Do original manuals remain canon with updated manuals for re-releases?
CH: Remade manuals are the most canon, same with remade games and recent director quotes. If a remade manual leaves out information from the original it can still be canon as long as it does not contradict with anything else. To be honest, manuals are really under used in modern games. Back on the NES, cartridges had little memory and not enough room to hold everything, so minor aspects, like the small story, gets bumped onto the manual along with other directions like game controls. Today games can hold a lot of information so there is no need to push extra content onto the manual. Very few people, including myself, even bother to look at them anymore. Future titles probably won’t have any use for the manuals, but when looking back at the NES or SNES, it may be necessary to understand their position of canon in the series.
