in case you've never heard of it, was first released in 1.0 back in 2020, and is a hack that essentially overhauls Ted Woolsey's original English translation of the game, which was famously produced in a bit of a rush and featured a ton of cut content from the game's original Japanese script.
It was created by The Sap Team (with the help of the level editor Tomm) and features a retranslation of the original Japanese script, combined with some of the more memorable elements from Woolsey’s original to create what it describes as a first of its kind "comprehensive fan-made script remaster", and also goes to the effort of restoring various pieces of missing and cut content "based on [the team's] exhaustive research".
According to a news article published on the website romhack.ing, to reintroduce the two areas, The SAP Team had to painstakingly and precisely recreate the area from screenshots, even returning the world map to its prerelease state "to accommodate the newly reimplemented content". The interior of the Moogle Village huts, meanwhile, were crafted entirely from scratch, drawing inspiration from "other parts of the game".
You can grab the patch (version 2.5) here.