I finished Dragon Warrior III for GBC over the weekend and immediately started a playthrough of the NES version, consolidating my notes between versions, and I realized that I prefer the NES version. The screen space is larger, so I can actually see where I’m going on the overworld. Even with the unabridged script and item names, the text space is larger, so I don’t have to press a button several times for a single line of dialogue. The music is fantastic. The NES (emulated) sounds are rich and full of harmonics that you just don’t get from the GBC (emulated) sounds. It’s less finely tuned, and the numbers are less polished, and walking around is generally slower, and menuing is stiff and difficult, and I’m into it, really put into the world.
It is amazing that they managed to fit this experience on the GBC, but some of the quality of life changes I just accepted as better because that’s what I was told. In one of the dugeons you’re supposed to get lost and figure out you need to use a key on a wall. There isn’t a single NPC in the game who tells you this, but you know you’re supposed to be there, so you’re expected to intuit that there’s a hidden passage. That little nuance is gone in the remake because you just unlock doors automatically by walking into them. That made me think about parts of the experience people are missing because the only versions of this game you can play, barring spending exorbitant money on original cartridges, are the ass-ugly mobile ports.
My original reaction to the DQ3 HD-2D remake was “yeah sure whatever” but that just looped around to me being upset about the Switch Online NES app, how few fucking games there are available, how many NES titles like the first four Dragon Warrior games are just missing when these versions should be treated as monuments to game design, and yet Chunsoft and Square Enix and Nintendo want me to believe they never existed. This game is just a massive obelisk and you can’t fucking play it without piracy. I’ve said this before but every game made in the 80s should be public domain. Who owns the rights to these games and why can you literally only play them through layers of obfuscation and repainting?
I played like, an hour of Mother (Earthbound Beginnings) on that NES app, with my roommate watching. I slammed that game before, unjustly, but when my roommate watched me die within the first ten random encounters, he just said “this game kind of sucks.” And jeez, is that what I sounded like? It irritated me. I was having a fun time. Like dying in the first ten minutes doesn’t even come close to bugging me–it’s just part of the game. That’s like, the whole point. You start off weak as shit and you get stronger. Anyway, there’s no convincing my roommate, I don’t think he can ever “get it” and he’s not obligated to. I actually bought him SaGa Scarlet Grace a month ago because I wanted to try and get him to “get” RPGs, and he did play it for a few hours but I don’t think that was the right approach, and I don’t know why I had that motive. I just wanted someone to relate to, I guess. I’m fucking lonely and I’ve been sinking into old ass video games again.
I’m going to finish this playthrough of DWIII and then play Earthbound Beginnings as my next NES game, I decided, because I’ve called Earthbound my favorite game for a few years now, ignoring it as a series, and I want to give the original Mother a fair shot. That first hour of the game reminded me of how much of my youth I spent playing original NES games on the Wii virtual console, just bare presentations of the games without savestates, or rewinds, which are features that I’ve come to resent and understand as merely tools for building complacency. You can just tell someone to emulate an NES game, but you can’t make anybody want to do that, and you can’t make Nintendo be less full of shit and just dump their entire ancient game library onto their stupid online emulation service. As if it’s of any fucking consequence whether they do that.
So I’ve been thinking about the prevalence of remakes, and how early in the medium came the tendency to “improve” games through porting them, like how the Apple II version of Wizardry is considerably different from the NES version, and the NES version became the base template for the other ports, or how many different versions of Falcom’s early games are across systems, some differences being due to system limitations or other versions just being completely different games under the same title. Why are capcom making a new Resident Evil 4? They ported the original game to so many different systems, you can just see it everywhere. Did it not sell well enough? Did people get sick of it? Are we, as in the game industry, just going to treat this remake as the new canon and pretend like the original RE4 wasn’t one of the most influential action games of all time? We have RE4 at home, it goes on sale for like $9. But you can’t convince people to just play the game, because there’s no reason to.
I guess my point is that emulation is the only way to keep this medium living and respected.
