I’m with you on Tactics Ogre, but I don’t think too many people played it back in the day so it’s pretty much a good game that was over looked back in the day.
The whole remake trend of popular games is the issue, imo. Unless your completely going full FF7R, it’s just a cash grab. The RE remakes wernt anything special, neither are all the gta5 upgrades. If studios want to remake games they thought were good but didn’t sell well I can get behind that.
I’d love to see Shining Force one and two remade and the full SF3 brought over legally to the states and would buy those over any LOU remake every single day. I cannot believe there’s a big market for LOU that investing millions in remaking a game that millions have already played just to get it up to par on current systems is smart business unless they’re adding about 20 new hours of gameplay along with it.
The problem is that most of the time they are not really perfecting it and using it more as a cash grab. The Last of Us strength is it's narrative because honestly when it comes to game play, it is very limited like many Naughty Dogs games. Making the game a bit prettier does nothing for the story and the game play is still below a PS2 game like Metal Gear Solid 3.
If we are talking about films, i love Stanley Kubrick because he never really stuck to a subject matter and sought to challenge himself by changing genres and telling completely different stories and doing it well. The closet gaming equivalent to that would be people like Miyamoto at Nintendo who are not afraid to mix it up. Does it always work? No. But in trying and experimenting with new things, they have made a lasting impact on the gaming industry several times over through evolution. Much better than releasing Zelda Ocarina of Time over and over and over again like most of the industry would do where they in their shoes.
They're different approaches that both have arguable merits and drawbacks either way, in my opinion, and if anything, I heavily favor the single-minded perfectionist attitude, personally. This idea that people should always strive to be the "always challenge yourself to do something different and reinvent yourself each time" type is, in my view, misguided and far more lopsided than it should be. It's two sides of the same coin, of equal merit. I prefer and have greater admiration for the "understand what truly makes you tick and spend a lifetime nailing that 100%-- relish in repetition and perfectionism" attitude, myself (the Jiro Dreams of Sushi mindset), and remakes can be, in principle, an extension of that (not that they always are, in practice).
I have more respect for the mindset of the RE remakes than I do with FFVIIR, personally (even though I'm far more impressed by the latter's original game), because they care more about getting things perfectly right and nailing what makes it tick than superficially keeping people guessing with shit they've never seen before (while arguably going against the core ideas of the original and doing something artistically more shallow). I think people are too obsessed with the novelty of things being fresh and new-- Personally, I found a lot of the lip-service surrounding the game to be BS. The RE remakes are obviously superior to the originals, whereas I would still take FFVII OG over FFVIIR pretty easily (despite both having a ton of flaws).
I would also take Ozu (who kinda made the same film over and over) over Kubrick, Neu! or Fela Kuti (who kinda wrote the same song over and over) over The Beatles, and Matsuno over Miyamoto (although I'm not sure I agree he's a great example of that), etc. I'm not saying everyone should agree, but I think it's stupid how everyone matter-of-fact-ly treats it like it unanimously should be one way over the other.
Also, The Last of Us Part 1's narrative is every bit as lame and mediocre as its gameplay, in my opinion. Critically praised only because the bar for storytelling in videogames is so low, when the same level of storytelling would be eye-rolling in other mediums. I think its only really exceptional at having high quality production values and baseline competence in most areas, so repeatedly updating those to keep up with technology makes a lot of sense to me. Not that I agree that this matters anyways-- whatever way you can legitimately improve something (whether it's its bread and butter or not), it's worth doing, IMO.
I agree that remakes are often just cash-grabs that aren't very good or even not necessarily improvements over the originals at all, but that's an issue with how well done they happen to be, not a fundamental issue with the idea of remakes overall. It's not an issue exclusive to remakes either-- The same thing could be said about original properties-- I'd wager that the likelihood and success rate of them being bad or shameless cash grabs is ultimately pretty similar.
