In the past year and a bit, there have been three notable video game releases--Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake, and Final Fantasy VII Remake. I wrote about Resident Evil 2 Remake back in January 2019 when I finished it for the first time. I have since replayed it a good three or four times, still enjoying it quite thoroughly. In fact, in anticipation for RE3 coming out at the beginning of April, I replayed RE2 and had a great time blasting my way through the infected of Racoon City yet again.
But what I was really waiting for was Final Fantasy VII Remake. I have an enormous soft-spot in my heart for Cloud and his colorful crew--enough that I should maybe expand on some of what I talked about back in January of 2018--and I have been waiting and hoping for this game for over a decade. Really, ever since Advent Children came out, I wanted to see LEGO-style Cloud remade with newer graphics and video game mechanics. When Square Enix announced that FFVII Remake would be a reality and that we need only wait a bit longer, I was skeptical. After a certain amount of time, anticipation far outstrips what can be delivered. (This is the problem with Half Life 3, though there are stirrings about that actually coming to pass…) It's hard not to be excited about something that you're, you know, excited about. But the more I focus on wanting a thing, the less impressive it tends to be when I finally get it. So, I specifically avoided watching trailers (except for a couple of times, when the temptation was too great), and I did my best to think on other things. However, as it got closer, the demo dropped, and I was immediately excited--I played through the demo twice the day I downloaded it. Suffice to say, I have been a rather-pampered gamer in the past little while. In fact, that's what I wanted to talk about (I will try to write a review of both RE3 and FFVII in the near future, while the experience playing the games is still fresh): The strange way iterations in the video game medium differ from other media. Make vs. Remake Films are notorious for this: We have classic films that Hollywood knows contain a lot of quality, and they get remade with modern sensibilities, acting styles, costumes, and special effects. Almost always, they are an inferior product. I'm not a huge film nerd, but I can, off the top of my head, list a handful of movie "reboots" or remakes that failed to make a lasting impression. The Mummy, Godzilla, Ben Hur, Clash of the Titans, Total Recall, and Robocop all came and went with hardly a note. In fact, the aborted "Dark Universe" was supposed to be a cinematic contender of the classic Universal monster movies against Marvel's undisputed creations, but fell apart at inception because of many reasons that aren't really relevant here. The point is, with just over a century of film history, we've repeated film ideas constantly. It isn't like film invented this phenomenon, though. Lost to us now, there is a version of Hamlet from the late 1580s (maybe early 1590s?) that we only know about because people wrote about how bad it was. Maybe it was an early draft of the play that Shakespeare himself wrote (which is what Harold Bloom argues), or maybe it was just a trashy version of a familiar story. What Shakespeare went on to write--the Hamlet that has changed the world--is, on a story level, a reboot of the Ur-Hamlet. (And, yes, I would love to read that play.) But even Ur-Hamlet is based upon a Danish story about a prince named Amleth (whose name cracks me up…just relocating the last letter to the front and boom! new name). In fact, almost every story that Shakespeare told was actually a retelling--and he did it better than anyone else. Drama, being the forebearer to film, that makes sense. But even in poetry--arguably our oldest form of permanent communication--we see retellings and reimaginings. While The Aeneid is more of a spin-off from The Iliad, we see Homeric and Virgilian echoes throughout almost all of history. New forms take the epics and uses their tropes to experience the stories again (think, for example, of the experimental novel Ulysses). Even the Bible isn't free from retellings, as the sublime and unsurpassable Paradise Lost shows. What's the reason for this? Being a would-be writer, I understand this impulse. Some stories--and, in many ways, the way the stories are told--have an unexpected influence on a person. A creative person often will take that influential energy and redirect it through their own lens and talents in a hope to glean a piece of the original's power and put it into their own work. I despair of my own writings when I read Steinbeck or It, because I can't reach the level that I see. I want to try my hand at those influential stories--it's the reason I retold Hamlet for my NaNoWriMo 2019--and see if I can "do what they did". But as a consumer, it's a desire to reclaim the awe the original inspired. I envy anyone who gets to come to Paradise Lost for the first time, or experience It without expectations or prior knowledge. There's something inside of these stories that can't be caught anywhere else--but that doesn't mean we don't want to try. Within the Digital I understand why people want to retell and rework and reimagine and remake their stories. What's so fascinating to me about this phenomenon in video games, though, is why they want to try again: The technology has improved. Assuming Bloom is right and Shakespeare decided to try the story of Hamlet again, it wasn't because there was a new innovation in the medium of his story. It wasn't like they discovered they could have stereoscopic sound in the Globe Theatre. There wasn't a technological advancement in printing that made Milton think that the story of Genesis could now be told in epic poetry. (In fact, his choice of epic poetry was a commercial risk, as nobody read or wrote in that format anymore; he was using an antiquated format for his Bible fanfic.) Final Fantasy VII was originally released on the PlayStation because that console had the greatest amount of power available to the developers at the time. They crammed as much content as they could into three CD-ROMs, using every shortcut* they could to be able to tell the story as possible. The limitations of their technology prevented them from doing all that they wished to do. With the continual increase of processing power, photo-realistic graphics, and improvements on acting capture (a level beyond motion capture) technology, video games now have the ability to tell their stories more fully, with greater detail and precision than ever before. The medium itself is changed. So the desire to revisit that which was technologically-confined is, I think, understandable. But what surprises me is that these remakes are, from a standpoint unaffected by nostalgia, superior to the originals that inspired them. And that is a controversial statement. The Power of Nostalgia There's another form of iteration at play here: As rising generations--in this case, the much-maligned Millennials of which I am one--begin to create, they often recreate. It's a call-back to a "simpler" time (simple only because the creator was a child during that time, and most kids have the innocence of childhood to paste over the hard parts of history). I think the best example would have to be Back to the Future, where the modern (1985) clashes with the idyllic (1955). The majority of that film takes place in the fifties, with only the framing concept being in the eighties. The stuff that was modern to Marty Macfly is nostalgic to me now. Stranger Things takes this feeling as the primary part of its appeal (even though it's technically historical urban science fiction--not a particularly large genre, to be honest). It's common for this to happen: Soon enough, early 2000 pop-culture will be used in our stories as creators who have fond memories of a pre-9/11 world will take creative control over our television, movies, novels, and video games and use that nostalgia as fuel for interest in their creations. That is the nature of how we tell stories, I think. Originality is simply a combination of two previously uncombined elements, but those elements still exist. We can find fingerprints of others throughout any story, if we really try. What's happening now in the video game world, though, is that the power of nostalgia is being coupled with outstanding quality. Resident Evil 2 will always be one of my favorite video games. I played it countless times and could probably knock it out in a single afternoon with minimal saves if I really wanted. My long-standing fascination with zombies comes from that video game. (In fact, I tried writing a zombie story in middle school that involved an evil corporation that accidentally turned people into zombies and had to be stopped by the main character, a gun-toting, ponytailed girl who wasn't afraid of the monsters.) I have a huge amount of nostalgic appreciation for that game…but I don't recommend it. Not because of its violence or gore (which is so much worse in the remake), but because it's a product of the times and the technology. The voice acting is bad, the animations strange, the controls a mess…everything that we now use to judge a game's quality** renders Resident Evil 2 as a definite pass. Yes, it's influential and continued the survivor horror genre in video games. It's an important game. But it's no longer a "good" game…at least, not without context. Resident Evil 2 Remake, however, is excellent on almost every front. Again, without the nostalgia-glasses, it deserves the acclaim it's received and could be considered a better game than its original. If you add back in the nostalgia, its power is diminished a bit (since it can't ever be experienced in the same milieu of life in which I experienced the original), but only a bit. Where it fades (the twists and turns of the story aren't a surprise, for example), the nostalgia of being in the Racoon Police Department, hunting for the Diamond Key more than makes up for it. Final Remake Much of what I said about Resident Evil 2--and, by extension, Resident Evil 3--doesn't apply as much to FFVII. That game is still wonderful, and even has a retro vibe*** to it now. In fact, I insisted that my son play FFVII on his iPad before he played the remake on the PlayStation 4, as I didn't want him to create nostalgic memories of something that I didn't have. I wanted, in this particular case, his experience with Cloud to be dictated by the original PlayStation version. And I think I made the right choice (though my other boys won't have that experience, since they've watched me play FFVII Remake and have now started formulating their own childhood memories that will one day bloom into nostalgia). My oldest is at the perfect age to allow these types of memories to shape him and go with him. And while I think FFVII Remake is a remarkable game, the power of the connection between the original and me can't really be undone. I'll never be able to feel about Remake as I did about the nineties' version, because I'm not that person any more. I'm not in middle school in an America that had been at war since before I was born. I'm no longer living in a world with corded telephones and no home internet. What I made out of that game is contingent on when I encountered that game. So of course the remake can't really generate the same sort of feelings. Instead, whenever I play FFVII Remake in the future, it will remind me of this time, of the chaos and strangeness of living in quasi-quarantine as a virus ravages the world. The context of now will continue to affect how I feel about that game, just as the context of then affects me now. Still, it is remarkable to me that the video game industry is able to be iterative in its reiterations. I think there's more to this than happenstance, too, but I won't know for certain until we get remakes of things like Overwatch or Fortnite…and maybe we won't. Perhaps our technology has reached a place that current ideas can be realized fully on the first try (albeit with a patch or two), preventing the necessity of remaking anything. I guess we'll have to wait and see. --- * FFVII had "solved" the problem of not enough processing power by having all of the character models be simple geometric shapes, imbued with a subtlety of movement within their animations to convey their feelings. The other members of Cloud's party would disappear, walking into his body so that the game didn't have to render three characters at once. When they went on to develop Final Fantasy VIII, the developers at Squaresoft wanted to keep the models of the characters the same in the battle sequences as in the world--no more of that blocky, severely deformed character model idea. That desire nearly prevented the game from being completed, as it was one of the most difficult programming feats the developers had to do. ** Not the story, though…I've never seen the caliber of story as one of the graded components of a video game review *** If you were curious, I don't much care for retro aesthetic. I didn't like pixelated video games when that was all I could get. I disliked seeing cover art that looked so dissimilar from the product. Retro gaming doesn't appeal to me because it creates a false impression of nostalgia--it looks like my gaming past, but it's a brand new game that I didn't actually play. Without nostalgia to smooth over the rough (pixelated) edges, I don't get a lot from the game. |
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