Last Friday marked the release of Crash Bandicoot: N Sane Trilogy, a remake of the original trilogy of games for the first Playstation. The trend of re-releasing old games is anything but new. The Playstation Store has whole sections devoted to it, and most of them simply function by running the original game code as-is, sometimes with improved textures and/or models if you're lucky, and these days usually trophy support as well (or achievements when this phenomenon occurs on other platforms). I have, admittedly, spent a considerable amount of money supporting this trend. And, while I would rather see games made available in this way than not at all on modern consoles, the approach Crash took is the “right” approach.
Ground-up remakes are not a new concept. SquareEnix quite famously took a similar approach in remaking Final Fantasy IV (originally II in the US) and V as well as Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. But traditionally, game companies have avoided this approach, as the resources required are many orders of power higher. N Sane has no lines of code from the original game and, though each environment and animation is recreated with meticulous detail, it was all from the ground up anew.
In SquareEnix’s case, none of the remakes were given nearly as much attention by not just the press but the company itself. They were afterthoughts, and even technically speaking, they were not attempting to create something cutting edge. Re:chain of Memories reused the engine and assets from the other Playstation 2 Kingdom Hearts titles, and the 3D Final Fantasy remakes originally debuted on the Nintendo DS. Their graphics were not much better than the almost decade older Playstation 1 Final Fantasy trilogy.
Of course, in Crash’s case, the lack of any new games minus a couple of mobile kart racing titles meant that demand was higher than ever, and recouping costs becomes more of a safe bet than franchises with titles saturating the market already. Crash also used to be a tentpole of Sony’s advertising, giving it more teeth than cult classic titles given new life through enhanced re-releases like the Dark Cloud duology. However, the massive sales success demonstrates it is an effective tactic for reviving dead franchises. Hopefully Activision keeps this in mind with “classic” Spryo (i.e. not Skylanders) and whoever holds the Tomba intellectual property does the same. This is an easy way to revive hibernating fanbases.
Admittedly, the games proved to be a bit of a frustration at first, to the point I disliked them. The fact that they were so exact a recreation of the originals meant I relied heavily on muscle memory. Even if the levels themselves are the same, the controls and, perhaps more profoundly, the physics are different. Ultimately, these actually make the game better, though for someone like me who completed (not beat, completed—stuff like gems and relics included) the second and third games many times over meant it was hard to “unlearn what I had learned.”
However, this uncanny valley-level recreation works for stuff of this sort. As excited as I am for the remake of Final Fantasy VII, SquareEnix’s deviation from this philosophy has me somewhat disappointed. I’m sure the game will be great. I’m sure it will have many things about it that the original lacks I will enjoy. But it will never replace the original. The high adrenaline action will undoubtedly be fun, but some part of me will always love carefully planning out attacks in a boss fight for each character. Of course, this also ensures that it will not have to compete quite as much with the original, which may be something that guided their direction.
After spending most of the weekend playing the game, I just don’t see myself going back to the originals. The adjustment to the old controls would, without question, prove frustrating once again, and there is not anything other than the extra life sound—it just doesn’t have nearly as much punch—that the originals provide that I miss.
Though Crash will need to innovate beyond what the originals did gameplay-wise, something it had unsuccessfully attempted once before, the project also ensures they have the tools needed to make new content in the vein of the old, something done to great success with the new expansion packs to some old strategy games like Age of Empires II. Even better would be level creation tools.
Regardless of where the Crash franchise itself goes from here, the success of this release should serve as a template for others. The demand for old content is there, but the more time invested in modernizing it, the more likely it will be to succeed. This is especially important for games from the Playstation 1 era, where a fresh coat of paint does little to hide a game’s age. Hopefully we will someday view this as a seminal moment not just for Crash but for the industry.