In my experience, Squaresoft is pretty secretive about their development process. Their staff will talk on the record about the process and drop tidbits, like

In my experience, Squaresoft is pretty secretive about their development process. Their staff will talk on the record about the process and drop tidbits, like the interview above, about stuff that might have been cut, but it's pretty rare that they'll go into any great detail or provide "beta" screenshots. That stuff rarely happens unless we happen to find it dummied out in the game code somewhere.[0] For the rest, we sorta have to look at what came later and work backwards from there to try to envision what the features might have looked like. For example: > One of the most significant changes was the removal of the option to take multiple routes through the game that led to several possible endings, in contrast to the linear journey in the final product. [1] Since this system eventually showed up in the game's sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3 (Now called "Trials of Mana" after its Switch port localization), we can probably assume that it would have worked something like that. It's also probably safe to assume that some of the other unused concepts from Secret of Mana eventually found their way into SD3. But I'm always hesitant to get too specific, since game developers change their mind all the time during development. One of the best examples I can think of for this would be the Soul Reaver series, where the original title had a huge amount of content cut in order to deliver the game on time[2], instead ending on a cliffhanger and with the intention that Soul Reaver 2 would finish it up. We have a pretty good idea of what was supposed to happen in the original conception of the story, because we found a ton of leftover assets, voiceovers from unproduced cutscenes, and design documents. There's even a sequence of the main character "gazing into the future" with pieces of sequences that never occur (presumably they would have if the game had been finished as originally designed). By the time the sequels Soul Reaver 2 and Legacy of Kain: Defiance were produced, however, the story veered off into a much different direction. Some of the boss fights that were planned for Soul Reaver 1 ended up eventually happening in SR2 or LoK:D under very different circumstances, or were scrapped altogether. [0]https://tcrf.net/Final_Fantasy_VII#The_Red_Man https://tcrf.net/Final_Fantasy_VII#The_Red_Man [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_Mana#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_Mana#Development [2]http://thelostworlds.net/ http://thelostworlds.net/