2023 has been full of high-profile video game remakes and remasters: Dead Space, Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4, Advance Wars, System Shock, and so on. Some of these have been crowd-pleasing surprises, the kind of thing that sets social media ablaze during a reveal in a Nintendo Direct. Others come bearing a near overwhelming amount of fan expectation. Series like Resident Evil and even Pokémon have consistently cycled through remaking their classic catalog. Now the question isn’t so much “Will we get this as a remake?”, but rather “What will the remake of this be like? And how will it compare to the game I already know?”
This kind of inevitability brings its own complications. If you wanted to remake a Nintendo game from the ’80s, you could hedge your bets on a major technological and graphical upgrade. That kind of jump isn’t so evident in a game like Resident Evil 4.
The original Resident Evil 4, launched in 2005 for the Nintendo GameCube, revolutionized its genre to the extent that many action-horror games still feel like it today. Its constant rereleases over the years have assured us that no generation has gone by since without noticing its cultural ubiquity. So, as the originals get newer and the advancements get less obvious, how does a remake become more than a particularly nice-looking cash grab?
One approach that has worked—with best-selling results—is Final Fantasy VII Remake. Cloud’s chunky polygons in the original might scream retro, but the explosion of the franchise’s popularity has meant that role-playing games like it aren’t exactly an unturned stone. The creators of FFVII Remake overhauled the story at its core, taking the Midgar setting in the first game and broadening its potential. Thus, it combines both the new and the familiar for an experience that appeals to far more than just people who somehow haven’t played the original yet. No matter how many times you’ve beaten Sephiroth, Remake still packs a punch.
In a similar vein is Resident Evil 2, a game that, while not pulled to the scale of FFVII Remake, tried to find a story worth telling by expanding bits of the original. Simply redoing the first game with more pixels added to Leon Kennedy’s perfect bangs wasn’t going to be enough—a situation that left the game’s writer, Brent Friedman, feeling a mixture of “excitement and terror.” The responsibility to make it truly fitting for a remake would be resting partially on his shoulders, and while the game would become highly revered, its success didn’t seem so obvious at first.
“When I was originally brought on to the project, the intent was to do much more of a scene-for-scene remake,” Friedman explains. He would polish some of the more stilted dialog, let the graphics do the talking, and call it a day. For what Friedman guessed was six months, it continued down that path until “someone up top at Capcom saw it and said, ‘Wow, it’s going to look really cool. But it’s basically going to be the same experience?’” Friedman and the developers stopped and regrouped, and what they arrived at was more of a “reimagining.”
