ITT: any stories about the 'hardships' you had to go through to find a game/figure something out about or in a game/whatever before Google was a thing
I remember playing SoM and then reading in GamePlayers that Final Fantasy Adventure (which I'd never played) was actually the first game in this series and that SoM was "Sacred Mana Sword 2". I have no idea who they got to translate, but hey, close enough at the time. I played that (never had a GameBoy so I bought the Super GameBoy cart and the game) and this shortly became my favorite series. Like a year later, Secret of Evermore was being advertised and I thought like a bunch of people that it was the third game that I only knew was supposed to be a thing because Nintendo Power mentioned a *second* game. Then they said it wasn't, and that it was only released in Japan "at the moment".
During this time my dad worked for a big car audio company and made trips abroad. I wrote down the title of the game, gave it to him and on his next trip to Japan, one of the dealers who had known my dad for like five years actually had a son who owned a bunch of Square games and knew exactly what it was. He was kind enough to give my dad his specific work email in the event he wanted to actually pay him to buy the game and ship it over.
So, I eventually said screw SoE and spent a stupid amount of money having my dad import this game on the word of this acquaintance of his. Took months to show up. Then it took a while because I didn't have internet at home and had nobody to ask about this sort of thing to figure out how to play it. Eventually I "modded" (incidentally correctly) the console just to make the game fit without any adapter and was shocked that it worked. Then I just pretended I understood the text. Wasn't until like 2003 that I even knew about emulators and at that point I really didn't regret it, but goddamn was the story a lot different than what I thought was going on if that translation is correct.