power, the firebird. The comet arrives and appears as Dark Gaia. Will and Kara destroy its power, returning the world to normal. The spirits of Will's parents tell Will and Kara that the world will return to normal and that neither of them will preserve any memories of the adventure. Saddened by that fact, Will and Kara join one last time to form Shadow to return to Earth. The final scene is ambiguous. Will's friends are depicted in what appears to be a modern-day school, implying that even if they forgot about their time together, they remained friends in the "real" world. Development and release Illusion of Gaia was scored by Yasuhiro Kawasaki. Moto Hagio is credited with the character designs. Novelist Mariko Ōhara worked on the story. The game is often considered an unofficial trilogy along with two other Quintet games, Soul Blazer (1992) and Terranigma (1995). It was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, in Japan on November 27, 1993, and in North America on September 1, 1994. Developed by Quintet, Enix published the game in Japan, and Nintendo published it worldwide. A pre-release, English-language version of Illusion of Gaia was leaked onto the World Wide Web in the form of a ROM file. This pre-release version differed in presentation and translation from the final English-language version. For example, the prototype version contained a different title screen, based on the original Japanese-version title screen. The pre-release version portrayed small sprites of the game's main characters running on the surface of a comet. The final version released in the United States came bundled with an instruction booklet that contained one image of an early title screen, which still contained the small sprites at the bottom, but this version had the correct title. In the leaked prototype, the title was presented as SoulBlazer: Illusion of GAIA. Another notable difference was that many of the original Japanese names were in the English-language pre-release version. For instance, the character "Will" was named "Tim", the character "Kara" was named "Karen" (one instance of this name remained in the released version), and so on. Some of the script of the English-language prototype was different from the final version. An example included the character "Jeweler Gem" being portrayed as more "sinister". Finally, Nintendo was not listed in the pre-release version's title credits. It is assumed that the prototype was developed before Nintendo of America