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.”
“It seemed like every sequence of the game got put under a microscope, and we asked, ‘What do we want to do? What do we want to change here?’” Friedman explains. The characters’ arcs and outcomes were set in stone, being that the game is only a single piece of a massive franchise, but Friedman and the team could adjust characterization and dialog to reflect more “real life.” How would real people respond to these “crazy situations”? This allowed for countless opportunities, particularly in dealing with characters that the original hadn’t dived into with much depth but were “remembered fondly” by players, like Marvin the police officer and Kendo the gun shop owner.
With Marvin, a character that was famously zombified without much drama in the original, Friedman used him as a chance to build up the ethical troubles of the plot: It’s certainly hard to put down a zombie, but it takes a lot more emotional gumption to do it if it’s a former friend now hungry for your flesh. And with Kendo, whose introduction was pushed a little later in the remake than in the original, it would be a chance to surprise veterans who felt they could guess every twist. He would be an everyman with a bit more tragic nuance than the original Kendo, who existed merely to point a gun at Leon, gripe about zombies, and be devoured unceremoniously.
Balancing the assumptions of older fans while satisfying new ones has been a winning formula for various remakes. HeartGold and SoulSilver are often named the best remakes in the Pokemon franchise because they “respected the feelings” of people who had played the originals, while delivering for young players “the sense that it was a totally new game.” Meanwhile, the developers of 2016’s DOOM reboot realized that “you want to respect the game and have fondness for it,” but that they needed to look “ahead with every decision and every idea.”
These were two successful cases, but would it land with a game like Resident Evil 4? It’s a title that still has such a stranglehold on the medium (both the original Dead Space and its 2023 remake owe a lot to it). Washington Post games journalist Gene Park believes it was a slam dunk—praise that didn’t come easily, considering his reaction to playing the original. “I was like, ‘I’ve never played a game like this ever before.’ The amount of action that Leon was capable of and the famous pacing—there’s always something weird and wacky and interesting happening every 10 minutes. And when I started playing other games after it, I could see Resident Evil 4 in those games. Like Uncharted 2, I thought, ‘This is a Resident Evil 4 game right here.’”
So, for a Resident Evil 4 remake to gain value for Park, it would have to be stellar in its own right. “I’m always thinking of how video games compare and contrast to other forms of pop culture,” Park says. “It’s not like a cover of a song, and it’s not like a rerelease. It has to be a recreation of the experience.” Playing the remake sent a flood of feelings that felt simultaneously fresh and similar. “When zombies are coming in through the windows,” Park recalls, “it felt like I was transported back to 2005, when everything felt frantic and hectic and scary and new.”
A fresh coat of paint had certainly been added, but the technological benefits had allowed the original concepts of the game to both “recognize what they got correct” and “breathe more,” according to Park. And the character-building that Friedman had aimed to do in the Resident Evil 2 remake had been spiritually carried over to 4, something Park appreciates: “In the original, characters come and go and have weird motivations that are never explained. This made it feel a lot more cohesive, and the story, especially the evolution between the different locations, is more welded together.”
This matters all the more to Park, who looks ahead to remakes of Resident Evil 5 and 6, games he feels are pretty inevitable and also games whose gameplay clearly owes a ton of debt to the groundbreaking 4. It’s a chance to analyze the narratives of games that were considered graphically wonderful at the time of release, but which suffered from pacing issues or poor character development. Because, when it comes down to it, as the video game industry maintains a desperate race for top-notch lifelike graphics on a wide scale, it’s the story, mechanics, and experience that will allow both new games and remakes alike to stand out from the pack.
There are more remakes and reboots to come before the year is out, ranging from the blood-soaked Mortal Kombat 1 to the delightful Super Mario RPG. There’s even a remake of Silent Hill 2 on the horizon, one of the most acclaimed horror games of all time and certainly on par with Resident Evil 4 in terms of influence in the medium. How they will fare, though, is anyone’s guess. Mortal Kombat 1’s story director Dominic Cianciolo said in an interview with IGN that “it was a process of figuring out which stories we wanted to play with, and then what stories needed to stay more close to what we know”—something that actually makes a big difference in a series with such a previously labyrinthine mythology.
No amount of marketing can hide a game that’s ultimately creatively bereft, though, and no matter what buzzwords you slap on to a game, in the end it all comes down to whether fans actually accept it. “There’s all this terminology, right? Remastering, refreshing, rebooting, remaking, reimagining,” Friedman says. “But at the end of the day, fans can view it as, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to make more money.’ You have to make a new game and a new experience. I think the companies that are the most courageous are going to take that approach because, if you do it right, the fans will completely embrace it. If it feels cynical, it probably is, and the fans will sniff it out.”
