Secret of Mana in The Super Famicom Magazine

May 2, 2021

The Super Famicom was published by Soft Bank. It’s distinct from Super Famicom Magazine.

February 5, 1993

A small map was made for this graphic:

Translated by Hiro Amano

Still under investigation!!

"Seiken Densetsu 2" is gradually pulling the veil back.  The day is coming when all will be revealed.  Wait for more news from our spy!  ...and so we continue to the next episode...

February 19, 1993

In the final game the glove doesn’t have a graphic, but the developers had plans for one:

Earlier this year, I managed to catch up with zhaDe after being out of touch for awhile. He explained possible complications in the design as shown above:

The designers would've had to track the movement of both hands with the glove in every frame (unlike other weapons), so they would need two hand positions instead of one, making it complicated to get the gloves and hands to line up. One of the gloves would be drawn over your character and the other behind.  It would be hard to sync each glove and each hand, and it wouldn't be effective as far as making it look like they're actually wearing it.

You can see in the lower left image that the glove is floating over the girl’s left hand. This happened with other weapons in the prerelease before the animations were finalized.

Queue expanded on the technical details:

All weapons are aligned to the boy's animations, and there are compensating offsets applied for the girl and the sprite. I believe that enemies who use weapons (such as the hoods with bows, goblins with axes, ninjas with swords, etc.) are aligned for that particular enemy. There's no need for any compensating offsets. [ManaRedux's note: this makes sense as enemies rarely use more than weapon.]

When they had to animate weapons over a character's body, they would use a modified version of the character that was partially obscured in the frames that the weapon would need to be drawn. With this technique, making a claw look right for each hand is basically impossible with the limitations of the game. For all three characters, their hands aren't spaced relative to each other in the same way for all glove animation frames. Even if they aligned the right claw and right hand, the left hand would not line up with the left claw if the girl or sprite's design differed too much from the boy.

Sevon translated the above article. I’ve speculated elsewhere that each character may have been confined to using one weapon, like Trials of Mana was later. With this and some VJump articles, it seems that the designers may have had more complex attack execution planned a la Street Fighter. Also note a “scratch attack” that only the girl would use:

Girl ～Skilled at unarmed combat～

She's a rich girl, a young lady who doesn't know much about the world. Is her personality something like "a girl in love who's also headstrong and selfish"?

Normal Technique
— She's equipped with iron claws. What would her elders say about that?
— This is a scratch attack unique to the Girl.

Charged Technique
— With beautiful footwork, she goes flying.
— It's a backwards roundhouse kick!