Should More Classic Final Fantasy Games Be Remade? The Arguments For & Against

Few games are timeless and most get quickly superseded by advances in technology, particularly on the graphics front. Pop any classic game into a console of yesteryear and you can almost guarantee that happy childhood memories will be quickly overridden by frustration at non-responsive controls and clunkiness.

Given that Final Fantasy games are RPGs, however, most of them can be considered as such. Why? Because their heart is their story rather than their mechanics. Good stories do not age, hence why texts from hundreds of years ago are still commonplace in classrooms and as source material for films today.

There are always those that will turn their nose up at older games because of their lack of visual appeal, however, similar to how there are always those that will refuse to watch a great foreign film because it isn’t in English. Annoyingly, these sorts of people will be put off by the aesthetics of Final Fantasies I through XII, despite the fact that each has been reworked on several occasions to iron out many of their gameplay kinks.

By giving some of them the remake treatment and completely updating their graphics and gameplay to reflect modern standards, it would be possible to cultivate a new generation of fans that didn’t experience the stories the first time around and have neglected to explore them out of cynicism, lack of knowledge or an inability to source copies (VI’s best version is >£100 used on Amazon after all!). The stories deserve to be told.