Overall, I’m not a huge fan of remasters, mostly because a lot of games that get the remaster treatment are always good. I would always prioritize ports, or maybe remasters, as long as they don’t change too much, because it’s just too difficult to play so many older games these days. Final Fantasy 7 Remake, though… the man threw a wrench at work. A remake in name, but not a complete remake, the game is more of a reimagining of the original seminal game.
Most of it is the same as the opening portion of Midgar, just extended from two or three hours to about 30 hours.To me, this feels like a great and ambitious way to kick off a remake project, but now rebirth At this point, my ambitions were somewhat dashed. For many more reasons, I think Rebirth is a great example of why most other remakes are kind of pointless.
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Let’s review the last of us Take remakes for example. Why does it exist? Well, money is the actual answer to this question, but for the sake of this argument, let’s forget about capitalism for a moment and focus on other reasons why people might remake games. The Last of Us was originally released on the PS3, a two-generation-old console whose games were difficult to make backwards compatible due to its architecture. Well, of course, there are technical reasons for remaking it, although it did get a PS4 port, so that’s a knock on it. But the thing is, aesthetically speaking, it’s noticeably different.
The colors are different, the design is different, it’s The Last of Us, but it’s presented in a way that says, “No, sorry, this is the game we wanted to make,” as if the original wasn’t rave reviews. It doesn’t really seek to do anything better or completely different from the original, it’s just a product designed to sell you a third time in some way.
Rebirth, however, is somewhat forced to do things differently. How could a game from 1997, with a low-poly protagonist and pre-rendered, messy but beautiful backgrounds, not be completely redesigned? There’s no way Rebirth, for example, will make the Golden Saucer look exactly like it did before, but the spirit of a big, exciting theme park is still there.
But beyond that, as established in Remastered and Reborn, the Final Game trilogy is questioning the point of remaking a game, especially one that is easily one of the most iconic games of all time. One game. That fateful scene with Iris is a Darth Vader twist in a video game spoiler, and its developers know you know this and are taking advantage of that fact.
What’s the point of being reborn if you don’t want to just look at the ground again with rose-tinted goggles? It wants you to know that things are different now and lets you decide how you feel about that fact. Of course, not every remake has to do this, but it should think about why it exists beyond just exploiting existing intellectual property to please shareholders.
This could be something small like Crash Bandicoot The remaster contains levels that never made it into the final game, or Link’s Awakening The remake justifies its existence with one of the best aesthetics ever (that little toy-like Link is so adorable).
Whether or not both games manage to survive, I’m not 100% convinced that a port would be equally effective, but at least they tried something.Reproduced titles such as the last of us, Demon’s Soulsand giant’s shadowThe production didn’t really need to be made, though, because neither could understand why their respective aesthetics were so important to the way their stories were told.
Rebirth is big, bold, and has its own problems, but having the courage to do something different really highlights how pointless most other remakes feel. To be clear here, I’m fine with them existing as long as the originals are also easily accessible – the recently released Tomb Raider Remastered, which felt like half a remake, was honestly a good one example. All I ask is that when it comes to the question of why a game should be remade, when you put down the “money” answer, you consider what the best answer is. Also, no other remake has had Claude Strife wearing only swimming trunks, but that’s hard to do.