What causes a SNES game to lose its save game?

Let's sum up what we got. Possible reasons:

  1. Battery fault.
  2. SNES fault (for some reason erases saves randomly).
  3. Cartridge fault (memory chip corruption).

So that's that you can do:

  1. Be sure you replaced battery nice and correctly.
  2. Try other games, and see if their saves are not lost.
  3. Try cartridge on some other SNES console and see if it fails there.

Try the capacitor next to the battery on the cartridge circuit board - I just replaced the battery in a SNES game and noticed there were dry joints on both capacitor pins.