Why Remade Games Can Feel Worse

Have you ever found yourself playing a remake of a game that you loved in your youth and then all of the sudden you start thinking, "I remember the original looking better." Have you ever wondered why that is? I mean, you know it's not true because it I mean it can't be, right? Games have come so far even in just the last decade. So, I mean, how the heck could a game made 10 to 15 years ago possibly look better than something put out today? But then you look back at that game and there's really just no denying what's right in front of you. I mean, look at it. Your childhood ruined on a 4K screen. Of course, I am being very overdramatic here, but it doesn't change the fact that this is a real phenomenon that I and many other people have experienced. So, let's take the time of today's episode and explore some reasons why that might be. This episode is brought to you by Nebula where you can watch this and all of our other episodes without ads like this one for Nebula. You get the idea. So, why does it so often feel like remakes of old games look worse than the

original? Well, there are actually quite a few factors. First off is what I kind of like to call the distinction of indistinctness. Whether we're talking about Nintendo era sprite limitations or PS1 PS2 era poly counts, older games tend to leave a lot to the imagination and the human imagination is a very powerful thing. It's why we can fill in the action between comic book panels or conjure whole worlds out of a few pages of written text. And that ability to extrapolate out to create a fantastic personalized vision from a few loosely drawn pieces is in full effect with old games. I mean, look, here is what Cloud and crew used to look like and here's ActRaiser and Ghosts 'n Goblins. Ooh, and here's Grand Theft Auto 3 before it got all definitive and here's Warcraft 3 before it's remaster. Now, seeing these still shots, they probably do look worse than you remember them. Yet, if you compare all of these with the exception of one I'll let you guess which to their remasters, you may get the weird sense that the soul was kind of lost in the new ones. But why? Well, because the new versions are high fidelity enough that they're informing you of what the world looks like rather than leaving space for

you to imagine it on your own, but also they're not high fidelity enough to actually make that world compete with the vision your younger self concocted in your head. Of course, the one exception I mentioned to the phenomenon above is Final Fantasy, but actually hold on, we'll get to that in a minute because first we have to talk about things like cutscenes, box art, and other anchors for your imagination. Because that was something that older games relied heavily on. They all gave you a small imaginative crutch that your brain could kind of build around. Heck, even the old school Final Fantasy series might be the perfect example here. The art by Amano Yoshitaka or the highly detailed cutscenes that are way beyond anything the machine you were playing them on could actually render in real time. Those are all there to give your subconscious a way of interpreting the primitive images on the screen for most of the game. When you see Cloud like this, those make sure you're primed to imagine seeing him like this. And the same goes for box art. When you see the art on the packages for Dragon Warrior, Double Dragon II, Gradius, Mega Man. Wait, no, not Mega Man. Sorry, exception to the rule. It does set up how you're

supposed to see the sprites in their relative titles before you ever even play the game. Something that can't be done at high levels of fidelity. And you know, Silent Hill might be the prototypical example of this imaginative space. When Silent Hill first came out, the PS1 simply couldn't render all of the things at a high enough fidelity that the designers wanted them to if it kept showing a ton of them on screen at the same time. So, they came up with a pretty genius solution that also fit the narrative perfectly. They shrouded the town in fog to limit the draw distance on the PS1. By making the whole thing close and claustrophobic, they could also dodge their technical limitations. And the use of this trick continued into the PS2 era. But when some of the remastered editions came out, they actually pushed back the fog, showing how much more the new hardware could render of course, but in doing so destroying the horror therein. And that's because horror is most effective when our imagination is filling in any indistinctness. I mean, we all know the old adage about not showing the monster too early in the movie, right? Well, that's kind of what's at play here when you think about aging pixels looking better than our new and shiny remasters.

But, there are definitely other elements at work as well. One of the biggest is probably asset cost. Wonder why the Final Fantasy VII Remake was attempted and scrapped several times before Square Enix decided to make a totally different game and then still take 5 years to produce what was around the first third of the original story? Well, that's because reproducing the world of Final Fantasy VII at modern fidelity is kind of an absurd task because the price of asset production back in the day when every enemy had 100 polys and perhaps five animations was so much cheaper than what it would take to make people feel like they looked good today. So, they simply can't produce as many in a finite amount of time. Case in point, Final Fantasy VII had approximately 300 enemies in it, you know, depending on how you count them. The only thing that really comes close in recent memory is Elden Ring and there's a lot of clever reuse there. Something like Dark Souls only has about 70 and even Persona 5, probably the most direct comparison in terms of giant modern JRPG, has approximately half of the number of enemies Final Fantasy VII had, clocking in at around 150. Now, I think the Final Fantasy VII Remake project did it right.

It's not a one-for-one remake. This allowed them to tell more of the story, promise something even for people who don't have nostalgia for the original, and limit their asset count. Oh, and of course, they did it all on a massive budget, so that always helps. But, it's important to remember that most remakes just do not get those fat stacks of cheddar. They tend to get a shoestring because the assumption is that they're mostly going to sell to people who loved the original and they're only going to sell to a fraction of them. This means that the developers are going to have to cut expenses to even get these projects out the door and one of the easiest ways to do so is to do something like choosing a cheaper art style. Oh, you've probably seen one or two of these in the past, remakes with kind of like big head characters or that take some of the beautiful old 2D art and replace it with cheap cartoony 3D characters. I don't think that's because anyone believes these new versions actually look better than the original, but rather it's done that way because it's what the developer can afford. Also, usually with remakes, even when the original was in 2D, all the assets from the original game are also kind of completely useless in a

modern development context. They're either too low-res, in a format that's so out of date it's just easier to remake them than try to import them into anything, or they just straight up have been lost. So, instead they replace it with things that look cheap because I mean, they kind of are. And unfortunately, there is some ineffable aspect to quality of production that we can sense, even if we can't quite put our finger on it. A high-quality, top-level work from 40 years ago will always still feel better to us than a throwaway production today. Or to put it in a fun way, Aliens feels higher quality than Morbius, Secret of Mana feels higher quality than Babylon's Fall. Oh, and another thing you have to remember, which is my sort of favorite techy brain nonsense thing that I want to talk about today, is actually display technology these games were made for, not the consoles they were launched on, but the actual like screens they're being played on, is now different. Because we create for the canvas as we have. Back then, we used tricks of the technology to get away with things that might otherwise seem ridiculous or unacceptable. Like, you know how if you watch an episode of the original Star Trek on an old CRT TV, those being the

big fat ones that run on tubes, it still looks pretty good. Like a perfectly fine if little outdated sci-fi adventure, right? But then if you watch those episodes on a 4K TV, either even the originals or the up-res remasters from the 35 mm prints, you can start to see flaws. You see that the silly wigs are silly wigs. You can see the seams in the monsters' costumes or the wayward threads on the way cheaper than Starfleet would probably issue uniforms. This is because the creators were actually using the fuzziness, the indistinctiveness of the technology their show was going to be displayed on to their advantage. And the same is true for old games. For that reason, games meant to be played on a 480i TV will just never look as good on a super crisp modern monitor. The mushiness, even the scan lines, were all sort of built into how they designed the art. The developers planned for them, used them to make their games more approachable, to bleed colors, and give pixels softer edges than what we see in pixel art today. Remakes made for modern hardware really can't do that, and sometimes that's another thing we're picking up on

when we feel that a remake has perfectly fine fidelity, but is actually too sterile and clean and lost all of the warmth of the original. So, between the loss of imaginative space that comes with higher fidelity art, the higher cost of assets, and the low budgets that remakes usually get, and the conversion of assets delivered on a crisp new HD or higher fidelity screen messing with the visual feel, there are just a ton of ways a remake will have a difficult time competing with the original. But, that's just old man Matt talking, you know, I can hear my bones creaking while I'm reading this. And that's of course not to say that it can never be done. So, I'm going to leave it to you. Are there any games that you thought really got the remaking process right? Any upcoming remakes you're particularly hopeful for? Come on, Witcher. Ooh, or perhaps a more fun question to discuss would be are there any games that got it so wrong? Just absolutely tanked the idea of its remake that it actually soured your perception of even the original. Please let us know all of those things in the comments below or tweet it us if you are watching this on Nebula. Thank you for doing that, by the way. And then we'll

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