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".
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.
It should be noted that Square has been doing this for basically as long as they've been re-releasing Final Fantasy games: virtually every FF1~6 reissue has been a remake of a port of a remake, and off the top of my head, I don't think they've reissued the authentic originals outside of Nintendo's old Virtual Console line (and I suspect they may never do so again, and wouldn't have even done so then if Nintendo wasn't so stringent.) There was never a shift in approach; they've been post-processing their legacy forever.
In this specific instance, I do see a silver lining inasmuch as you can play vidcon dendrochronologist with their remakes in order to observe S-E's shifting sentiments and practical approaches to presenting and selling old games to contemporary audiences, not just in terms of aesthetic choices—mixed-res assets, pre-smeared graphics a la your favourite '00s-era emulator, laissez-faire, giga-sized dot art with virtually no style guides; name your faux pa and they probably pioneered it—but also their specific reactions to how the prior versions were received. I can't think of another big mainstream series whose classic games continue to be mauled with such regularity, and if it was a series I gave the slightest shit about, I'd be annoyed to no end, but it's FF so fuck it, have at it.
I will say that I was rankled by the whole "overseen by FF pixel art legend Kazuko Shibuya!" angle they used to promote the Pixel Remasters, and how frequently her contribution was touted as the differentiator between these versions and versions prior—like, no shade to Shibuya whatsoever but the role they played on the Pixel Masters was exactly the same role they played on the smartphone versions that preceded them, which were derided for being hideous.
@yaktaur left a comment on your post
I think one way to satisfy both sides of the argument would be to include an emulated version of the original with the remakes. I think that would at least satisfy me. I kind of DO want to play the Trails in the Sky remake to be honest, but that's because I've already played through the original. I feel like if the original was included with the remake I'd be the most happy because I could experience what was new safe in the knowledge that the "real" experience was also there.
don't get me wrong, I'm not against remakes as a rule—I'm looking forward to the Romancing SaGa 2 remake, for example, and the recent Shadow of the Ninja "remake" is one of my favourite games of the last while—but yeah, it's the literal erasure of the original games (or in Square's case, the near-total refusal to circulate them to begin with) that bothers me. Take Sega, for example: they removed the original Mega Drive versions of the classic Sonic games to make way for the Sonic Origins collection, and they're going to be delisting the original versions of Sonic Generations when the remaster comes out (with some caveats that'll allow you to still acquire it via bundles and so on, as a response to backlash). Sure, anyone who wants the original versions will have no trouble finding them, but they needn't have any trouble at all, and their recent history with remasters has been so shaky that there's no reason to trust that these substitutes are even going to be adequately functional, let alone a credible representation of the original.
As for remakes including the original, it's obviously a lot of work that many devs can't afford or aren't equipped for, but I can also say that in many cases, mundane licensing restrictions are to blame for the exclusion of the authentic originals: some rights owners treat their games not as games but as itemised bundles of assets that they can't or won't necessarily license out as a full package, or in a way that allows one to directly incorporate raw source material; some simply don't want external companies touching their originals as a matter of policy; some will dissuade licensors from packaging a remake with a reissue because they simply don't want to take on the added burden of coordinating between production and licensing/brand management, etc.
