I've been thinking about why exactly I'm so cynical about remakes recently. At least beyond the "I'm a fuddy duddy who hates fun and nice things" angle.
It's I think pretty obvious that for major game companies remakes exist mainly for "market" and "brand management" reasons. You have a longrunning series, you want to keep it in peoples' eyes so they associate that history with your new games. But maybe people aren't willing to spend more than a few bucks on an old game, or, worse, your game shows the inexorable passage of time. How are people supposed to like a game that looks and plays "old"! Can we believe that such an object is worthy of reverence and influence if it doesn't hold up to the standards of today. It's not a surprise that a lot of these kinds of remakes replace the original games entirely, like how the GTA3 "remasters" replaced the original games on Steam or how many other games are just delisted in favour of the newer take.
Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster is a good example of this for me - it's a brand-safe take on Final Fantasy 1-6, with a unified look and sound across the six games. Those original games were made over a period of seven years by somewhat distinct groups of people with an evolving idea of what making an RPG meant, what they were doing, what these kinds of games could be - but to Square in the 2020s it's more valuable to have an idea of what pre-3D Final Fantasy means, to reduce the concept of "Final Fantasy" down to a singular object that can be presented and sold. So it seems only natural that Square doesn't sell the original games anymore, just the pixel remasters. These are the versions they'd like you to play. There's absolutely nothing wrong with them as games, it's their existence as "this is what we want you to believe the history of Final Fantasy to be" that bugs me.
The comparison I keep making in my head is to theatre. Obviously for something ephemeral like a theatre performance it's hard to have a "definitive", "original" version of a play, but the culture where there's an eternal series of iterations on a text - interpreting it in new ways, twisting and playing around with it in ways that make sense for the production and the people doing the production - that's more interesting to me. I guess that's what the culture of fan remakes is like - it's not like KQ6 AGI, or the Metroid 2 remake, or whatever is going to "replace" the original games. They're toyboxes for people to experiment in, to express ideas about what those games mean or use them as venues for new things. In a culture where the copyright holder is the final arbiter of "canon", I suppose it's the other side of the coin - the publisher gets to decide what's canon, so these other interpretations are freed to be something a little more interesting than just "the new canon".
