posted 2007/03/12 at 21:56
With my birthday now less than a week away (buy me something off of my Amazon.com wishlist darn it), I am reminded of the fact that for my birthday last year my parents got me the Gameboy Advance remake of Final Fantasy IV, and then for Christmas they got me the Gameboy Advance remake of Final Fantasy V. Given that the Gameboy Advance remake of Final Fantasy VI came out last month, I think I have a pretty good idea of what one of my birthday presents will be this coming Sunday. (Is it too much to hope for a Gameboy Advance remake of Chrono Trigger some time in the near future?)
This realization, coupled with a debate about the merits of Final Fantasy VI I had on a messageboard recently, has me thinking about the whole process of remaking games for newer consoles. I think it's noteworthy that these Final Fantasy remakes have been coming out mostly for systems of comparable power to the systems the games were originally made on (the DS remake of Final Fantasy III being the only exception I can think of). I'm wondering if perhaps there is a link between the graphical complexity of a game and how mature of a storyline the game can get away with.
In this debate I was having, I was arguing that one of the reasons I don't think Final Fantasy VI fully succeeded was that the game was just ahead of its time. In addition to pure technological restrictions (the opera scene that so many people gush about was ruined, for me, by the crappy wavetable they used for the voices), I think that the story was a little too dark and mature to be adequately conveyed. Final Fantasy VI's story, to me, seems like it could have been told far better on Playstation than it was on the Super NES. It was only when we got to the 32-bit era that the technology allowed game developers to create worlds where you could tell a really mature story and have the visuals and sounds to really immerse you in that world.
There's a part of me that thinks that I may just be thinking this because of how I grew up with these games, though. When the original Final Fantasy first came out, I don't think I would have been interested in handling a story more complex than the old "bad guy looks to destroy our world, please save us" framework. Perhaps I'm just so used to simpler stories being told on more primitive video game systems that to me the idea of trying to tell a more mature story on less powerful hardware seems like it wouldn't work. Then again, it's not like I played every RPG that came out in the 8- and 16-bit eras, so for all I know maybe there was a game that succeeded in doing just that.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon