Gamers all around the world, young and old, tall and small I beg of you: please stop requesting game remakes.
The calls come far and wide for pretty much every game you’ve ever played, but there is an art to what games deserve this treatment.
Luckily, you have this young writer ready and waiting with a piece that will blow your mind on a strictly metaphorical basis because, well, we ideally want you to read another article and dead readers would be a bad business strategy.
Anyway, immoral tangents aside, not every game qualifies and after seeing a piece crying out for the remake treatment to be given to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I realise this needs saying. Please, I can only sigh so much; if people have died from laughing then sighing must surely be a risk and I have something that sort of resembles potential.
Ocarina of Time’s Perfection Flaw
See Ocarina of Time isn’t a game that needs a remake, because it ticks the two major boxes that shouldn’t be hit for a remake to be needed: it’s a pretty complete experience with no glaring issues and it hasn’t aged badly, not that it’s possible to age badly, but it doesn’t wear it on its sleeve.
The 3DS version was incredibly good, it gave a good graphical touch-up while making equipment easier to change on the fly, which was the main issue with the original. The updated graphics smooths everything out and brings it up to a level where no one will be complaining. It’s not the biggest Zelda title out there by a long shot, but the overall package works. The world feels nice enough, it has great dungeons, it has a satisfying pace to it all.
Three dungeons were cut, but two were directly replaced by others and would be tough to fit into the game, and it’s only the Light Temple that would make a great deal of sense to be added back into the game. Again, it’s a complete experience that hasn’t changed in hindsight, it made great use of the technology of the time to the point it doesn’t suffer from it. It doesn’t need remaking.
In a nutshell, if you want a great candidate for a remake, you’re probably looking at a flawed classic. A game that had something going for it to be remembered, but also had severe issues that are glowing in hindsight. You might also want aspects of the game to have changed in hindsight, maybe the combat is outdated, or maybe the story has developed significantly since the original title. Also, you don’t want a full-scale remake with a lot of additions to evolve into something too similar to other titles. I think if you gave Ocarina Of Time a huge rewritten remake it would just end up too similar to Twilight Princess.
A Game Needs to Age Poorly to Be Worth It
A remake should deliver a modern version of that original experience but to do that you have to address flaws from the original while updating aspects of the title that have aged poorly. Enter the remake with comfortably the biggest scale ever seen, to the point one game got divided into three. Yes, Final Fantasy VII, the game which most needed a remake.
The original was flawed; graphically it’s aged so much worse than its remarkably prettier PlayStation One successors VIII and IX and the characters in combat weren’t very distinctive. The plot grew so much that you realise the original glazed over a lot of places and due to the latter media the original story feels oddly disjointed. There are also plot twists that are too well-known, the impact that the original title had with Aerith or Zack is gone, the latter has his own prequel title and the former is at the centre of arguably one of the best-known plot twists in gaming. So to update the graphics to be modern, then all of a sudden the original is a blur with areas receiving nowhere near enough development, so it made sense to break it down into parts to give individual places like Midgar enough time to shine.
It really needed it. Making it into three games is no disservice either as the original is a game that just didn’t live up to its own reputation. Anyone into gaming that doesn’t like the JRPG genre, is still very aware of this title. With the second part of the remake, Rebirth, it’s claiming its crown back, it deserves its reputation again.
Heck, the original PlayStation has been a great breeding ground, the Resident Evil 2 & 3 remakes went down extremely well and seem to have ticked the right boxes: modernising a flawed experience to show why these games are so highly considered.
It’s a double-edged sword, if your game is so perfect and genuinely timeless then it doesn’t need a remake.
Shut Up About the Sun, Shut up About the Sun…
I think every fan and their dog wants their favourite game remade, but it just doesn’t make sense. I know fans within the Smash Bros community want Melee to be remade, but it doesn’t make sense. Adventure and event mode might have been fun and I appreciate how incredibly in-depth the competitive scene is, but as a product it has been completely eclipsed by Ultimate. It just isn’t needed. I just picked an argument with the Smash competitive scene, tell my family I love them.
Ports would kill half the calls for remakes to be honest, as consoles age it naturally becomes harder and more expensive to find that game you loved as a child again. Even just sticking an in-built emulator and selling it cheaply would assuage fans.
It’s the uncomfortable truth with remakes: a lot of the time, fans don’t want the game remade, they just want the same feeling from being younger and completely enthralled by a title. You want the feeling of drinking Coke, being a bit hyper with all your favourite snacks, and the innocence of more youth than you currently have. You don’t want a remake, you just want to replay the time in your life when you first played it. That, depressingly, is pretty impossible but acknowledging this can go some way to drying the tears of how expensive salt & vinegar maize-based snacks are. I’m sorry, I recently turned 30 and I’m perfectly ok with it.
Game developers need a good business sense to do it, so remastering or porting games is a great and cheaper idea. Unfortunately, if not enough people swoon over the memory of your favourite game that you want remade, then it’s not going to happen. Sorry folks, but simply typing your desire for a game on Reddit and hitting send doesn’t really cut the metaphorical-but-it-wouldn’t-really-matter mustard.
… To be continued.
… Only in one more part though, I don’t have quite that much to say.
