I normally don’t focus too much on rebuying old games that I can play on original hardware but this one may be an exception for me. Even having played and beaten SMRPG for the first time only about a year ago, I still want to check this one out.
Not sure why, but the whole thing felt more authentic, faithful, and even necessary as an update to the original experience than any other remake. I normally don’t have that reaction to this sort of thing.
But this really feels both 100% brand new using the latest technology and 100% the same exact game at the same time.
it looked odd to me. the enemies and battles look faithful, but the rest of the game seems to have that generic HD Mario era graphics, except with chibi characters
At what point does it sit in the ‘HD’ ‘Remaster’ ‘Remake’ continuum? The 2D to 3D complicates it but so far it seems to more like a remaster.
Metroid Prime Remastered similarly has every single asset re-done, but is otherwise the exact same game and gives pretty much the exact same vibes. Last of Us and the Uncharted remasters were similar.
Lots of other PS360 games got PS4Bone remasters with vastly changed lighting and textures (eg Tomb Raider 2013) but the vibes often changed.
Back in the day, it was common for the same exact game to get completely “remade” for different hardware, particularly when porting from Arcade to consoles or vice versa. But we called these “ports” even though some were remakes and others were de-makes.
Remaster is generally closer to the original experience than a remake. But I don’t really worry about this stuff too much. I think people would probably refer to this as a remake since the underlying technology is so drastically different.
All those C64 ports done by one guy with zero access to any original assets, essentially coding a clone from scratch. You heard about them not even having their own arcade game, and having to go and play it a lot and record the music on a cassette to copy it lol.
There was something about this on early morning TV today. I don’t care for Mario so I didn’t pay much attention but when I heard “Super Famicom” I looked up at the TV. Then saw Mario then went back to getting ready for work. I honestly had no idea they were remaking thins.
I’d call it a remake, based on the effort taken to fully remake and reconstruct the game. I felt Nintendo calling Metroid Prime Switch a Remaster did a huge disservice to that game, given the amount of effort spent on not only ensuring the qualities of the game remained intact (not necessarily a given even with ports) but, as you point out, the quality and the amount of work that went into redoing the game’s graphics using modern rendering techniques and new assets.
HD remasters far more often than not tend to be ports running in HD resolution with crudely upscaled textures.
Modern remakes to me seem more like reimaginings, almost to the point of rewriting history. Capcom’s Resident Evil remakes have taken very unique games and rebuilt them in the vein of Resident Evil 4, for example.
The Super Mario RPG remake looks gorgeous, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the trailer for the first time, and I’m usually the first to point out inconsistencies, natural flaws or poorly thought out art direction in remakes. Only the user interface seems like a step down and that’s subject to change.
I’ve seen a few fans call the choice to use 3D graphics blasphemous, and I can’t understand why. The original game was taking still screenshots of prerendered 90s CGI 3D models and downscaling those as sprites, there’s barely any hand-crafted pixel art in the game.
This image that has been doing the rounds speaks volumes about that approach:
While it’s a fantastic recreation I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate - depends on how you look at it. The new look may be what the developers originally had in mind with the CGI, but ultimately the final CGI models had very different lighting than modern graphics, and that look isn’t being recreated here.
This article will do a better job articulating what I’m talking about:
Yeah it’s really a continuum with multiple variables on the port to remaster to remake to reimagining line.
Other examples like Crash Trilogy were made from scratch with essentially zero technically in common with the originals, but in an attempt to be as perfectly faithful as possible.
