“Not Every Game Needs A Remake Or Sequel”

Not every game needs a remake, but Final Fantasy VII does. The closer we get to the launch of this long-awaited remake, the more I realize just how “justified” this complete remake of VII is. This doesn’t mean I’ve swung from one extreme (doubter) to the other (believer). I still maintain a hale handful of skepticism, mostly about new character development and additions to the story, as well as the episodic release plan, which I wrote about in my review of the FFVIIR Demo.

While the launch has so far proven to be a scattered and unpredictable launch indeed, I’m now resolved to say that the world “needed” this. Notice the quotation marks: I don’t think anyone truly needed this to survive, but I’m going to extend the definition of “need” a bit more than that. Why would Final Fantasy VII need a remake, especially one at this exceptional scale and detail?

Because of its original context in time. The original fantasy adventure wowed the world in 1997 with its interweaving of cinematic cutscenes with three-dimensional environments, but decades later, those same visuals which helped sell its many, many units are showing their age. I’ve been a strong proponent for late 16-bit over early 3D games, and this is a part of that argument. Late 16-bit games represented the products of developers who had refined the generation and just about reached the limits of the hardware available at the time, whereas early 3D games had to hit the ground running and learn to navigate new hardware, new controllers and control schemes, camera design, new kinds of environments, even new subgenres.

Note that this doesn’t mean that every 16-bit game is better than the early 3D games. That’s simply not true. I’m only talking about averages. The early 3D era had its gems, undeniably. We started this article talking about one of them.

So far, I’ve played through Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy IX with my wife. When we finished IX, a polished port on the Switch, we were both convinced it was a great time. Then we started Final Fantasy VII, again a Switch port, and I was surprised at her reaction when Cloud leaped off the train in Midgar for the first time on his mission with AVALANCHE. Never having seen or played FFVII before, she actually burst into laughter and said “Are you kidding?!”

I laughed, too. As beloved as FFVII is to millions (and me), it looks ridiculous. Cloud looked ridiculous with his Popeye arms and Polygonal edginess. Of course, games are more than graphics. We know that because we write about games or read articles about games. The average consumer does not and graphics have the privilege of being the thing that must immediately grab the consumer’s attention and get them to purchase and play.

The conceptual underbelly of FFVII is still intact. While clumsy here and there, it still has a great story to tell with great characters, but it’s the presentation that has suffered under the passing of time (the same seems to be true for these Resident Evil remakes). Even the soundtrack, which I just might put at the top of Uematsu’s FF canon, sounds like synthetic noise at its worst, though at its best it is a piece of majesty, awe, elegance, and beauty, and they didn’t even pay me to say that.

A generation that didn’t grow up with the PS1 is steadily becoming a larger demographic among consumers, and frankly, we can’t expect them to get the same experience out of the original VII that those of us who enjoyed it contemporaneously did. We’re asking them to set aside modernity, potentially bias, and look past the presentation to the core of the game’s best attributes, and not every person is willing (or able?) to do that.

This morning I read about Square’s Yoshinori Kitase saying how they wanted to preserve FFVII’s legacy for a new generation of players. They will hopefully fall in love with the same game but with a new presentation. That is my wish, at least.

While thoughts like these have led me to believe the remake for VII is fully justified, and I cannot wait to play it myself, skepticism in tow… I still think that not every game needs a remake, heck or even a sequel.

Sequelitis is a thing. A sequel risks a lot. I think many of us can tell the difference between a sequel made because a story still needed to be told (from the creators’ perspective, of course) versus a sequel with the sole purpose of cashing in on a trend or brand. The first is an extension and expansion of the world of its predecessor, the second is a milked cow or even a dead horse.

Final Fantasy, however, is a series which seemingly thrives upon reinventing itself with each main entry, revisiting and expanding upon its individual worlds now and then, to hit-or-miss success, but not every series is Final Fantasy.

It’s surprised me just how frequently I’ve talked on this subject with others recently, typically in regards to Chrono Trigger. I’m firmly in the camp that not everything needs a sequel, and in fact that sequels are not indicative of quality in the original, meaning that games which get sequels are not necessarily or automatically better than games which don’t.

My line of reasoning goes that we got two quasi-spinoffs of Trigger, which are Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross. You can hear about how the developers of Cross didn’t consider it to be a direct sequel to Trigger in our podcast on Cross. Also, Trigger was a product of its time, in the most literal sense of that phrase. It came into being on the Super Nintendo and made strong use of the system’s limitations to its advantage. Perhaps more significantly, it was the baby of the Dream Team, a unique combination of talents that would be very difficult to bring together again.

Even if Square managed to pull Sakaguchi, Horii, Toriyama, Uematsu, Yasunori, Kitase, and Kato back together for one more Avengers Assemble, there’s still the fact that all those men are different people than they were in the mid-90’s. Even Square Enix isn’t the same company that Squaresoft was. And finally, at this point, there would perhaps be too much of a danger present in doing the inevitable: trying to either recapture the magic of Chrono Trigger or outdoing it.

To my mind, a direct sequel seems iffy at best and ruinous at worst. Spinoffs and indirect sequels, if anything would probably be the way to go, but as it is, I’m happy if Square just leaves the Chrono series alone. I don’t think there are enough dangling threads to warrant a sequel. But the best sequels in games are those that expand upon an overarching story, not those which simply try to outdo the games that have come before.

As to remakes, there’s immediate context for that. We’re seeing a resurgence of interest in the Mana series, again by Square. Our newest mage even reviewed Seiken Densetsu 3. You can actually see where the remake mentality is working and where it isn’t. While a remake of Secret of Mana sounded good at first glance, it evidently turned out a divisive game at best, receiving mixed reactions from fans and newcomers alike. Despite my affection for the original SNES action RPG classic, I avoided the remake like the plague. I for one was disappointed that they didn’t take the opportunity to restore a lot of the content cut during localization from the original game.

Then Collection of Mana and Trials of Mana come along. The former seems to demonstrate that a bit of a facelift in terms of presentation and repackaging is enough to satisfy players, particularly with the 16-bit entries. And the latter gets at the question of availability, since Seiken Densetsu 3 isn’t a game that too many have people played. Clearly, there are a lot of factors involved here but it seems like if the product is scarce, if the presentation really requires an update… this points toward a better reception for a remake (or port, even).

In a world in which nearly every Hollywood hit from the past seems to be getting a silver screen or Netflix remake, right down to the animes, and some of that bleeds into gaming where remakes have firmly rooted themselves as a part of the market, I do think we should ask which titles really need a remake and which ones don’t.

Final Fantasy VII, yes.

Chrono Trigger, please don’t.

Heck, I’m very skeptical for a Final Fantasy VI remake, even though it’s my favorite in the series. You wouldn’t want it to end up like that Secret of Mana remake… or Trigger on Steam!

But what do you think? Is FFVIIR a justified remake? What makes a remake justified? What games would you like to see remade and which ones should be left as they are?

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.