Wanted to get some thoughts out on remasters vs originals that I’ve been stewing on after playing some of the Final Fantasy IV pixel remaster then going back to the original, all of which has culminated (in combination with various other things only briefly mentioned here) in me considering selling my pain in the ass gaming laptop and just being a console gamer forever!
I started playing the pixel remaster the other week on my excessively expensive and powerful gaming laptop, hadn’t ever touched any version of the game. I was immediately hooked with the story, presentation, and music. I’ve played varying amounts of FF VI, VII, IX, X, and XV and it already felt like it could be up there with VI as my favorite one. I did have a couple issues with the particular version of the game though.
The first was that I absolutely could not get the screen to scroll smoothly (I really just wish I could ignore it, but I’m playing a remaster of a SNES game on a laptop with an RTX 3070, it seems like this shouldn’t be a problem). I tried for hours searching internet forums to see how to fix it, as screen tearing and stuttering is apparently a known issue with the game that people have supposedly resolved. I did various combinations of altering the refresh rate of my display, the frame rate of the game, turning v-sync and triple buffering on and off, full screen vs windowed, different resolutions, hooked up to the tv vs just on the laptop, etc etc etc. Nothing made any difference whatsoever.
I eventually went as far as to watch let’s plays of the game on youtube to see if they were having the same issue. Everyone that I watched had the stuttering. Maybe they just didn’t care or didn’t notice? I wish I could not care lmao I would be having so much more fun. The thing that convinced me that there is indeed no fix was going to Square Enix’s twitter and watching a video of the upcoming FFV pixel remaster where the exact same juttery scrolling was shown. So I guess SE just doesn’t care!
The other thing that was bothering me about this version of the game was the nagging feeling of not knowing what I was missing by playing the remaster before the original. For some reason I was getting the impression that this game had all its rough edges smoothed down until much of the personality the original game had was gone and replaced with whatever arbitrary modern comforts the designers of this remaster decided the players needed. If they don’t even care enough to get the screen scrolling smoothly, how can I expect them to make tasteful decisions on modernizing the game?
Small aspects just felt off, adding up to make a product that I didn’t trust. I initially enjoyed all of the modern animation flourishes that wouldn’t have been possible on original hardware, like the water rippling effect when on a boat or at the bottom of a waterfall, or the attack animations during battle, but I slowly became soured on them. I am probably being cynical here, but I eventually found myself asking “why?” What is the point of all this “modernized” stuff? Do they think it’s too boring to just have the original textures and animations? Why go for this weird in-between graphical style that has a strange mix of retro and modern? To me it is not a cohesive artistic vision, and despite not having played the original at that point, it felt like the original intent of the developers must have been compromised or obscured in some way, limited by hardware it may have been.
The last thing I will mention was the battle system. It just felt completely unbalanced and incoherent. Party members flew in and out of the party without me even understanding what their combat function was or how they fit into the party. The mages learned new spells at a rate so quick and unpredictable that I could barely try out the moves they hard already learned. I highly suspected that this was not how the battle system was originally constructed, and that it was some half baked attempt to make it easier for a modern audience to blast through. For me though, a person who can enjoy a good jrpg grind if the mood is right, it led to an experience that I found unenjoyable. So with all that in mind, I decided to stop playing this version and figure out the best way to play the original.
Running in parallel with playing this game, I was struggling desperately to get the full might of my PC to display correctly on my TV so I could play all the hot new games with the hottest new graphics. I won’t get into this here because I have spent many hours in the last weeks in various reddit threads, discords, youtube videos, and forums and have determined 100% that the laptop absolutely will not do what it was advertised to do on my TV, and I don’t want to invite any more well-meaning people to try to help me. I just need to accept it at this point lol. This combined with me really not enjoying my forays into emulation (a lot of the reason why I bought this laptop was to emulate and it turns out I just hate doing it for a lot of reasons), my poor experiences with other ports and remasters (really didn’t like the steam version of Chrono Trigger either despite it supposedly being much better than it was on release, the Dragon Quest 1-3 releases, etc), and of course my issues with the FFIV remaster had me in an extremely pessimistic mood about the state of modern gaming/modern retro gaming. As I often do, I went way too hard in the exact opposite direction. I bought an Analogue Super NT so that I could play FFIV the “right” way!
Oh my god I love this thing so much. I got a decent deal on eBay where an original SNES controller was included with 4 games (Super Mario World and some sports games I haven’t checked out yet). Super Mario World is probably my favorite game of all time (or at least the most nostalgic, the GBA version was my childhood) and playing it on what is basically the original hardware is an absolute joy. Compared to turning on the Switch, seeing ads on the lock screen, messing with updates to their rip-off online system, dealing with input lag (that I probably can’t actually perceive but I think I’m perceiving it so it’s pretty much real (lol)), seeing the dumb “p1” icon at the top the whole time, constantly fighting with the temptation to use the rewind/save state function, and having to be connected to the internet the whole time, putting that cartridge in the Super NT, hitting the power button, pressing “run cartridge,” and then getting a 100% accurate experience is incredible.
I have a bit of a collecting problem (I have an action figure collection of around 400+ pieces and rapidly growing (my Mezco 1:12 Darkseid is my profile picture here), plus a giant childhood Pez dispenser collection in the attic), and the idea of collecting retro games has always appealed to me (but not owning any retro consoles would make that kinda weird), so that made the idea of the Super NT even more exciting. I hit up some local video game stores and got a couple carts even before my console had arrived. I should have gotten Final Fantasy II cause it was at one of the stores, but it was $80 and a collection philosophy that I have developed over the years is that when starting a new collection you have to work up to getting the expensive stuff. I will get it eventually!
But I had to play FFIV now! I knew that I already loved the game, even through all its (perceived?) flaws in the remaster. So I ended up jailbreaking the Super NT, put every SNES game released in North America on an SD card, and booted it up. And maybe it was just confirmation bias, but every complaint I had about the remaster was satisfied in the original and then some.
First and most obviously, of course the screen stuttering was gone! After all my attempts at fixing it I was starting to think that maybe I was just imagining the issues and all game like this looked bad, but it’s smooth 60fps scrolling galore on the Super NT. It’s the simple pleasures in life!
The original pixel art is good! I’m sorry, adding fancy graphical flourishes in this context just doesn’t make any sense. This is probably more of a personal preference thing, and maybe if I had played the original first I would have enjoyed the updated style more, but seeing everything in its original presentation knowing this is exactly what was intended at the time was much more satisfying for me. I know this is far from the most heinous attempt at updating graphics from this era, but just let the old graphics live!
The biggest thing that I think was lost with the remaster was the gameplay. This game in its original form isn’t any kind of revelation in JRPG battle systems and dungeons. However, the pacing allowed you to do what I feel is the most important thing for this kind of game: get to know the characters! The original is a pretty well-paced game. With the amount of different characters that get switched in and out, you need to spend a decent amount of time with them to get to know how they function, and then level them up and watch them improve to be able to feel like you’ve made a connection with them, which the original does great.
The remaster completely butchers this pacing, and in turn the player’s connection with the characters. Take one of the first party members you meet, Edward. The first dungeon I went through with him in the remaster I had no idea what his deal was. I could not for the life of me figure out what his "sing’ or whatever command was supposed to do, and he made no sense in the context of the greater party because he couldn’t do any damage and he had no defense. But the game is so easy that I pretty much could just ignore him and blast through the dungeon.
In contrast, in the much more deliberately paced original, you are in that dungeon for a good amount longer and the enemy encounters last longer due to the game being balanced correctly. This allowed me to spend much more time with Edward, see what he was about, and actually understand how he functions in the party (his sing command can inflict various status changes and his regular harp attack is more effective against certain monsters than the main character’s physical attack).
I am not saying that this is perfect game design, and I am certainly not trying to say that it is an inherently good thing to spend longer times in JRPG dungeons and battles! But what I am saying is that FFIV is balanced around these things, and the remaster completely ignores it for the sake of making it more palatable to a modern audience (not sold on this being successful or necessary for this kind of game) and/or so that the game critics can say “it’s a fresh take with nice modern upgrades, 8/10” instead of “it’s the same old outdated game, 6/10.” Thoughtlessly making these changes does no favors to the old game or the remaster. If they feel that they have to make them, why not include the original unaltered game along with the remaster if they refuse to rerelease the exact SNES version?
All this is to say that I like old games and I hate that they are so inaccessible and when they are accessible companies often don’t care about doing them justice! Man I can’t wait to build a MiSTer and just play old games with no issues, I have had 1000x more fun playing the Super NT than I have messing with settings and dealing with garbage ad nauseum on this laptop! Sorry this got long, was procrastinating at work and wanted to be home playing games so I just started writing and figured I’d put it here lol. I need to hang out in these forums more often…
