Hope I was not missed too much. What do I have to bring today? I was playing
Final Fantasy IV a little while back, and it hit me that this game has just seen too many remakes since its release. While I love this game to death, I kind of have to put my foot down and say, hey, Square Enix, enough is enough. I'm interested in looking at some feedback from you guys about your thoughts regarding video game remakes. Are video game remakes healthy for the gaming industry? And where should we draw the line? Is there a theoretical point where as a gamer, you think that something has been released too many times to be enjoyable?
With me, I see remakes as a good thing in small amounts. When I look at a game like
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I see a timeless classic that should be remade for the newer generation to be exposed to it. I feel like that should have been the purpose of remakes; exposing the game to a newer generation so that they are able to experience the adventures we did back in the day. Thankfully,
Ocarina of Time appeared as a port on the Nintendo Gamecube with the Master Quest bundle, and got redone on the Nintendo 3DS. From my own experience, I think that the remakes were handled nicely, and sufficiently enough to please a lot. It was done sparingly and spread out while maintaining that bit of exclusivity on the Nintendo console.
I then move on to a company like Square Enix, who as of late has severely disappointed me and seems to not be focusing anymore on unique content, instead taking previous ideas and rehashing them time after time. Gone are the days where
Final Fantasy was about exploration and an epic journey with incredible storytelling. All I see now are games like
Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII-2, and Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns, which deviate little from the original game. When we look at the release of
Final Fantasy IV, the game has been released on the Famicom, the Playstation, the Game Boy Advance, the Wii, and even the mobile industry. It has been remade so many times over the past two decades that at this point it just feels old and evident that Square Enix has run out of ideas.
When I mentioned that it is good for remakes to expose the game to newer generations, when you look at a timeline like that of
Final Fantasy IV do you find that a line should be drawn and say that the game needs to stop since it has access almost anywhere now? It is unfortunate that even Capcom is taking a similar route, one of them being the
Ace Attorney franchise. The original trilogy is all over the place now; having originated from the Game Boy Advance, it is now on the Nintendo DS, Wii, coming to the 3DS, and on mobile.
When we look at games that are being remade constantly like this, does it ever come to mind that these companies are just taking the easy way out? A little while back, I
criticized the video game industry, and made comments about how developers are not taking enough risks and generating interesting content. While the overall goal of a company is solely to make money, where is it that gamers should draw the line and be able to request more, especially from a big company such as Square Enix or Capcom? Do we even have the right to legitimately criticize companies for their actions? When I see remakes of the same game on every single platform (easy money), and rehashing of the same content (easy way out) it just feels like the dedicated gaming base is getting spat on. And God knows that I'll still be there to buy the next remake of whatever game, because that's the way life works. It's an interesting paradox I've found myself in. The same could be said of the
Pokémon franchise, which I have been playing since I was a kid, and acknowledge that, to some degree, it could be more and more of the same.
Unhealthy? Square Enix has remade Final Fantasy VI to disparaging reviews citing how poor the graphics now look in comparison to the original.
Could it happen to be that we gamers are now getting older, therefore we don't see games the same as we did when we were young? Look at the
Pokémon franchise, we used to relish catching critters as kids and now as we grow older all we think about are the analytics behind each creature! Has our age jaded us to the point that we just expect more and more out of games?
Going back to the original point, are remakes in themselves healthy? For me, I find it to be both yes and no. Yes, remakes are nice if they are not thrown about everywhere to the point where it makes the game developers look cheap. I find that remakes could also be a bad thing as, from before, it gives developers an easy way out.
For those tuning in, do you find that gaming remakes are good for the industry (thinking about it in terms of games like
Final Fantasy IV or the
Ace Attorney series) and should be encouraged, or do you think that remakes should get minimal exposure and instead tell gamers to search for older systems to enjoy the content on, thereby giving developers more time to actively develop unique intellectual properties? Let me know what you think!
