I wish Nintendo would do more remakes for the Switch 2 – Reader’s Feature

With the Switch 2 unable to rely on Wii U ports to fill out its schedules, a reader suggests trying remakes of its older games, especially Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.

One of the big reasons for the success of the original Switch is that Nintendo was able to stack its release schedules full of Wii U ports, which worked out great, because hardly anyone had played them before and yet most of them were really good.

It allowed them to fill gaps in their release schedule, and no one got upset because they’d either not seen them before or people accepted that backwards compatibility was not possible, since the Wii U was disc-based and Switch was cartridges.

However, this is not the situation with Switch 2. Both consoles are very similar in terms of their storage format and how they work and while there have been some Switch 2 Edition remasters of Switch 1 games, most of them are pretty minor and the upgrade from one version to the other is only £8, so not really much of a money-spinner for Nintendo.

I’m not getting myself too invested in Nintendo’s financials here – I’m a fan, not a sycophant – but I’m hoping that as they search for a replacement for the Wii U concept on Switch 2 they opt for what I think is the obvious solution: more remakes.

Traditionally, Nintendo doesn’t go in for these very much, but they have done a few, perhaps most famously Super Mario 3D All-Stars on the SNES. But there was also Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Advance Wars, Famicom Detective Club, Metroid: Zero Mission, and at least three Pokémon games. There’s been quite a few recently too, with Super Mario RPG and Mario Paper: The Thousand-Year Door.

A lot of these are quite similar to the original games, while a few, like Link’s Awakening and Zero Mission change them quite a bit. I don’t feel there’s a right or wrong way to approach this, it’s just whatever’s right for the game in question and I feel Nintendo usually makes the right choices.

However, they do seem to treat remakes as a fairly cheap and dirty concept. A lot of the games are handed off to outside developers and none of them seem to have very big budgets. They’re all good, but I don’t think Nintendo views them as very important, except as schedule filler and maybe a test to see if people are interested in more of whatever it is.

What I’d like to see is big budget remakes on the scale of Resident Evil and Final Fantasy 7. Heck, they could get Capcom to do some of them themselves, since they’ve worked with Nintendo before on the Zelda series. There’s no beating around the bush here, but a remake of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time would be the holy grail for many fans and I really hope it happens in the next few years.

It fills the schedules before the next mainline Zelda, it allows Nintendo to go back to the old formula without giving up on the new one, and it ensures one of the best games ever made is available in a form everyone can enjoy.

That’s the same logic for everything else. Anyone of a certain age knows how amazing and important Super Mario 64 is but it’s kind of hard to appreciate nowadays, given the only way to play it is a bare bones N64 remaster.

It’s the same for every N64 game, because of how old they are, but if I was them I’d also open up the vaults for the DS and 3DS. Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass is a great game, but it’s stuck on a dead format and has very old-fashioned graphics that modern gamers are probably not going to want to play.

Or why stick with their own games? GTA 6 is never going to be on the Switch 2, so why not remake Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars from the DS? Take the design and missions and make it into a proper 3D game; seems like a great idea to me.

Trying to predict what Nintendo will do doesn’t often go well but I really think that we will see a Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake in the next two or three years, and hopefully more beyond that. I think remakes are a lot of fun and a lot of time I’d much rather play them than an uninspired sequel, even if it’s the same series.

By reader Klutter

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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