Lars tweeted: "What are some examples of BAD HD re-masters of games, and why?"

[Hlo]

I hate twitter and it’s 140 character limit, and these boards seem like a fine place to discuss things like this.

To throw my hat into the ring:

Final Fantasy IV on Steam. See, Final Fantasy IV was an okay HD re-master for the DS. And then it was ported to Android, where they dumbed it down significantly in order to run on there. Minigames removed, FPS limit turned down and in battles the FPS counter was locked at 10-12 frames per second. The Android version looked and played like complete crap.

So you can guess which version they brought to Steam. A port of the Android version, which somehow felt like it played even WORSE, with non-responsive buttons in battle and battles taking forever. It was the only time I’ve been disappointed by a remake of Final Fantasy, after god knows how many times.

The Star Fox 64 remake was panned when it was released, as I remember, for not keeping all the original voiceacting as an option and removing the ground based units in multiplayer. Something else too, I forget. I wrote it off completely for not having the decency to make the original VA an option.

The Final Fantasy 1 GBA remake received a lot of criticism for significantly changing up the battle system, doing away with the Dungeon & Dragons-style spell slots in favor of the generic MP system that all other Final Fantasy games had. You had 8 tiers of spells and a certain number of times you could cast from each tier, as I remember.

The Avernum series also received a ton of criticism and disappointment from old fans when Jeff Vogel severely chopped off huge portions of content from the games. Down was your party size from 6 to 4, down was your list of magic spells, you had significantly less party building options available to you. The game didn’t even offer to let you add 6 as an option. The game looked better and ran good on more modern computers, yes, but trimming the appeal of Avernum - the large party building mechanics - was one of the worst things an HD remake could have done.

One Way Heroics+ was essentially the original game with some DLC, but they resold it as an entirely new game. People who purchased the first one were not given a discount. Not necessarily bad in terms of gameplay, but that’s a horrible way to screw your fans over.

Spelunky HD was a good game, but the decision to not put work into online multiplayer in favor of couch co-op was a major disappointment. Same with Motherload HD catering only to couch co-op.

Anyone else able to think of some disappointing remakes?

[thatgirlwiththe]

Anytime a remake is made within a few years of its original, repackaged, and sold as a separate game from its original. unless it has more than just graphics update (or a significant update), it just looks like an attempt to make more money, and a NOT very veiled attempt at that. Kingdom hearts series confuses me with all the hd remakes they’ve been putting out lately that I almost don’t wanna even play or touch any of the games now, despite how much I actually enjoy the story.

Unfortunately, outside of the pokemon series, I don’t know of any remakes from their predecessors, in that I’ve played both versions. But some that look like obvious cash cows to me are the Binding of Isaac, kingdom hearts, and pokemon, but at least I know that pokemon is an actual update to older games and brings the current in game systems to older games (when they start remaking DS titles though and remakes of remakes as separate games instead of, say, in the same packaging as some other remake, is when I’ll start thinking they’re getting ridiculous with the rereleases)
There are a few other things where they sell the updated version separate from the original and it’s not some intense overhaul or lack of available legal copies that I know of (ie, releasing stuff from more than several years ago to modern cartridges is good, but making a ps4 “improved” port of a recent ps3 release seems cheap to me), but those were the first to come to mind

[Hlo]

Binding of Isaac was one of the absolute most necessary remakes. Flash was a horrible program and it was getting worse with every update, with every year. There is a reason Lars did everything he could to move away from it.

It’s in a new, non-flash based engine, it can recognize controllers without Joy2Key now, it has a ridiculous amount of new content, music, graphics, co-op… I don’t see the argument that Rebirth could be considered a cash cow.

[thatgirlwiththe]

Ahh. But I still don’t see why they need to market it as separate from the original.

[Kwi]

None too horrible come to mind, although I wasn’t entirely happy with aspects of the Monkey Island 2 HD re-release. (I know the “HD remaster” label also covers gameplay remastering, but I’ll focus on visuals and style here.)

Although MI2 was originally rendered in glorious 320x200 VGA resolution, the visuals were mostly “serious” and pseudo-realistic, which provided a nice contrast to the zany, uh, everything else in the game. The intro demonstrates this nicely, starting out quite ridiculous, before segueing into what would’ve been a very serious Ye Olde Pirate Game title sequence, if not for the occasional interruption of Guybrush chasing dancing monkeys across the screen. All of it scored with somber and dramatic state-of-the-art MIDI music, of course. (The aspect ratio is off in the video, as is often the case with captures of 320x200 VGA, but it’s close enough.)

The game keeps shifting tone between silly and serious all the way to the very ending, which honestly would be pure nighmare fuel if not for the constant string of zany antics.

Now, the HD remake includes a completely new intro sequence, which keeps the monkey chase (in original VGA quality, too) but drops the serious parts, even hamming things up a bit with silly voice over guy reading the title card “Deep in the Caribbean, Scabb Island”. You can hear the actor wiggle his fingers dramatically… and it’s just too much, like they’re afraid we might already have forgotten that this is supposed to be funny, and need to remind us.

Of course, MI2 is notorious for its darker tone, a direction which was promptly reversed in MI3… and now, to some extend, also MI2 HD.

Oh, also, the HD release removes Khris Brown’s cameo. How dare they.

---

Now, for an example of a perfect HD re-release – outside gaming – look no further than Blade Runner: The Final Cut, as compared to the previous Director’s Cut: Generally improved imaging, color balancing, a few special effect shots cleaned up (but not dramatically changed), small but annoying continuity errors removed. The most noticable difference is a few scenes of gore, which had previously been toned down, are toned up again, but nothing that changes the overall tone or style of the film. And Deckard still shoots first.

[Hlo]

So, they released Final Fantasy 4: The After Years on Steam recently.

They still haven’t fixed the unforgivably low FPS limitation on FF4.

And guess what, it’s in TAY too. Because Square-Enix doesn’t give a damn about PC gamers, we’re just here to shovel crappy remakes and ports to because anything more than the bare minimum of effort just wouldn’t be profitable enough. Or maybe if they made a perfect remake / port the first go round, they couldn’t re-remake or re-HD it later to squeeze a couple more bucks out of PC gamers.

I am never, ever going to buy another one of their bloody games from Square-Enix. To see FF4 treated like this is terrible.

[larsiusprime]

Oooooh, some interesting responses here Thanks for this thread!

[Sajin]

Making things “simpler” is generally a bad thing as a lot of the market base is interested in at least the same complexity as the original. Trying to gain new audience members by making things “simple and streamlined” is not worth more than annoying your dedicated fan base.

In the same line of thought by adding a single bonus area or some extra hard boss fights it will interest more people to replay or buy the HD version.

Bad examples Heroes of Might and Magic remakes when new company took over.

Good examples: FF X HD that included the Pal only version dark aeons bonus content. Chrono Trigger DS version.

[Hlo]

Oh man, I remember the Chrono Trigger DS re-master. It had an amazing new translation that was so well written…

But ridiculous Square-Enix has a ‘RE-RELEASES MUST HAVE % EXTRA CONTENT’ rule. Which worked out fine for FF4-6 re-release since it added ton of new jobs or mechanics. But the bonus dungeon in Chrono Trigger, it still makes me cringe.

There’s this giant mountain you have to go up and down over and over and over, gathering items to get higher and higher. And this normally wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s a few required battles you simply can’t avoid on that mountain. So you go up, you fight the battles, you go down, you fightthe battles, and you repeat that so many, many times to artificially pad out the game content. It felt like some RPGMaker romhack by ‘fans’.

It’s like the people who designed the mountain didn’t understand that part of what made CT fun was the very limited number of mandatory battles, you could avoid most fights just by dodging the enemies on the screen. Same with Chrono Cross.

Still a good remaster if you ignore Square-Enix’s “% new content” rule leading to padded out stuff.

[thatgirlwiththe]

I wasn’t aware of any H:M&M remakes, could you tell me which ones were remade? It’s been awhile since I checked the wiki page on the series, and I don’t recall seeing anything about rereleases in the list of games, but I probably wasn’t looking too closely either.

[Hlo]

Mark my words about the FF7 remake:

They’re going to completely rip out the Wall Market section, or tone it down completely.

You had Cloud getting into various different dresses, getting perfumed up, putting on women’s underwear. You had him going into a brothel and consorting with prostitutes, getting into a hot tub full of giant naked bodybuilders.You had him getting pounced on and slapped unconscious by one of them. You had him peeking through keyholes and watching people do naughty things. You had him seducing Cornello, if you did everything right.

That would completely destroy the ‘Brand Image’ they’ve desperately built for Cloud with everything post-FF7. He’s no longer going to be an easy-come easy-go aloof sort of guy, he’s going to be Broody and Dark from the start.

I hope I’m wrong on this. But the Wall Market crap wouldn’t fly in super HD graphics for them, I’m sure of it.

[Hlo]

Oh boy oh boy, Square-Enix disappoints yet again. Who ever could have seen this coming? I swear that Enix just openly loathes everything Square made before their fusion as companies and treats them poorly out of spite.

Today we have Final Fantasy V on Steam, which looks like something you would throw together as Baby’s First RPGMaker project. The clashing artstyles are atrocious.

By the way, @larsiusprime, you seem to be friends with Zeboyd and he’s giving the game hell at the moment. You may want to pass this along to them.

r/FinalFantasy - FFV PC mod early beginning

[quote]I plan to, but there are some problems as the mobile/PC versions have
less character emotion poses and uses battle-sprites on the field (at
least for characters with no classes).

Adding extra poses and separating the battle and field graphics may be troublesome.

It may be a better idea to remake the sprites entirely with the
correct 3/4 orthogonal perspective and improved contrast, rather than
replace with the SNES sprites.

Early on in the gameplay there are character poses that have been
removed. It’s a shame because the game is known for the wide-array of
character expressions.[/quote]

Someone is trying to fix the problems with the remake and found they actually gutted a ton of the emotion sprites. How utterly, shamefully lazy do you have to be as a developer to have significantly fewer sprites than the original game did in a remake? Whoever was in charge of this port should be fired. Almost every single FF PC release has had numerous problems with it. That’s depressing.

Also,

Oh… oh god no.

Edit Oh. The portrait art hardly fits in the text boxes at the bottom. At the top…

My portrait runneth over.

[Hlo]

The more I think about it, the problem probably does boil down to “It’s Not Their Baby”.

They didn’t create this game. They might not even have played it when they were kids. There’s no passion put into games like this, there’s no respect for the original game, they just want to port it over to Mobile or PC ASAP as quickly as possible, with as little funding as possible put into it.

They don’t care if the port or remake stands the test of time decades later. In fact, it’s actually best for them if it ages god awfully, that means it can be re-remade in the future for an ‘improved’ experience.

I think the last remake I saw that was a labor of love was the Final Fantasy IV remake for GBA, which got a beautiful re-translation and an immense load of actually meaningful post-game content. You could now switch between all the characters in the game at the end, never before seen in a Final Fantasy 4 remake/port. You had a bonus dungeon filled with gear for your new characters, and a special randomized dungeon filled with all sorts of tricky, difficult, weird or puzzle-filled floors. Every character in the game had a mini-dungeon within that dungeon with their own personal side-quest. The best part was, since it was randomized, you could go through it again and again and see / collect things that weren’t there before.

They basically just took the GBA release of Final Fantasy V here and slapped on an ugly coat of paint to collect their paychecks. I wonder if anyone involved with the PC port is at all proud of it.

Edit: It doesn’t help that Japan apparently thinks so little of Mobile and PC gaming, from what I’ve read.

[fasz]

Bad example: Heroes 3. They didn’t have the whole codebase, so they shipped only half of the original final game. And it didn’t even need a HD remake. It was good as it was.