In general, I’m not really a big fan of remakes, with the main reason being that a lot of games that get the remake treatment were always good. I’m always going to be in favour of ports above all else, or maybe a remaster as long as they don’t change too much, because it’s so difficult to play so many older games now. Final Fantasy 7 Remake, though… that one threw a spanner in the works. Remake by name, but not quite in practice, it’s a game that’s more a reimagining of the original seminal title.
For the most part it follows the same beats as the opening section in Midgar, just stretched from two or three hours to about 30. To me, it felt like a great and ambitious way to start the Remake project, but now that Rebirth is here, my ideas of what ambition could be have been shattered slightly. And for more reasons than just that, I think Rebirth is a good example of why most other remakes are a bit pointless.
Let’s look back to The Last of Us remake, as an example. Why does it exist? Well, money is the actual answer to that question, but for the sake of this argument let’s forget about capitalism for the moment, and focus on the other reasons one might remake a game. The Last of Us originally released on the PS3, a now two generations old console whose games are difficult to make backwards compatible because of its architecture. Alright, sure, there are technical reasons to remake it then, though it did receive a PS4 port so that’s one knock against it. The problem is though, aesthetically it was noticeably different.
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