Read Kotaku Jason's Interview with the producer of the remake, Masaru Oyamada:
“The ultimate goal would be to get that glory back,” Mana series producer Masaru Oyamada told me during an E3 interview, speaking through a translator. “With Trials of Mana we really challenged ourselves to provide Mana in a new form, different than how it used to be. And so after the fans see the story and actually play this game for themselves, we would like their feedback on their expectations for Mana games to come, and to take that into consideration for the future.”
Trials of Mana, which will be out in early 2020, is a remake of the previously Japan-only Seiken Densetsu 3. That game was released in 1995 for the Super Famicom, but never made it to the West, despite the popularity of its predecessor, Secret of Mana, .
“We decided on making the new version of Trials of Mana first... We got a lot of feedback from outside Japan saying they wished it was coming to their areas as well,” said Oyamada. “And so we decided to start working on Trials of Mana as a new title, since many of these players had never played it before. Then we showed the remake to the Western teams. They thought it was good, but they were really hoping to get the original version also.”
“We learned that the fans have really high expectations and desires towards titles in this series,” Oyamada said, “and so we really wanted to take that feedback into account and apply it to make improvements when we developed Trials of Mana.”
For example, he said, they plan to add lip synchronization to characters’ voice acting, which was an unsettling omission in Secret of Mana. “That’s one concrete example,” he said. “As far as other various elements go, this time around the system is very different.”