There are few games that benefit from a remake less than this.

There was a point in time where games getting remade was exciting, because they were games that were weird and jank by today's standard. There had been innovations in how games were designed since they came out, such as control schemes or quality of life stuff. Some old games are legitimately hard to play now, because we all got used to, frankly better, modern game design stuff.

SMRPG (pronounced "smerpig") is not one of those games.

A lot of old games, especially really popular/well known ones, nailed it first try. Everything SMRPG does, it does well. When I play SMRPG, there are no moments where I'm thinking "ugh, that old jank". That's not to say the game couldn't be improved at all with modern design stuff, I just don't think it's significant enough to make the entire game again. It still looks good and plays good. It's exactly as fun today as it was when it came out.

The kinds of games that """need""" remakes are the ones that are not popular. The ones that came really close to being beloved, but were just too clunky even at the time. I'd like to see some old jank modernized, but that won't happen because of capitalism >:c

I'm getting tired of game remakes, in the same way that I got tired of movie remakes 15 (20?) years ago. Games like The Last of Us and Mass Effect (was it all 3 of them?) did not benefit from being remade. What did they get? Slightly higher graphical fidelity. All that effort could have been put into making something new instead. The only developer that's remaking games right now in a way that's worth it is capcom, and that's because they're remaking the games in a way that's actually different from the original.

So there are good games being remade for little to no benefit, and maybe that's fine. Like, I'm pretty negative on it, but maybe it's at worst neutral. I can admit that I tend to be very critical.

BUT

Sometimes they really screw it up. There's been some recent really bad remakes that were the result of rushing it through or giving it to a company that's not a game dev company (usually both). Like that GTA remake that everyone keeps saying was the result of machine upscaling (it wasn't, there is no evidence for that and lots of evidence for why it was just human error caused by a rush job).

Personally I was most disappointed by the Chrono Cross remake. That's a game that would benefit from higher graphical fidelity. Chrono Cross is full of beautiful prerendered backgrounds, and each one could be hung as a painting without anyone realizing it was from a video game. Except they're all low resolution, so some of the fine details get lost in the pixels. What I wanted was to see those backgrounds as they originally existed (if a higher fidelity original ever existed, though they certainly don't now), or redrawn/repainted. I wanted the beauty of those places to match how I imagine them to be. Instead what I got was machine upscaled versions of the backgrounds that I already saw. And it looks WORSE for it. It looks BAD!

A common argument in favor of game remakes is "they make the game more accessible". This might be true in specific cases, but not in the general case. If there was a game that came out in 2010 that I wanted but didn't get, it's because I could not afford it or the console it exclusively released on. When these games get remade, I still can not afford them or the consoles they exclusively release on. My situation is not atypical. I am poor, like nearly everyone else in this country is. Like nearly everyone in the world is. If you are buying modern mainstream video games when they come out, you are more wealthy than me. Releasing a game again for 60 (or 70 now!) USD is not making it more accessible than still offering the older version at a discounted price.

As for games older than that...

/me hands you an emulator and a bunch of ROMs

Games from the early 00's and earlier have never been more accessible. The average person does not know about emulators and piracy, but they really should. Teach everyone you know how to commit cybercrime, it will open them up to so many things they'd miss out on otherwise. It's more difficult with non-console games, but even arcade cabinets and operating systems can be emulated.

"But I don't want to do piracy :c"

THEN SUFFER

Something else I hear as a common response to criticism of the trend of remakes is "what's the problem? It's not going to replace the original, you can still play go play it". Actually it does replace the original. Like, even ignoring cases like blizzard force uninstalling Warcraft 3 from your computer and replacing it with the worse (!!!) remake, they get replaced in the public consciousness. The remake will replace all search engine results, it will replace discussion online, it will make everyone forget about the original, and anyone who didn't know about the original because they're young will know about the remake instead. It gets actively harder to find copies of, or even information about, the original when a remake gets released. I have had a face to face conversation where the one I was talking to got confused because I was talking about the original and they were talking about the remake that they didn't realize was a remake.

This is a bad trend, but maybe you're still ok with it. What I'd rather have, and what I think you'd be happier with as well, is sequels. I think it could be cool to have a direct sequel to SMRPG. Like, I love Paper Mario, but it's a very different game to SMRPG. Sometimes I'll finish a game and think to myself "I want more of this". That doesn't mean I want to play it again, it means I want another game with the same tone and feel, but different situations. I don't want polished mechanics, I want expanded concepts. And sometimes games don't benefit from sequels either, and that's ok. Let stories end, make something new and different.

Remakes are bad, actually