Recently, I've been playing through the Half Life 1 remake, Black Mesa, a remake that I didn't really enjoy my time running through, and it's made me reflect a lot on remake culture as a whole. It's a trend I've noticed a lot in the gaming industry, where a lot of classic games will be remade in a new take, aiming to do something different, while attempting to maintain the original idea behind it. Resident Evil is the most prominent of this, it feels like every entry is getting a remake, whether they needed to or not, and it's turned into a game of waiting for the next remake announcement, but we've also gotten other major releases with titles such as Silent Hill 2 and Dead Space. From a casual perspective, these remakes seem like easier ways to branch into a game or series, serving as a better gateway point then digging up the original and dealing with "dated" design, but as someone who's played more games then you'd expect, and has read up more on art and it's intentional design philosophies, I find remakes to be a major plague on the industry, and they feel fundamentally anti art, stripping away what were once unique game mechanics and decisions for more generic and standard gameplay choices in order to appeal to a wider demographic.
As I mentioned before, I started this thought process with Black Mesa, a fan made remake of Half Life 1, and I find this game exemplifies a lot of my issue with the remake mindset. Reading into it's development had me understand that the developers of Black Mesa wanted to create an easier gateway into the series, a better first entry to play then the original, and I find that philosophy baked into the game design for the worse. Unique enemy encounters have been stripped away for more generic ones, with a real lack of enemy variety, especially by the end. Atmosphere has been stripped away for a more darker, oppressive vibe, instead of the rather lived in workplace the original had. Even Xen isn't safe from this, where instead of being an alien planet that feels utterly hostile to you and your species, it now looks like a UE5 tech demo that trades away all uniqueness in it to be a bog standard alien planet, with the original identity simply lost to time. Leeway can be given here for being a fan work rather then one made by a company, but it still sticks out in how it misses so much of what made the original Half Life such a well regarded classic. It just feels so padded out and more generic as a shooter, I adore the original for it's lack of fear in alienating people, instead setting off to make what it wanted to make from the offset, creating one of the most unique first person shooters out there, a game well regarded as a classic. There's this strange mindset of about how fans can better understand a game's intention and design more then the devs, but Black Mesa kinda proves the opposite, instead showcasing just how fans can miss the mark just as easily, maybe even more, then these original developers, and how just because you're a diehard fan of the work, doesn't mean you know exactly what you're doing (Sonic suffers from this a lot).
Persona 3 Reload is another rather continuous remake that I feel strips away all love behind the original. It's no secret that the original Persona 3 can be a bit of a tough game to return too. It strips away party control, social links are a lot more harsh in their requirements, and it's a lot more challenging the the more modern Persona Games such as 5. Remake is a game that sets out to "fix" all this, all while losing a lot of love and care behind its original release! To get the big one out the way, the shift to being in full control of your party. The lack of control in your actions were an intentional choice, one done with the idea of making each party member feel like their own character with their own sense of agency and decisions, instead of just being a generic teammate for you to send out to battle and forget about after. It replaces this system with the controversial tactics menu, having you plan out what strategy will better work for the encounter in front of you, instead of directly choosing the right spell to be used. You see a lot of talk about how bad this system is, with how Mitisuri will just spam the same spell over and over as an example, leaving you more crippled then anything, but when you play the game, you'll find that this never actually happens if you properly plan out your tactics options. it was a strange decision to remove control sure, it deviates from the norm heavily and wasn't something RPGs tended to go for at the time, but it gave Persona 3 a sense of identity that let it stick out from the crowd and better challenged your knowledge on enemy types and encounters more then any RPG had before. Reload stripping this away suddenly takes away all the challenge and skill the original release expected from you, now feeling like a more generic RPG that blends in with the other Persona releases that came after. Tartarus being revamped for the worse as well sticks out in my mind, as the removal of the exhaustion system stripped away an important layer of strategy the game employed onto you. It wasn't a perfect system, you could easily circumvent it by the end game, but it was still was an added layer of depth that made you consider just how far you wanted to push a run in the dungeon each night, and Reload could have benefited from better expanding on it and making it a lot more oppressive, that way you're forced to better manage your schedule in order to be better prepared for the eventual boss fight at the end of each month. Social Links were another major aspect of this, as if you weren't careful enough, you were severely punished by the social link being harmed, with you needing to set out and repair it. It could be a little too cruel at points in the game, and it was another system that needed some more touching up, but it really reinforced the importance of bonds and comradery Persona 3 tried to teach into you. Reload once again strips this away to where Social Links are incredibly easy to manage this time, removing all layers of challenge to it, thus taking away another element of planning you had to incorporate before. Even the cutscene quality has taken a hit here, with the Persona awakening being such a prime example of this. The hesitation Makoto has in pulling the trigger, the way it flashes between his sweating face and the gun's barrel, it showcases that primal fear of death and the urge to overcome it and face the future head on, it's a phenomenal intro, and it sticks in your head even near the end of the game for how strong an impact it makes on you. Reload takes away that hesitation and that beautiful hand drawn 2d artwork to be replaced with more generic 3D models, with the lack of hesitation in the gunshot being taken away, which just makes you ask what the point of htis change was? Was it worth losing an intentional aspect of the games theming in order to appeal to a wider market? What did you gain from this, what does this do to improve upon the original, and what purpose does this release aim to do? It loses everything that made the original great, and becomes yet another generic RPG lost in the sea of constant releases that will be forgotten about in the upcoming years.
Persona 3 Reload losing it's art design is another issue that has plagued this wave of remake culture, and Bluepoint was a company that exemplified this perfectly. The remakes of Demon Souls is another controversial remake due to the lost of intentional art design in it. Demon Souls on PS3 is an incredible looking game, and the bosses and creatures you had to face were some of the coolest designs ever, creating such unique showcases of hostility, and they made you perfectly feel as if you were thrust into a world you didn't belong to. The remake strips away these original designs and instead gives you more generic fantasy enemy designs, one you could mistake from being a crudely made DND campaign, then anything the souls series gives you. You can feel this as early as the tutorial fight, where it's been touched up way too much, to where you can tell it's meant to be the original design, but without any of the wonder and fear put into it. It feels more like a regular encounter in any JRPG then a demon from hell that's the only thing that stands between you and salvation. Why don;t the eyes glow as much, why are the eyes smaller, why are there more spikes on its body, why does it have nipple piercings, what is there to gain from changing up this design so much??? It won't stick in your mind as much, it'll be forgotten about just as easily as any other generic creature, so why would you give up an aspect that the original game is praised for for this, it's horrible. Shadow of the Colossus suffers from this too, it's not nearly as egregious, but the more realistic visuals these remakes make loses so much wonder and discovery the PS2 release set into you, Bluepoint really missed the mark on each of their releases, and it made me dread any project they were announced to be working on.
Majora's Mask 3D is another one that has stirred up a lot of talk in the gaming sphere, one that I wanna put my fellow hat into the ring. I'm a rather big fan of the original Majora's Mask, its one of my favorite Zelda games so the idea of a remake existing always had me weary. This weariness proved to be true, because upon playing it, it's suddenly nowhere near as challenging or oppressive as the original. Sure, it has a few more quality of life changes such as being able to go to any hour you want with one of your songs instead of set intervals, but quality of life shouldn't be put in place of oppressive and unique game design. I liked the lack of exact time frames chosen in the original because it forced me to better multitask my game and schedule. While I'm waiting for my meetup to occur, I can be spending time running through the fields collecting heart pieces or fulfilling other side quests the game litters throughout. There was a layer of management kept in place with this, where I had to consider if I still had enough time to go out and complete other tasks the game has in place, or if it'd be too much a risk, making me miss out on my allotted meeting time, thus having me reset the day, or sometimes the side quest entirely in order to have another shot at it. It's a change that, from the offset, seems like it would be for the better, but then you start actually thinking about it, you start thinking about the intention behind it, and suddenly it all falls apart, and it has you look out the remake a lot more harshly.
This stripness of unique mechanics is the biggest issue remakes have nowadays, where they just take away such vital game mechanics that had actual intention behind it in order to better grasp people in, losing what made this original game special. Silent Hill 2 is such a prime example of this, it's one of my most detested remakes for a reason because it takes away everything that made the original fantastic in place for a much worse product made by a company that clearly didn't understand why Silent Hill 2 was as praised as it was. One of the best scenes in the game, the video tape reveal, is sped up in the remake, telling you exactly what was on the tape way faster, instead of the original lingering on James, having you slowly piece together what happened, with the horror and disgust creeping into you just as slowly, trusting the player to put together the pieces yourself instead of spoon feeding you all the information, refusing to let you actually use your thinking in order to place together the story. The voice acting is made worse by the more the casual, generic sounding voices instead of the more out of place, uncanny atmosphere the original gave in order to better illustrate the otherworldly vibe the town brought into others, leaving you more unsure of who James was a person and his hidden motivations behind every action and thought process. Combat is no longer an intentional choice, having you consider if it's worth using your bullets on a fight, or if you need to pull out your melee weapon and time your swings, constantly forcing a choice onto you in each fight, leaving you tense and scared of what to do moving forward. In the remake, every combat encounter can be dealt with in the exact same way, having you shoot the legs once or twice then bashing them with a pipe on the ground. There's no longer any intention or weight behind any of these encounters, instead having every combat boil to the same strategy without any challenge being left intact. It wants to be more cinematic too, boss fights are a lot more intense and feel more like an action encounter instead of these terrifying, oppressive foes that represent our characters darkest desires and worst fears. Take the final boss for example, it was set on a foggy rooftop, with a quiet atmosphere, and an oppressive feeling lingering in the air, it felt like a perfect culmination of everything that the game had been building up to at this point, and was the perfect finale to an incredible game. In the remake, you're now in the dark, rain pouring down on you, with loud, intense music, as the boss goes through multiple phase changes, destroying the floor around you and feeling like a climatic finale to a Marvel movie then anything unique that Silent Hill 2 actually wanted to do.
I find these issues can even plague what are considered good remakes, good video games, and ruin any kind of enjoyment I can feel from these releases. Resident Evil 2 remake is such a prime example of this, it's a game that I can enjoy casually, I can engage with it, I can see what it sets out to do, but then I compare it to what it's directly remaking and I can suddenly see the loss of what made it so great in the first place. Resource management is still here, but it feels like less of a focus here, and while the original could lack it in some areas, it never felt as bad as it was in this remake. Gone are the fixed camera angle, gone are the tank controls instead you have standard third person action gameplay, it feels like such a loss from what made me adore survival horror so much in the first place, and I think it opting for this more generic gameplay makes it stick out way less from the originality and love the PS1 release gave me. The campaigns aren't even that unique anymore, you used to be able to make choices in the other campigan that affected the other, but not even that managed to stay here, they both feel so sameish and boring, it just sucks. I tend to stay out of fandom culture a lot nowdays, it's an utterly toxic wasteland that is better off dead then thriving, but in doing research for this topic, I delved into the a few fanbases for these remakes to see how people felt and why they enjoyed them, and I began to realize it's because no one really wants to respect games as art. There's this refusal to engage with older games because their intentional design is seen as too dated or a product of the time, instead of being purposely made. People no longer want to be challenged, people no longer want to be faced with more out there control schemes are design decisions, they instead want to play something more standard, more comfortable, then anything actually special or unique. It doesn't help that Capcom views these remakes as replacements for the original, with companies such as GOG having to fight tooth and nail to get the original releases on modern storefronts, viewing it as pointless when they can just play the remake instead, no matter how generic and standard that remake actually is. It feels as if art is no longer as beloved, no longer as respected, and instead are viewed as something to consume, to view as just entertainment and nothing else, when the beauty of art was how it never needed to worry about conforming to anyone, how it could stand on its own as its own unique product without worrying of alienating others. The best art for me is ones that are not afraid to challenge you, art that isn't scared to isolate others, instead opting to do what it wants to do instead of needing worldwide mass appeal.
Despite my utter hatred for remake culture as a whole nowadays, I can ultimately see some merit in remakes as a whole. I think a remake works best when it takes what was originally a good idea that just failed to meet it's potential, whether due to lack of time or experience, and fully capitalizes on it to create the proper vision of what the game should have been, instead of a rather lackluster product. There's nothing more frustrating in art then seeing the potential an idea has, but ultimately failing to meet said potential due to a wide variety of factors, external or internal. The problem is, no one else seems to view it this way, and we just get constant remakes of art that was already acclaimed as incredible before, making me ask the question what the point was. Take the recent Resident Evil 4 Remake for an example, a pretty fun game all things considered, and one of the better remakes out there, but also one that feels like it has 0 point to exist. The original release is regarded as one of the greatest games of all time, and is readily available on every modern platform at an affordable price that can run on about anything, so what does the remake serve to do? What reason does it have to exist, why does it need to be here, why were resources being used to work on this when it could have been used on ideas that are much more deserving of a 2nd run through such as Code Veronica or 0. It baffles me so much, even in ones I enjoy, in remakes such as Resident Evil 4, or Dead Space, what do these remakes do to actually justify their existence? I find myself debating over this question time and time again, and I always come to the conclusion that they don't do anything to justify that purpose, that they just feel like a waste of effort of resources that could have been better spent on other projects. Sometimes this mindset can lead to a much worse release too, Resident Evil 3 remake is such a drastic decrease in quality from the original release, it makes you wonder why they bothered to remake it at all instead of just making a whole new game or re-releasing the original.
I hate the modern remake landscape, and I hate that so much discussion boils down to just "both are great what's there to complain about?" It strips away all nuance in the conversation and ignores any intentionally, any deliberate game design choices in the original releases that remakes can utterly fail to lose. People don't want more alien concepts, more oppressive game design, more challenging works of art, they want bog standard products to consume and talk about instead of actually engaging with what they are given. it's frustrating to witness as someone who adores art as much as I do, and it makes me worry more and more about what the future has in store for art as a whole. Art deserves to be respected, it shouldn't be remade into a worse version of itself, it shouldn't be stripped of all that made it unique, it should be treasured as it is, and I'm tired of standing on the sidelines and seeing this respect lower more and more as more days pass by. We have to do better, we have to have better expectations, we have to fight harder, because if this keeps going the way it is, we may lose all uniqueness art contains, instead having everything become a sludge of conformity and standardization, no love left inside, but instead creating products that are meant to be consumed with no real thought behind it. Even if it's something as simple as writing a blog post on how I feel, I'll do all I can to fight for better respect for art, and I implore you to come join me. Remake culture is a stain on art as a whole, and unless something is drastically changed within it, I see no place for it, and find it better off buried and dead in the ground.
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