My Two Gils

Which game should definitely not be remade next?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or took a spontaneous 11 day Twitter hiatus, you have probably heard of Square Enix’s announcement of the long requested FF7 remake and my personal excitement for the news. Alas, days have passed and while people are trying to find multiple ways to ensure NO ONE gets their hopes up, I moved on to more pressing matters. In case you haven’t noticed, some people are facing their worst crisis in more than 15 years. Many amateur Youtubers and writers have lost their fetish game that “should not be remade” (and other results). Sure, Shenmue 3 and Fallout 4 were announced, but Half-Life 3 remains the running gag for unreleased sequels. As for “doesn’t deserve a remake” territory, the land is barren.

With FFVII, Ocarina of Time/Majora’s Mask and the third generation of Pokémon, it almost seems like the last few gaming years were meant to eradicate the pessimistic specialized gaming content creators. Let us find them a spiritual successor to the wanted, but unrealistic remake and allow them to, once again, furnish Youtube and the blogging realm with their specific mix of negativity and condescension.

The common points of these games are fairly obvious, even to this day. While they are very different in gameplay, presentation and even target audience, their reputation and appreciation in the public eye were pretty much the same:

Final Fantasy VII is a PS1 RPG that greatly contributed in the genre’s mainstream success. It also introduced a lot of new players to the genre. It was greatly appreciated by both fans and reviewers upon release and was considered one of the best games to exist at the time, despite blocky early PS1 graphics and mistranslations. As the years went by, FFVII retained its core fanbase who still considered the game as one of the greatest and weren’t afraid to show their love. On the other hand, many wanted to curb that enthusiasm and vehemently declared FFVII overrated, naming their favorite in the series in its stead. Many fans of the game debate its merits helplessly, while calling for a remake to fix the flaws of the original.

I don’t see the problem here

Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald was released later and introduced a lot of features that remained a staple of the Pokémon franchise. They departed from the original evil Team Rocket to introduce characters who wanted to expand the land or water. Unlike FFVII, it was not acclaimed by critics, per se. However, many younger generation gamers played it as their first Pokémon game and truthfully think that it’s underrated compared to the two previous games in the series. Hearing this, many older Pokémon fans reject this idea and consider the 3rd generation of Pokémon highly overrated. Since both generation 1 and 2 were remade, many 3rd generation fans were begging for a re-release ever since the DS days.

Sure…

As for Majora’s Mask and Ocarina of Time, they seem to have highly opposed, but intertwining fanbases. While Ocarina of Time is still considered one of the best game ever made, boasting its great original reviews score, it seems more and more people are considering it overrated, because… You know, I never really saw a reason behind it. On the other hand, Majora’s Mask also boasted high score, but wasn’t as much of a commercial success. Many are turned off by the darker theme and time limit, but fans of the game are, pretty passionate about Majora’s Mask. Therefore, they went the FFVII route of demanding a remake to show these kids how awesome Majora’s Mask really is. In the meantime, Ocarina of Time fans didn’t really know they wanted a remake until they got it. The re-release sparked the debate again over early N64 zelda supremacy (with some Windwaker remake mixed in).

We got it alright…

Basically, we have games that share a huge passionate fanbase that will not accept criticism, a nonetheless great reputation and undeniable relative quality and games that contain several aged elements including graphics (Pokémon making the jump to 3D and the other two games making the jump from horrible early PS1/N64 graphics). We also have games that are on both side of the underrated/overrated spectrum. Finally, these games are part of a bigger franchise, which enables the arguments related to other games deserving a remake before them.

With this knowledge in mind, where do we go from here? First off, we need to make sure we choose a remake people want to see, but will never see. There’s no way we’d get fooled again with a good decision from a company that wants to please a very loyal fanbase. This, in my opinion, eliminates Nintendo. As they’ve shown with Windwaker, Pokémon, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask remakes, they are way too inclined on remaking content their fanbase enjoys. Hell, they even remade the super hard Mario rom hacks and Exploding Rabbit’s Super Mario Crossover in both Mario Maker and the NES Remix. Square Enix are out of the question too. Having the guts to remake FFVII pretty much confirms they’ll be ready to remake anything in the future as they just don’t know what their fans want anymore. On the other hand, we have seen our fair share of spiritual sequels and remakes from Capcom and Sega (“Whoo-hoo”).

So we need to think outside of the box, but still with a company that could have the assets to invest in a classic IP remake. Hence why I suggest Prince of Persia. With the success of the Xbox series and the subsequent mainstream reappearance of the Prince, people seem to have forgotten about the original Prince of Persia. It would make for a perfect remake debate for multiple reasons.

A little bit of controversial gore. Perfect.

This “realistic” platformer fits perfectly into the new desire for hard games. Being a Commodore 64 game and also present on other more obscure platform, it’s the perfect game for hipsters to “fanboy” over, but also just undercover enough for people to blatantly call it overrated without having played It could cause social debate on the origin of the Persian prince and if a princess of Persia could be playable. All this debate would spur the idea that the game “doesn’t need to be remade” or “wouldn’t be appropriate for the current gaming market”. Old fans of the games probably already despise Ubisoft’ reinvention and new Prince of Persia fans surely don’t have any interest in a pajama wearing boy running through a weird S&M dungeon. Considering people love hating on Ubisoft, forcefully requesting this remake won’t be a problem.

So, there you have it, Prince of Persia needs to be remade. Spread the word, help people gain enthusiasm for an eventual remake. When this catches on, we will finally be able to see new articles and video on : “Why ______ shouldn’t be remade.”

See you in two weeks!