Sometimes you remember an older game fondly because you had a blast playing it all that time ago, but when picking it up again now that you're more mature and maybe spoiled by better games you can see all its many flaws and how it could have been much better.
I'd like to talk about games that people feel could use with a remake that improves on any flaws the original game had and build upon its inate potential. This is more than a remake with a graphical upgrade, it's about improving any aspect of the game. I'd also like to focus on games whose series don't seem to exist anymore and so never got a chance for improvement.
One game I'd like to talk about is Terranigma for the SNES, or Illusions of Gaia 2, as I believe it was also called.
Terranigma was a Zelda/Mana-esque game, with real time combat, town and dungeon exploration, and a fairly epic storyline for its time. It was an Enix game before they fused with Square into the multiheaded beast it is now.
The game had a fairly unique setting as it played with the concept of a fantasy game taking place in the real world, and so in some aspects it was pretty fucked up. It had some gorgeous pixel art and Mode7 graphics in it, and the music was not too shabby either. One thing it also had was a combat system with a pretty good variety of different combat moves, something that I haven't seen any other action-RPG at the time do, and some pretty epic boss battles. Of course, though, you had only one character and magic was pretty limited.
I feel that a remake of this game would be something awesome if done right. The storyline of the original tended to be a bit too senseless in some areas, and maybe a slight revision could improve it. One thing that could really be improved was the basis of the game's gameplay, combat. While you had different combat moves that you could do (you used a spear, so you could stab, stab-flurry, do a circular jumping attack, a dash attack, a dash-from-the-air-and-slide-on-ground attack which looked pretty neat, and even a block) most of these moves were pretty useless or unnecessary in the grand scheme of things, mostly due to poor balancing. The dash attack made you virtually invulnerable through its duration, and if you had good timing you could be pretty much impervious to damage while you used it, so it tended to be used through 99% of the game. Using the stab-flurry attack was actually weaker than just using repeated normal stabs, the circular jump attack I never found a use for and the last attack was only needed for few monsters. The block was neat, but overall disnecessary especially with the imba dash attack.
Improving that would basically be a matter of balancing the moves better and creating new combat scenarios in which different moves are more useful than the rest, or allow the player to do some nifty combos with his different moves for greater effect.
Magic was another issue. In order to cast magic you needed to exaust one-time-use magic rings. So far so good, but getting those rings requires you to finds special items called magirocks in the game's many areas, and they were fairly limited. That would be cool too, if the spells were actually useful. All the times I played this game I must have used at most 2 or 3 rings, if that. Which is a shame because some of them had some pretty awesome-looking effects. I would basically change the magic system to have more use, maybe in a Zelda/Metroid fashion in which using spells in areas would open new paths. Also, maybe decreasing the number of available magirocks in order to make rings, but making the rings non-exaustable, so that the player was encouraged to experiment with them instead of saving their precious few for when they might need it, which never really happened. Make some of the battles actually benefit from magic-use, for that matter.
Another issue is the usual jRPG leveling up thingmagig. While being an action RPG with a fairly large moveset dimished the need of powerleveling greatly if you knew what you're doing, it still felt pretty out-of-place. It's highly simplified, you only have three stats, Attack, Defense and Luck, and they grow exactly the same way no matter how you play the game or what you do. The game's well balanced enough that you'll rarely feel you need more strength or that you're overpowered if you didn't stay in a single spot killing wolves from dusk to dawn. So I ask, why is it even there? Probably due to convention. I'd work it into a better mechanic or most probably do away with it completely.
Another problem is that, although the game's usually fairly well balanced, some few instances are glaringly flawed. Off the top of my head I can think of a single mid-game boss which happens to be around twice as hard as the game's final boss, if not more.
I guess I've made the post big enough. Share your own beloved games you guys feel could do with an upgrade.
Player
