There’s just something about a re-release. Not a remake mind you, I mean a game being released a second time, possibly ported to another system, with a few ancillary new features thrown in to entice previous owners to cough up more cash. Sometimes they just get me angry. Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime on Wii with new controls? Why?! You can buy perfectly good versions of those games for half the price and play ‘em the way they were supposed to be played! Grumble mumble whyioughta. That’s just the idiot inside, the natural born fanboy hungry to defend an allegiance, doesn’t matter to what or who. He’s easy to ignore, but hard to suppress. Most of the time, I love a good re-release. Resident Evil 4 and Metroid Prime on Wii with new controls? Excellent! Those are great games that more people should play, glad they’re getting a new lease on life.
It is too much to ask that a game be better than it was the first time around. If a game is good enough to warrant a second try, the best you can hope for is that whatever was excellent in the original release is preserved, that anything added is un-intrusive icing on an already delicious cake. There are rare exceptions to this rule though. Devil May Cry 3’s Special Edition re-release on PS2 was unceremonious but significant. The original game, known for its sadistic difficulty, had been rebalanced in its entirety and you could now play the entire game as its villain. Persona 3: Fes, in its North American incarnation, added twenty hours to the original, made a supporting character into the lead at the climax, and rewrote the game’s ending. These don’t happen often, but they do happen.
Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden is a curious example, since it is both proof of and the exception to the rule. When it was re-released the first time as Ninja Gaiden: Black, it was improved upon greatly, featuring many of the same tweaks and additions that made Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition so, well, special. It’s second re-release, however, was less rosy. Ninja Gaiden Sigma on PS3 modernized the visuals and added a new playable character but it also demonstrated just how much the underlying game of Ninja Gaiden had aged. It preserved, certainly, but added nothing.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, Tecmo’s impending re-release of the Microsoft-published Ninja Gaiden 2, is branded as a remake. We all know better though, don’t we? My sincere hope is that Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is one of the rare improvements because, unlike its predecessor, Ninja Gaiden 2 wasn’t a very good game. Its camera couldn’t follow the action, the combat lacked Gaiden’s precision, and the environments were cramped and ugly. It felt, as I said in my review, unfinished. The Itagaki-less Team Ninja has a second shot at living up to the first game’s legacy. Good luck to them.
Related links:
Fix It: Alone in the Dark, Tiger Woods, and the Death of the Glitch
The 61FPS Review: Ninja Gaiden 2
My Top 10 of 2008 in No Particular Order: Persona 3: FES
Rock Star Designer Fallout: Team Ninja’s Post-Itagaki Future