Look, I never owned Final Fantasy VII when it first came out. Couldn’t afford a PlayStation back then – I was still trying to make ends meet in my twenties, working construction jobs that barely paid the bills. So when I finally got around to playing it years later on an emulator my daughter set up for me, it was this incredible experience discovering what I’d missed. That four-disc epic sitting in a jewel case wasn’t some childhood memory for me… it was something I experienced for the first time at 45.
Which is why the whole remaster situation hits me differently than most gamers. I don’t have that nostalgic attachment clouding my judgment. When Square Enix announced they were remaking FF7, I wasn’t worried about them ruining my childhood memories – I was curious whether they could improve on what was already a pretty solid game. Turns out that perspective has served me well navigating this whole remaster trend that’s taken over gaming.
Because here’s the thing – some of these remasters are genuinely great preservation efforts that make classic games accessible to new audiences. Others are lazy cash grabs that barely qualify as ports, let alone improvements. And a whole bunch fall somewhere in between, leaving you wondering if the developers actually cared about the source material or just saw an easy payday.
I learned this the hard way when I bought Silent Hill HD Collection back around 2012. My daughter had been raving about the original games, said they were masterpieces of atmospheric horror. I picked up what I thought was the definitive way to experience them. What I got was this botched mess that somehow managed to be worse than games that were over a decade old. Different voice acting that killed the mood, missing fog effects that made the graphics look terrible, bugs that weren’t in the originals. Forty bucks down the drain for what felt like someone’s half-finished homework assignment.
That experience taught me to be skeptical. Started doing research before buying any remaster, looking at what actually changed, whether the original developers were involved, if the price made sense for the work done. Turns out a lot of these projects are farmed out to whoever bids lowest, with minimal oversight from people who understand what made the originals special.
The technical stuff is more complicated than I initially realized. My buddy Rick, who works in software development, explained how games from the 90s were basically built around specific hardware limitations. Developers used all sorts of tricks to make things work on limited memory and processing power. When you try to run that code on modern systems, weird stuff happens. Frame rates get wonky, timing gets off, controls feel different. It’s not like digitizing a movie – you’re dealing with interactive software that was never meant to run on anything but the original hardware.
That’s why I’ve got respect for companies that put real effort into understanding the source material. When I played the Resident Evil remake on GameCube – yeah, I picked up a used GameCube just for that game – it was clear the developers understood what made the original work. They kept the core gameplay loop, the puzzle design, the atmosphere, but rebuilt everything with better technology. Wasn’t just a prettier version of the same game… it was like they’d taken the essence of the original and reimagined it.
Compare that to some of the lazy ports I’ve wasted money on. Grand Theft Auto Trilogy Definitive Edition was such a disaster I actually returned it – first time I’d done that with a game in probably fifteen years. Character models looked like they were made by someone who’d never seen a human face, rain effects made the screen completely unreadable, missing features that were in the originals. How do you make a remaster that’s objectively worse than twenty-year-old games?
The pricing is what really gets me. I understand game development costs money, that companies need to make profit. But when you’re charging full retail price for what amounts to running old code through an upscaling filter, that feels like exploitation. Especially when the same company will charge fifteen bucks for a genuine remake that took years of development work.
Nintendo’s particularly bad about this. Love their games, but their remaster pricing makes no sense. Sixty dollars for Super Mario 3D All-Stars, which was basically three old games with minimal improvements? And they made it limited availability to create false scarcity? That’s not preservation – that’s artificial demand creation.
Meanwhile, you’ve got something like Rare Replay offering thirty games spanning decades of development for twenty bucks. Included behind-the-scenes content, development documentaries, even games that were never officially released. That felt like celebrating gaming history, not exploiting it.
I’ve developed this informal checklist for evaluating remasters. Does it fix legitimate problems from the original without changing what made it good? Is the price reasonable for the work involved? Can you tell the developers actually played and understood the source material? Does it include the original version or meaningful extras? Most importantly – does it feel like it was made by people who cared, or people fulfilling a contract?
The best remasters pass all those tests. Demon’s Souls on PS5 was gorgeous, ran perfectly, kept everything that made the original challenging and atmospheric. Shadow of the Colossus remake maintained the emotional impact while making the controls less frustrating. Mass Effect Legendary Edition felt like developers who loved those games making them accessible to modern audiences.
The worst ones fail every criteria. Minimum effort, maximum price, obvious indifference to what made the originals special. And there’s a whole middle ground of “fine, I guess” remasters that aren’t awful but don’t really justify their existence beyond generating revenue from existing IP.
What bugs me is how this trend might be affecting new game development. If publishers can make easy money remastering old games, why take risks on original ideas? I get that AAA development is expensive and risky, but at some point, you need new experiences, not just prettier versions of old ones.
That said, I’m not completely anti-remaster. Some games genuinely benefit from modern technology and design sensibilities. Others were limited by their era’s hardware in ways that hurt the experience. And there’s legitimate value in preserving gaming history for new audiences – as long as it’s done thoughtfully.
The emulation question always comes up. Why pay for official remasters when you can often get better results running original games through emulators? It’s a fair point, though I prefer supporting official releases when they’re done well. There’s something to be said for developers who understand their own code making improvements versus community-built solutions that might miss important details.
Plus, not everyone wants to mess around with emulator setup, controller configuration, and tracking down ROM files of questionable legality. A good remaster should be plug-and-play, offering the best possible version of a classic game without requiring technical expertise.
My nephew asked me recently whether he should play original Final Fantasy VII or wait for all the remake episodes. Told him to play both – original first to understand the foundation, then remake to see how those ideas evolved. That’s what good remasters should do… not replace originals but offer new ways to experience familiar concepts.
I’m getting pickier about which remasters get my money these days. Used to buy them on nostalgia alone, but now I wait for reviews, check who developed them, see if the price matches the effort involved. Life’s too short and gaming budgets too limited to waste on lazy ports.
The industry will keep making remasters because they’re profitable and relatively safe. As consumers, we vote with our wallets. Support the thoughtful preservation efforts, skip the obvious cash grabs, and maybe publishers will learn the difference. Or maybe they won’t, but at least we won’t be subsidizing laziness.
Either way, I’ll keep my expectations realistic and my research thorough. Some remasters are worth buying, others aren’t, and most fall somewhere in between. The trick is knowing which category you’re looking at before you spend your money.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
