A while back, I made a post about remakes, looking through a bunch of more recent remakes to see whether or not they were collectively a good or a bad thing. To be blunt, I'm not especially proud of that post, it felt really oversimplified and lacking in nuance. The fact is that there are always going to be good and bad remakes, and whether or not they are good or bad depends on the person. You can't just calculate if remakes as a concept are good by pure math.
Since then, remakes have had some pretty fiery discourse in the year 2024, with the release of some fairly divisive remakes of Persona 3 Reload, The Thousand Year Door, and Silent Hill 2. I've seen many people just straight up swear off the concept of remakes entirely this year, and considering how common they feel now and how much discourse they spawn, I can't exactly blame them from getting tired of it all. However, it did also cause me to think about my thoughts on remake culture as of late. Why do I endlessly praise some remakes for being incredible modernizations that sand over all my issues with the original and at times replace it entirely, while also harshly criticizing other remakes for exactly that? Why I am I fine with the Super Mario RPG remake adding in an unnecessary amount of quality of life features that arguably make the game too easy, while also turning my nose up at the Return To Dream Land remaster for doing the same thing?
I think what I was missing with that first post was that no remakes are objectively better or worse than the originals. The quality of a remake relative to the original is entirely based on the person playing it. Discussion of remakes is an inherently vulnerable thing, you can't talk about them without opening up about your own history with the source material. I grew up with Return To Dream Land, it was one of my big childhood games, and some of the quirks that others may criticize like the do-or-die Energy Spheres or the precise Stomper Boot timing are things about the game that I've grown to find charming. While I played plenty of Super Mario RPG as a kid, I can't say I had anywhere near the same emotional investment to it, so any changes it might have had didn't really phase me. I was just happy to have a version of the game that kept a similar artstyle while boasting more detail.
That's not to say you need to be emotionally invested in the source material to prefer it to its remake, though. Sometimes people might just... prefer the original for their own reasons. The N Sane Trilogy is loved by many fans for its more realistic visuals, smoother movement, and improved save features, but despite never growing up with Crash, I simply prefer how the PS1 versions play. They just feel better to me, and that's that. I've even seen people voice their preferences for remakes that I thought were pretty much untouchable, like preferring the more isolating and obtuse vibe of NES Metroid to Zero Mission, or preferring the lighter B-movie charm of Resident Evil to its bleaker REmake. I said that remakes "need to be a love letter" to be good, but that doesn't guarantee everyone will love it. Besides, I'm sure Vicarious Visions put their heart into the N Sane Trilogy so who am I to say it's not a passion project because I didn't like it? The fact is that there will never be a remake that everyone will prefer to the original, there will always be that one change that sets someone off.
However, I still think remakes are important, even if not everyone is going to be welcome to their changes. For whatever people a remake alienates, there will probably be just as many people who discover one of their new favorite games through these remakes. Like, for as easy as it is to just tell someone to emulate the original, not everyone knows how to do that or is even willing to learn. The fact is that remakes and rereleases are the best way to re-introduce a game to a wider audience, and maybe also people who didn't even like the original. I've seen the argument that remakes are inherently worse because the
source material was made that way for a reason and any change is just
messing with the original vision, but that's not true. No game has a spotless development, and sometimes developers may genuinely just regret decisions they made the first time (the Ocarina/Majora 3D remakes being a notable example of this).
For me, The Thousand Year Door is the best example of this. While I never hated TTYD, it was originally a game that I was incredibly critical of, only for its remake to address pretty much all of my complaints and win me over in the process. Sure, the remake did have a few downgrades like the easier Pit Of 100 Trials and certain music tracks not sounding quite as good, but the diminished backtracking, more tactile visuals, and especially having a canonically trans Vivian are way more important to me personally. Vivian being trans is a special case because it was pretty much always the developer's intention, the localization just wrote it out because it was 2004. So that's just a case of the remake straight-up affirming the game's original vision, and it gave trans people another character they can see themselves in, in the form of Vivian. That's why remakes are important, because they can leave their own unique mark on players that the original game may not have been able to reach.
So ultimately, I think my verdict on the "original vs remake" debate is... both. Both is good. I'm glad we get remakes because they allow more players to discover old classics, and they serve as a way for developers to address feedback and concerns that fans had towards the original. However, the original game should also be readily available for those that already love them the way they are, and that's sadly the big issue. Not every game can be like Metroid Zero Mission, not every remake includes the original bundled in, and there are a lot of cases where the remake is the only version of a game that's legally available. At the end of the day, that's the biggest tragedy here, and the area where companies and developers are failing us the most.
Remakes aren't inherently good or inherently bad, and with how personal discussion about remakes can be, I don't think we'll ever find an "objective" answer to the matter. But as long as the original exists in some form, a remake, remaster, or rerelease existing doesn't harm it in any way, it only further extends its reach. More options is always a good thing in my book, so even if not every remake lands for me, I'd say remakes as a whole are generally a net positive.
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