News broke yesterday that Square would be remaking Lufia II—one of, according to GameCola’s Matt Gardner, the greatest RPGs of all time—for the Nintendo DS. This is fantastic news in general, but there are two specific things worth noting from this report:
1. Square announced that they’ll be giving Lufia II a shiny new coat of 3D graphics. By this, they actually mean that they’ll be giving it the Final Fantasy III treatment, replacing its archaic 2D sprites with new 3D polygons that are, inexplicably, actually way worse than its archaic 2D sprites. (Apparently, this is what videogame companies do now. See also: Turtles in Time – Reshelled.)
2. Square will be remaking the game—currently a turn-based RPG—into a Zelda-esque action RPG.
This is the greatest idea I have ever heard in my entire life.
There are a lot of RPGs, including Lufia II, that I’ve skipped over the years, because I’m so sick of turn-based combat—of random encounters, of sitting through long animations just to get to the battle screen, of hitting the X button for six hours until the enemy is defeated—that I can’t play them anymore. I don’t have the patience for it anymore, not when we have games whose combat takes place in real-time, and is actually fun, instead of something that’s just in the way of the story. I think Square, as well as other companies, need to move ahead right now and remake every turn-based RPG ever into action RPGs. I know that sounds like I’m making a crazy overgeneralization just to draw attention and/or a laugh, but I would seriously be the happiest man on Earth if this actually happened.
I think a lot of people won’t agree with this idea, because they have bad taste in games and love boring combat, or because they think it’s sacrilegious to alter such a big part of an old game’s gameplay, but the industry definitely needs to move forward with this. Thoughts?
Also, in other remake news, news also broke yesterday that Capcom is remaking the Phoenix Wright series—minus the obviously noncanon Apollo Justice—for Nintendo’s WiiWare service. Yesterday was a good day.
Also, I’ve heard a few people complain about Square developing the Lufia II remake for the DS, and not for a console. What else could they do? If they make it a retail game, nobody would buy it, because who wants to pay full-price for an SNES remake? And, if they made it a downloadable game, they’d have to charge a crazy low price, or else people would complain, because that’s what they do—and then Square wouldn’t make enough return on investment to make it worthwhile. It pretty much had to be the DS, or maybe the PSP.
