So, in Japan there’s a remake of SaGa 2 (better known as Final Fantasy Legend II in the US) for DS, and it’s
fantastic (“Gorgeous, challenging, and quirky,” as one reviewer said). I was playing this a while ago and set it aside when I got to the super-long dungeon which is IIRC called the “nasty dungeon” or something like that in English, but that means that I’m actually most of the way through the game.
Basically, this is what every remake should be. It remains completely faithful to the plot, dialog, and locales of the original, but the developers added several new elements to the gameplay that add a great deal of depth to it. Just as one example, monster sprites are visible and moving around on the worldmap and in dungeons (unlike the original SaGa 2 but like the Romancing SaGa games). It’s possible for them to spot you and run towards you, and if more than one monster sprite does this, then you have to fight both groups of monsters at once in a pincer attack. Your characters also have combination attacks which you can buy and use.
The worldmap and some other areas look a bit bland in that every-PS-era-FF-game sort of way, but there is quite a bit of attention and detail lavished on the towns and to a lesser extent the dungeons.
And even besides the things I’ve mentioned, there are quite a few other additional aspects to the gameplay that really enrich the game, so rather than merely updating the graphics a bit and throwing in a few extra cutscenes or an extra dungeon to get people to buy another copy of a game they already own, it feels like the developers poured a lot of love and effort into reworking the game.
Also, this exists:
In other news, F-Zero X (N64) is awesome. I really like the emphasis on precision and skill in the original F-Zero game, and this one F-Zero X is very much in the spirit of its predecessor. It also has everything I could wish for as an improvement on the original: more tracks, more cars, and a multiplayer mode. On the negative side, I could do without the ability to attack other cars (it conflicts with the goal of racing the course with as much precision and speed as possible), and the soundtrack leaves something to be desired (I like the hard rock style, but most of the pieces are poorly-written). Although the graphics are lacking in detail, this was the sacrifice the developers made in order to have such a high framerate and to have 30 cars on the road, and I don’t know how anyone can experience breezing through a pack of dozen rival cars at over 1,000 km/h without feeling that the developers made the right decision when they did that.