My understanding is that that's more of a remaster

The Klonoa ones. Absoluté disateg

diablo 2's remake/remaster is way more of a remake than the last of us 1, i'd think, but these things can be a little murky

Secret of Mana 2018 yucky. Trials is fine though they actually tried to do something new with it and it was warrented because it was originally Japanlocked.

Yeah, you're right on both of those, they very much exemplify what I feel like does and does not belong on the list

LAD: Ishin only has the cards shit and it is made on unreal, other than that is not that bad tho

This isn't a list for bad remakes, just unnecessary ones

Although many of them do suck ass

WELCOME, THE WITCHER 1

The Witcher 1 feels like a pretty well-justified remake...

@poyfuh really hope this is the way I find out about every new one of these. hurry up and add it, IGDB

Disagree with Mafia 1 Remake because the original plays like garbage and is archaic 2000's jank, it desperately needed a remake because of it and the remake was good.

Also yeah, Witcher 1 would also really benefit from a remake because it also is also archaic 2000's jank. Bounced off it really early on after playing 2 years ago.

For an actual suggestion so I'm not just arguing in the comments, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake (If it still exists at this point)

@Zap those are perfectly legitimate points, though I don't necessarily agree. I guess I'm just a real jank respecter, or at the very least an uncommonly strong jank tolerator. I played both Mafia 1 and Witcher 1 semi-recently and liked them both fine. Sands of Time though is a great add. Maybe they realized how pointless that would be and gave it up, lol

Yeah, I took some psychic damage off of this one. What's the most painful one we could be getting next. Uncharted? Bioshock?

After Witcher 1 Remake is the Cyberpunk "Acceptable At Launch" Remake.

btw what's the stance on Panzer Dragoon Remake? A lot of people I know think it's lifeless, but the original runs on hardware that Sega refuses to touch.

@Vee totally forgot about it. Any soulless redo of a good game that the publisher just refuses to port definitely qualifies. Also I feel like actually having the word "Remake" right in the title should be pretty good indicator tbh (excepting FF7R I guess)

Going by the criteria I'd say Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown. Redone in the Dragon Engine to make it look shiny and new, but no gameplay changes whatsoever and less content than Final Showdown, which is saying something. Only other additions are some new online modes because online is supposed to be the focus of the release, but it doesn't have rollback so nobody cares. Zero reason Sega couldn't have just ported regular Final Showdown to PS4 - they'd already done half the work by including it in Yakuza 6!

@Dreamboat lol that VF5 one is so weird I felt like I imagined it. Like was that some kind of weird Nagoshi lark that nobody said no to or something

"archaic 2000s jank" sounds like a good time to me, though yeah i suppose i would have a tough time honestly calling those remakes (gothic, the witcher) superfluous

recognize that there's always going to be a grey area when it comes to the superfluity argument with remakes, but I do think referring to games as archaic things with "jank" from a certain period of time is playing into the exact same ideology that creates these remakes in the first place! mind-boggling as it may be for backloggdheads like us to imagine, there are people who look at Silent Hill 2 and Demon's Souls and see games that are unplayably clunky and ugly. i don't think we can just pick and choose which games are Outdated and Terminally Janky and Bad without falling into that same framework! in the same way that the absence of sound in a silent film like Safety Last! is not a deficiency, games like Witcher 1 and Mafia 1 are games that are a product of their styles and technology of their own time period, and I personally find it much more valuable to appreciate those things in that context rather than dismissing them as inherent flaws that a remake would be valuable to correct. This is not to say that you have to like those games or that you can never enjoy a remake more than the original, but I would like to move away from the idea that a game can become "outdated" in an artistic sense, if only because we've been stuck with it for an unbearably long time and it's done real damage to how the medium treats it's own history.

(i think most people here agree with this lol i just wanted to articulate the perspective for those who maybe are still coming at this with a perspective of "oh some games do just need a remake because they are archaic and janky")

@woodaba Well put, very much agree. And also thanks for adding a link to that extremely goalpost moving, subtweet-ass other list lol

really do not agree with that read on what that list is, it's just demonstrating (correctly imo) that video games have always released "improved" versions of "outdated" games and that this is hardly a recent phenomenon. the ubiquity of remakes of late has far more to do with there being less big-budget games in general and consolidation across the industry. it's not that there are more remakes, it's that there's less of everything else (in the big-budget scene at least). i don't think it's a subtweet of this list so much as it is an extension of it.

"i made this list to poke fun at the "sky is falling" conversations about recent remakes", I meannnnnnn

Pokémon Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee
Resident Evil 2 and 3
Samus Returns

I'm trying to come up with the defense of the LHB list because I do think the discourse around remakes is often reactionary (in a generic sense, not politically obviously) and overall wasting mental energy on worrying about remakes is pointless because whether a remake is useful or not is entirely tied to personal context. however I also disagree with woodaba's defense of the list (among other things, it's hard not to call that list a subtweet) and the more I spin through topics the more I come up with reasons opposing its viewpoint, so I'm just going to lay out some points that I think might be useful to the discussion.

1) I really like how woodaba's first comment deftly navigates the argument over whether games age or not without making some sort of objectivist stance on it, and I wanted to elaborate upon that. the common argument that dovetails with the anti-remakes one is "games don't age poorly" because their mechanics do not literally change over time. I disagree with this because it ignores the context the game was originally released in and how that affected people's perceptions of the game. a game such as goldeneye was collectively lauded at the time of its release thanks to the novelty of the product and the lack of other high-quality console shooters, and I think it's fair to say that it's "aged poorly" given the modern context and what we expect from the FPS genre. what's important to realize is that qualitatively assessing it in such a manner is subjective to the commenter's own context; what may have aged poorly for someone may not have for someone else depending on their experiences, taste, and age. some games that defy modern design patterns may be fascinating for exactly that reason; some games that defied contemporary design patterns may be seen as "innovative" or "ahead of its time". I think what a lot of people are trying to do when shutting down an "aged poorly" argument is that they are critiquing someone's inability to elucidate what they actually find objectionable with a given game. which is fair, but also you don't need to come up with an axiom in order to do that.

2) considering the context of the 80s/90s, remakes at that time were created for different reasons than they are now. consoles were idiosyncratic embedded systems that generally necessitated hand-coded assembly for game creation, and porting a game forward a console generation was not as easy as changing out the graphics API. games had to be literally remade in order to appear on a different console (or PC architecture) more or less. I disagree that there was an ideological reason to do so in most cases. I also think that, in favor of this list, the actual need to remake a game for a modern platform in the era of high-level programming languages and the architecture convergence is not really there considering that we could have legal emulation solutions for the vast majority of pre-7th gen consoles. it's annoying that the major platform manufacturers have offered only half-hearted attempts at these possibilities (beyond microsoft, but even their BC service is inactive for the time being).

3) I dislike the preservationist argument against remakes ie that creating a new remake of a game is anti-preservation. it's my opinion that when people refer to "games preservation" they really mean "games availability". games are purely digital by nature, and thus are relatively well-preserved. there are legitimate issues to contend with regarding literally preserving games (unreleased games, pre-release builds, online-only functionality/content, user-generated content), but I don't consider maintaining games on modern storefronts an element of this; that's an availability issue. any of these games are available to pirate and play on software emulators; obviously this has its own issues (difficulties of hosting copyrighted content, potential malware, emulator inaccuracy). the latter is becoming less of an issue as FPGA technology becomes more available to hobbyists but the former is a systemic issue that will unfortunately not get fixed in the near future. still, the barrier to games piracy is low and I assume that virtually all of us concerned with playing older titles understand how to do it.

4) potentially most importantly: the original game is not artistically invalidated by a remake coming out. some of these games are still accessible on storefronts alongside their remake (though some of the storefronts are becoming difficult to access themselves). all of these games will continue to be played and shared and discussed regardless of whether a remake comes out. I dislike the idea that someone who has only played a remake has somehow been shafted; to assume that someone is somehow not whole because they did not consume a piece of media in the right way is distasteful to me. I saw this particular idea a lot when the klonoa collection came out and feel the need to bring it up. this is not even to mention that someone may enter a series through a remake and then try the originals as I'm sure many did with yakuza (including myself) and as I've done recently with resident evil. it's also fascinating to look at how many older remakes have been skipped over in favor of rereleasing the original, such as fire emblem shadow dragon and the blade of light getting an inexplicable NES translation on switch after both being remade on SNES with mystery of the emblem and getting a DS remake that released stateside. the one major counterfactual to this whole point is warcraft III unforged, which cannibalizes the original form of the game and actually does literally invalidate and erase its own legacy. a particularly cruel example.

5) out of all of the examples on this particular list, obviously silent hill 2 was the impetus, but I think the last of us part 1 is probably the best example of an actual superfluous release. it's interesting to read about its history starting from a small new sony internal team looking to take on a big project which spun out of control until naughty dog had to take it over themselves. the context this is presented in is especially curious: schreier presents this team as the underdog looking to exert creative control and sony as stamping them down. to be frank this article is some of the worst reporting I've ever seen from schreier and it is incessantly funny to me that a team would attempt for years to modernize a game that was barely over five years old when the project started, let it completely go belly-up for obvious reasons, and then force sony to sunk cost fallacy itself into releasing it, kneecapping naughty dog in the process for years while they salvaged the work. The Remake No One Wanted to Make.

6) I think the actual reasoning behind much of the backlash towards the current slate of remakes comes less from the actual fact that the games are getting remade (meaningful remakes have been released in the last five years after all), but that it reflects a current media industry trend of stripping the copper out of the walls, as it were. like the article above says, remakes are cheap(ish), and it follows that having a tentpole release be a remake makes sense financially. in other sectors companies are scrapping through their collections of profitable IPs to slap cheap shows with known appeal onto streaming services or extend old franchises to the silver screen. having that content model come to the gaming sphere is causing the unrest in my opinion regardless of the actual quality of the remakes; people are wary of seeing their favorite games become fodder for the content mill. the only balm to this is point 4 I think for better or for worst unless we were to nationalize the gaming industry in some way and disrupt the profit incentive. I can think of a lot of other industries we should nationalize first tho if we're going that far...

sorry for the insane longpost but hopefully this captures some of the main points that people are grasping at and provides insight that may be useful to other people. I've been thinking about this shit since the phantasy reverie discourse and have accrued a lot of thoughts about it + I had to burn some time in my office because I don't have any work to do right now LOL

i won't presume to speak for lhb, but i didn't necessarily read "poking fun" (once i understood that it was a joke) as anything ill-intended... it is true that remakes, remasters, and marginally different rereleases of games have for better and worse been a thing for a very long time, and it's kind of only a hot topic right now because of a handful of specific games, e.g. the last of us (a completely unnecessary money grab and/or act of "artistic" narcissism) and silent hill 2 (a revisitation of a beloved classic which will almost certainly be a meatier, flashier, emptier version of the original - an act of desecration, perhaps, and a demoralizing sign of The Industry's stifling capitalist greed and the willingness of gamers to fork over their cash in celebration of such hollow gestures). on the other hand, it's business as usual and maybe it ain't that deep. i don't really think it's a good reason to spark drama and animosity amid a small online community such as this one. all we can really do is decide whether to vote with our wallets, hoist the banner of skull & crossbones, or simply disengage entirely. and then talk about it.

@Pangburn Really great stuff - thank you for taking the time. Genuinely useful to the broader discussion, and I may be coming back to your points for a while as I continue to mull these topics over. For starters, I didn't know any of that TLOU1 background and uh ... wow.

For my part, I hope it's clear from what I did and did not put on this list, as well as my responses to suggestions in the comments, that my own approach to this is not totally knee-jerk or reactionary. Maybe I draw a harsher line than some, but I am giving thought to each of these individually, and there are plenty of remakes that I find worthwhile and not totally pointless. As with any list like this, it's simply a working through of my own opinion and not meant to be an objective statement.

To briefly give my own view on the "aging poorly" point, I personally just don't think that way about games, and while I understand why other people do, I still think it's a shame. Much like if a person cackles at outdated special effects in a fifty-year old movie, I wish they would be able to approach old media with the proper context and judge it based on that, rather than modern conventions. I think remakes are probably seen by these game companies as preferable to modernized ports in part to avoid having to deal with this problem, and that, to me, is also a shame and I think enables that mindset.

As far as the other list is concerned, no matter what the intent was, I think it should be abundantly clear that the two of us are talking about different things. Everything here is a from-scratch remake, no remasters or ports whatsoever. The point that that list seems to glibly be trying to make is undermined by a third of it being upscaled ports (which I personally have no problem with and I'm not sure who does) and another third being silly to include in the conversation because as you very rightly pointed out, ports as we think about them didn't exist in the cartridge/early PC era because they were functionally impossible. In this day and age, no such technical limitation is stopping Sony from having someone competent put the original Demon's Souls on PS5 with some QoL updates while BluePoint does something more worthwhile and suited to their skills (like remake Bloodborne).

Speaking generally, I can understand someone pushing back against what they perceive as overblown handwringing about "the industry" or whatever, but if you look at the announcements of the new Silent Hill 2 and RE4 and Dead Space and don't feel like some kind of corner is being turned here, or if you don't think there's any meaningful difference between the scope, promotion, and execution of those projects and, say, adding a fifth case to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and putting it on the DS, I don't really know what to say to you.

@Xator_Nova, I think those ones all justified themselves in principle by trying to do something pretty different than their originals. Farther towards the "reimagining" side of things. Whether or not they were successful, they tried