2314: Games That Deserve the Ys-Style Remake Treatment

Rather than pondering this as it occurred to me last night as I finished writing that day’s post, I thought I’d split this off into its own separate post, as it’s something that I think is worth thinking about in detail.

For the benefit of those who can’t be arsed to read yesterday’s post, my thinking is this: Ys I and II have had so many remakes over the years that their most recent incarnations are both recognisably “modern” and authentically “retro” at the same time. In other words, they maintain the feeling of the original games while incorporating modern aesthetic and mechanical standards to make them more palatable and enjoyable to a modern audience, as well as perhaps expanding on things like the overall script and story. This, to me, is a great way to bring a classic game up to date, so I started pondering what other old games might benefit from this treatment?

Here’s what I came up with. (Or rather, here’s what occurred to me as I wrote this post.)

Phantasy Star II

I played Phantasy Star I all the way through in its Game Boy Advance incarnation — actually just a straight port of the Master System original. I enjoyed it a great deal, despite the necessity of actually getting the graph paper out and mapping the dungeons.

Phantasy Star II, meanwhile, despite being enthusiastically raved about by a Phantasy Star-loving friend as his favourite in the series, just didn’t quite “click” with me for some reason. I liked its aesthetic, I liked its battle system, I liked its concept — I just couldn’t quite get into it.

Part of the reason for this was its dungeon design. By presenting its dungeons from a three-quarter top-down perspective rather than its predecessor’s first-person perspective, they became significantly harder to map effectively — and boy, you still needed to map them. The first big dungeon was a mess of almost identical-looking floors with transitions between them that sent you to all manner of different places, and I found it absolutely impossible to navigate effectively, and moreover, impossible to figure out a sensible, effective means of mapping it.

It’s not necessarily the lack of a map facility that was the problem, as both Ys I and II featured some fairly complex labyrinths that I nonetheless managed to navigate without mapping, but there was something about Phantasy Star II that I found irreconcilably confusing. A modern remake would perhaps benefit from a map facility, or perhaps even a rethinking of the dungeon designs — taking the latter approach would have the added benefit of making the game feel like a “new” experience for veterans, though purists would likely thumb their noses at the possibility. Perhaps there could be an option to have “classic” or “contemporary” dungeons according to your preference.

Aside from that, simply an update of the art would be lovely — and take Ys’ approach of improving the fidelity of the art without necessarily compromising its style; Ys I and II feature gorgeous ’90s anime-style character designs, and they look both lovely and distinctive, so I feel Phantasy Star II could benefit from such a visual update, too.

The Mercenary series

Mercenary and its two sequels Damocles and Mercenary III were defining games in my childhood. Some of the most technically impressive games of the 8- and 16-bit computer era, they were sprawling, open-world adventures that managed to tell an interesting story while giving the player an unprecedented degree of freedom to explore and just generally piss around in the world (and, later, solar system) that developer Paul Woakes had created.

They look very primitive today, though. Built on rigid grid systems with no more than one building per (pretty large) grid square, the environments were certainly large and sprawling, but rather empty-feeling at times. A modern remake could benefit from greater scenery density and perhaps an expansion of the dynamic scenery Mercenary III introduced in the form of its fully functional public transportation system.

There was actually going to be a Damocles remake at one point with full texture-mapped graphics and all manner of other goodies — this was a few years back, too, so I can only imagine what modern graphics hardware would make of this sort of game. Unfortunately, I feel that very few people have heard of this series these days, so I feel it’s destined to remain part of history rather than something that will ever get brought up to date and given to a brand new audience.

Shining Force

Sega’s classic strategy RPG already had one lovely remake on the Game Boy Advance, but it’s since disappeared from relevance everywhere except for the Sega Mega Drive Classics pack available on Steam. And while the Mega Drive version still works just fine, it would be kind of lovely to see a fully up to date version of the original Shining Force, its sequel and even the Game Gear version Shining Force Gaiden (which, fun fact, was also released for Palm devices, of all things).

Shining Force’s gameplay remains solid today, and with the popularity of Fire Emblem it’s not too much of a stretch to say that all it needs is a fresh coat of paint and a remastered soundtrack to make it something people would more than likely happily pay £15 to have in their Steam library or PSN downloads. Hell, I’d happily pay £40 for a physical edition of a Shining Force compilation, including modernised updates of Shining Force, Shining Force II and Shining Force Gaiden, perhaps even with upscaled versions of the various Shining Force III releases for good measure.

And localise the other two Shining Force III games while you’re on, Sega, while I’m dreaming.

Alternate Reality

I mention this game quite a lot, because it’s fascinating to me. I found it fascinating when I first played it as a child, even if I didn’t understand how role-playing games worked at the time, and I still find its complexity and depth fascinating today.

For the uninitiated, Alternate Reality was a proposed series of games that began with The City and continued into The Dungeon, but was ultimately scrapped before its other episodes were completed. The story deals with the player character being abducted by aliens and taken to another world, seemingly medieval in nature but with occasional whiffs of peculiar technology starting to become apparent, particularly in The Dungeon. The ultimate intention was for the player to discover the aliens’ plan — a Matrix-style virtual world designed to make its participants believe that they were living a “real life” in this other world, when in fact they were just existing as part of a simulation — but unfortunately this ambitious concept was never brought to fruition.

We have the graphical technology and programming knowhow to bring the complete Alternate Reality concept to fruition today, in more impressive form than ever before. Bethesda RPGs show that there’s very much a market for sprawling, freeform, open-world games that the player can tackle as they see fit, and the complete scope of Alternate Reality wouldn’t be any more ambitious than your typical Elder Scrolls game.

I would even be happy if it maintained its old-school “gridder”-style dungeon crawling presentation rather than featuring a true, fully modelled 3D open world — I just dream of one day seeing creator Philip Price’s original vision brought to fruition, and kind of wish I was able to do something about it myself!

2313: Reimagining

I’m going to resist ranting on about how good Ys II was, even though I finished it this evening, and instead talk a little more generally about something that divides opinions somewhat among gamers: the idea of remakes.

The reason I bring this up now is that the first two Ys games have the dubious honour of being some of the most frequently remade and rereleased games of all time. Beginning life on the PC-88, they subsequently found themselves ported, remade and rejigged on platforms ranging from the Sega Master System to modern Windows PCs. And, from what I know of these different versions, they provide markedly different experiences, at least in terms of their aesthetic, but also to a lesser extent in terms of gameplay and narrative content, too.

The situation with Ys reminds me somewhat of the ’80s and early ’90s in gaming, when multiplatform releases were noticeably different from one another due to the wildly different capabilities different hardware had. The ZX Spectrum version of a game, for example, tended to be the “worst” in most cases thanks to that system’s slow processor, lack of RAM and poor graphics and sound capabilities, while the Commodore Amiga version tended to be the most impressive version thanks to being a 16-bit rather than 8-bit computer, plus all the dedicated graphics and sound hardware in that system that made it one of the most impressive computers on the market during that period.

Ultimately, the Windows PC came along and made all this sort of thing mostly irrelevant, which was probably for the best — at least from a development perspective, as developers no longer had to create ten or more completely different versions of their game — but I sort of miss the differences between platforms, since there’s really very little to choose between Xbox One and PS4 versions of games these days, while the PC version is usually the “best” if your hardware is up to the job and the port has been handled with actual PC gamers in mind. The margin of “best” is much smaller than it was back in that period, though; in most cases, it’s only the very worst type of insufferable frame-rate buff that will be able to highlight (and probably talk about at great length) the differences between PC and console versions.

But back to Ys and the concept of remakes in general. The version of Ys and Ys II that I played was the Chronicles+ version, which is — for now, anyway — the absolute latest version. This features lovely PS1-style pixel art, a glorious live-recorded soundtrack (plus the option for two of the older incarnations of the music, too), some really rather fabulous 2D lighting effects and an excellent, excellent localisation by Xseed Games. In comparison to the earlier versions, the script also fleshes out some of the character and world backstory, too, making for a much more “complete”-feeling experience. It is, in short, probably closest to what the fine folks at Falcom wanted to create when Ys was first put together.

Ys is an example of a remake done extremely well. It’s true to the original game, but acknowledges modern tastes. For example, it incorporates analogue control, which simply didn’t exist in the console space when Ys first came out. It also features modern trappings like cloud saving and achievements — the latter aspect of which was added by Xseed and adds an enjoyable “metagame” to the experience, encouraging you to seek out some secrets you might not have found otherwise.

Other solid remakes I’ve come across include Atelier Rorona Plus on PS3. This was a curious situation in that the original Atelier Rorona was a PS3 title too, and only a couple of years earlier than its Plus incarnation. Plus turned out to be the definitive way to enjoy Rorona’s adventure, though, thanks to improved character models, a better interface and an overall better game experience all round. It was a less radical reinvention than the various Ys remakes, but it was still significant and ultimately to the game’s benefit.

Where I find myself raising my eyebrows a bit are when it comes to “remakes” that are little more than ports. Sure, it’s nice to be able to play, say, a PS2 classic in 1080p at 60 frames per second, but sometimes I wonder what a true remake of these older games might be like with modern technology. That’s a lot more work than a port, of course, but I can dream — and it is possible to do something along these lines. Ultimately this type of remake is mostly valuable for those who perhaps missed out on a game on its original platform, so might as well play a technically superior version for (theoretically) the “best” experience with it; contrast with, say, the Ys remakes, though, which provide value even for those who are already veterans of the source material.

Anyway. Remakes can be good; really good, in fact. And I’m more than happy to support them when they’re of as high a quality as the two Ys games I’ve just played through. It’s got me thinking about remakes I’d really like to see, too — though perhaps that’s a subject for a separate post on another day.