Demo Impressions: Remake edition

This isn’t your usual Demo Impressions writeup. This time, I’m checking out demos for remakes of classic games. Now I’ve been burned before by fatally flawed, bizarrely handled or simply lazy re-releases, so I’m always hankering to try the demo before throwing down my hard-earned money.

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Star Ocean: Second Story R

Now this isn’t the first time we’ve played the literal remake game with Star Ocean: The Second Story and its gratuitous use of the Star Trek: The Next Generation font. In what seems like ages ago, we got remakes of the first two games of the series on PSP: First Departure and Second Evolution.

While I’m normally one to to claim a new art style ruins a classic game, the redrawn characters for Second Evolution really got to me. It also lead to some squicky places with the much more youthful looking Rena which, while not as egregious a de-aging as occurred in the Star Ocean EX anime, left me hoping I didn’t get the ending I did when I played the original game.

Of course, the headline feature of the new remake is… a new art style. And while the new style suggests the original art, it flies free into the vast beauty of HD-2D, which SquareEnix appears to be embracing with its whole (albeit withered) heart. It makes for a more ambitions remake than the previous HD 2D project that was Live A Live, but mysteriously was announced and launched while we were still waiting on Dragon Quest III (don’t worry, Dragon Quest III is still coming).

That being said, this is the first time a PSX-era game got the HD-2D treatment, and I wasn’t expecting quite as much breath to be taken away compared to rejuvenating a SNES title. But there I was wrong, as it was a spectacular revisualizing of the pre-rendered backgrounds. It makes me all the more sad that the Final Fantasy and Seiken Densetsu series didn’t get this kind of lavish treatment.

As for the game itself, it plays well, though it’s not a perfect 1:1 remake. There has been some tweaking to combat skills and enemy balance, and I can’t shake the feeling that combat arenas feel a bit smaller. Everything is retranslated to a much higher standard, so you’ll fumble a bit with item and equipment names if you’re too used to the original.

All the crazy amount of crafting, skills and other offbeat or fine details remain. There’s a few quality of life fixes to them as well, with “private actions” no longer requiring you to invoke them before entering a town; just toggle the mode on and off as you see fit. Also, the game doesn’t crash at the drop of a hat.

While the demo only lasted three hours, it was enough for me to feel confident that I’ll be able to enjoy it even more than the original. If that’s not a mission accomplished for a remake, I don’t know what is.

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Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

One of the best games on the Nintendo DS got a well-deserved rescue from history, with the remake hitting the PS4, Xbox One, Switch and Steam earlier this summer.

As departing the DS won’t be as consequential for this game as it will be for the upcoming Switch version of Trace Memory, it’s as easy to adjust as it was for the Ace Attorney series, if not easier. Heck, if you played the smartphone versions, you already know the score.

And if you never played it before, so much the better. …just make sure you atone for your sins by at least trying the demo. It’s a fun story, and there’s no other puzzle game like it, and the game makes sure to wring out every last complication it can out of its conceit before refusing to overstay its welcome.