As you may or may not have heard, Sony trolled their fanbase pretty hard during the Playstation Experience event a little over a week ago. Basically, the big announcement was Final Fantasy 7… being ported to the PS4. No HD remake, no enhanced graphics, just the Steam port. Good job, guys, way to be. If Sony spent half as much time on IT security as it does teasing FF7 fans, perhaps their executives would still have access to email.

One of the articles that popped up on Kotaku amidst the memes though, was basically making the argument that a FF7 remake shouldn’t happen. The argument goes that there are essentially two scenarios, A and B. In Scenario A, Square Enix updates the graphics and leaves everything else alone. This is bad because… the game is so good that we all already played it. No, really:

In other words…we’ve done this all already. Many of us, several times. A remake that overhauled the graphics but kept everything else the same-that’s what most people want. But as we’ve all journeyed through this world many, many times already-and in fact, revisited it through things like Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, and Advent Children, a graphical-but-otherwise-identical remake would initially wow us…but we’d end up feeling empty afterward. Where would the excitement be? Every one of us can recite the story by heart. Every one of us knows how to breed a Gold Chocobo, how to beat Emerald Weapon, and we all have the high score on G-Bike.

So, I ask you: what does a remake really offer? There’s nothing new there.

I find this to be a highly bizarre argument, especially since it seems to apply to all remakes everywhere. You know, like the FFX/FFX-2 HD one. Or any of the earlier FF games.

In Scenario B, Square Enix remakes FF7’s graphics and then essentially changes the entire game with a new battle system or whatever. I agree that such an outcome would be bad, but that is because the scenario itself is dumb. That is no longer a remake, it is an entirely new game with the same characters. Which at this point I would probably play, but nevermind.

In the comments for these sort of articles, there is inevitably one or more individuals who feel to the need to express the sentiment that FF7 is overrated. Perhaps you even share that sentiment. In which case I feel the need to punch you in the face suggest you are objectively wrong. The game came out 17 years ago and it still consistently appears at the top of Most Wanted Remakes surveys in Japan. It has remained the best-selling Final Fantasy game ever released to this day. It was only ever outsold by Gran Turismo on the original Playstation. Just think about that for a minute: the second-most popular game for the entire life of a console system was a JRPG. One that outsold Halo, Resident Evil, GoldenEye, and similar (gaming) cultural touchstones of the era. If that is still considered overrated, I have to ask what you would consider “rated,” e.g. a game that matches its critical reception and/or reputation.

All that being said, I admit there would be issues. I haven’t played the game in decades (!) but I am not sure how an HD version of the Honey Bee Inn sequence and similar goofiness would translate. The general structure of the game means the artists would have to generate entirely new 3D environments pretty much the whole way through. And perhaps archaic mechanics such as random battles and limited save points would start to grate a bit on the newer (or even older) generation of gamers.

Nevertheless, I still feel like it is one of those things that just needs to happen. I don’t sit around believing that it will, but it should.