[Avenger42]

For Seiken Densetsu 3, Wikipedia links to an article that stated: "...the game's North American release had been canceled by Square's American branch due to programming bugs that they deemed impossible to fix in a timely manner."

For Final Fantasy II: "the long development time, the age of the original Japanese game and the arrival of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System [...] led Square Soft to cancel work on the Final Fantasy II localization in favor of the recently released Final Fantasy IV"

Similarly for Final Fantasy III: "...Square was focused on developing for Nintendo's new console."

[scott_s]

On SD3, I read that the "bugs" are mostly because English text took up more space than Japanese. From an article by Jermey Parish [1]:

"Seiken Densetsu 3 was among the first games to receive a fan translation, and Neil Corlett's localization crew was fairly open about the difficulty of that process. SD3 was a huge game on a cramped cartridge, and the Japanese version -- already benefiting from the density of kanji text -- employed a custom compression system that would have made it practically impossible for a localized version of the game to fit within the confines of the ROM without the removal of massive chunks of content. The simple fact is that SD3 was likely never intended for localization, because the process would have been impossible."

[1] http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-Sec...

[digi_owl]

Yeah i recall various ROM patches coming complete with special fonts so they could fit the english text into the boxes etc of the original game ui without having to hack in extra pages of scrolling or similar. Kanji allows for some very info-dense UIs.

[JoshTriplett]

The same thing applied to Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2): the original translation had to drastically simplify/cut details from the English translation to fit into the dialogue boxes, which used a large fixed-pitch English font. There's a ROM patch ("Variable Width Font edition") that changes the dialogue font to variable-width, and uses the additional space to improve quite a bit of the dialogue.

[bitwize]

It's worth noting that today, Square Enix is a massive multimedia empire with tons of resources to devote to localization; in the early nineties it would have been a small-ish shop and a localization effort for any given game would have been costlier in proportion to their size even without the additional technical onstacles. So they had to pick their battles as to which games to bring to western markets.