It’s kinda hard to play a lot of older video games officially. In this video, I talk about how Developers re-release the games from their past and how emulation affects their re-releases.
It seems like a lot of developers don’t really want to provide ways to play their older games. Why is that? Why doesn’t Nintendo want you to play Ocarina of Time on the Switch? And why do they want you to play Super Mario Sunshine only on Super Mario 3d All-Stars? Find out, right now.
Transcript:
You guys ever played Super Mario Bros.? That was a good game. You could walk, run and even jump if you pressed the A button! And I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. If you jump riiight here. Wait, it was here. Hmm. Jump here! Ugh, nevermind.
I think Super Mario Bros is still a game worth playing nowadays. Even if other games like Super Mario Bros 3 or Super Mario World do the formula better, there’s still some fun to be had in the OG. And luckily for us, there’s tons of ways to play Super Mario Bros. Nintendo have ported the game in some way or another to every one of their main consoles.
But what if you want to play other older games? Sure, there’s plenty of ways to play Baldur’s Gate, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or even Pitfall, if that’s your thing for some reason. Developers like Sega love embracing their back catalog of games.
Unfortunately, a lot of developers aren’t too keen on making their older games playable on modern hardware.
Say you wanted to play Final Fantasy 1. What are your options, legally? Well if you have just one of the modern consoles, sorry bud. You aren’t playing it. Square Enix hasn’t put out a port for the PS4 or Xbox One. Alright, what about PC? All of the mainline Final Fantasy games are on steam… except for 1 and 2. No go there either. You might be saying, “But what about emulationnnnn??” Hold your horses
(It’s a surprise TOPIC that will help us later)
Okay, what about handhelds? Dedicated handhelds aren’t much of a thing nowadays, but it’s still likely that you might have a 3ds or, god forbid, a vita laying around. Let’s just check the platform list on Wikipedia… Oh hey! It’s available for the 3ds! And It’s also on the PSP, which is able to be played on the PS vita. Sick! Well I prefer to play on my 3ds, so lets head to the Nintendo website to download it. Okay, let me just search it. Filter by console and… Uhhh, I don’t see it. Hm. Those are all the Final Fantasy games on 3ds. Let me head back to the Wikipedia page. Oh. It’s a Japan exclusive. That sucks. Luckily I still have my vita! Don’t ask why I bought a vita I don’t have a good answer. The one good thing about the ps3/psp/vita ecosystem is that a lot of the ps1 emulated games are playable across all 3 systems and you only have to buy it once.
So there we have it. The latest console you can play the first game of a massive gaming franchise on, is a depreciated handheld that came out in 2012.
But of course, this isn’t actually the easiest way. Again,
Final Fantasy 1 is in a pretty good position, considering all the other games that have left to linger on their original systems. Stuck decades later on systems that get harder to purchase as the days progress.
There are hundreds of games that retro gaming enthusiasts will tell you are hidden gems among massive game libraries. The holy grail of game collecting I’ve always heard about is Panzer Dragoon Saga. It’s game constantly listed in “Must play RPGs” lists.
Y’know, I’d kinda like to play it. I’m a big fan of older RPGs, so I think this is a game I really should play. I don’t have a Sega Saturn, but I’m sure it’s not that big of a deal to find one. Ebay is probably the best place to look. Hmm little on the expensive side, but that makes sense considering how it performed on release. What about Panzer Dragoon Saga? I know people say it’s expensive, so it’s what? $100? $200? It probably isn’t any more than $300. Lemme just… Hmm. Y-yeah I could maybe budget that out. I could maybe skimp out next time I go to get groceries and not buy anything. I bet if I sold all my possessions that’d make a hefty dent in that price.
So yeah. It’s absurd. Nobody out there is buying Panzer Dragoon Saga on eBay just so they can play it. You’d have to actually be insane to put that in your console.
So how are you gonna play Panzer Dragoon Saga? Of course, you could just emula-
(It’s a surprise topic that will help us later)
You straight up can’t play Panzer Dragoon Saga legally nowadays. It’s sad to say that, because so many people say it’s absolutely fantastic. It would be great to be able to buy it on the Nintendo eShop or whatever and show Sega that people are still interested in that game. But it just isn’t possible. There was a rumor that they lost the source code, but the director hints that it might have been found recently. Unfortunately, I think that whether the code was found or not, this game will be forced to languish on the Saturn for the foreseeable future.
Another holy grail in the retro gaming community is Seiken Densetsu 3. While it isn’t rare like Saga is, it’s a game that’s held in VERY high regards among JRPG fans. I’ve seen people compare it to, and maybe even say its better, than Chrono Trigger.
For those unaware, Seiken Densetsu is a series that became popular in the west with Seiken Densetsu 2, localized as Secret of Mana. Secret of Mana is in the upper echelon of JRPGs on the SNES. But it was a game that suffered from a troubled development. It was being developed for the unreleased CD addon for the SNES. Unfortunately for them, the deal with Nintendo and the company making the CD addon didn’t work out. That company took that technology and went on to make another console that failed and they were never heard from again.
Secret of Mana was built up to that point with the developers using the expanded space of a CD, but now they had to fit the whole game onto a cartridge. Instead of having 650mb, they had 2. So they started heavily cutting content. You can sorta tell something is up with the game, it feels off in a few places. But people still like it in spite of the obvious flaws and that’s O K by me.
After that, Square wasn’t fooling around. They went ALL OUT for Seiken Densetsu 3. The doubled the cartridge size to 4mb and filled it to the brim. Look at the graphics between the two. While Secret of Mana looks great, Seiken Densetsu 3 is absolutely amazing. It was released at the very tail end of the SNES’s lifecycle, just before the release of the next generation and it pushed the SNES to it’s absolute limit.
But it was never localized. Unlike Secret of Mana, English-speaking players never got to play it. Luckily, some die-hard fans did a translation of the game themselves, so you could play it if you were willing to go out of your way to get it. But it was still a fan translation.
This isn’t like Panzer Dragoon Saga, where the game came out in small quantities, this game just didn’t come out at all in English. Nevertheless, it stood among Panzer Dragoon Saga as another fantastic RPG that gamers would never be able to play officially.
Nintendo E3 2019. Square Enix announces that they’re releasing a game called Trials of Mana. I assumed that this was a new game in the mana series, because I had never played any of the games before. But then this plays.
It turns out that “Trials of Mana” is just the localized name of Seiken Densetsu 3. It’s hard to convey the emotions that went through my mind realizing that Seiken Densetu 3 would finally be officially available in English. Oh wait, it isn’t that hard to convey. Let this guy show you how I, and a lot of others, felt:
It felt like a developer finally cared about their backlog. So many great games have been left on their release platform, but Square Enix was both translating an SNES game in 2020 AND remaking it.
If you recall your lizard brain back to the beginning of the video, you’ll remember me rambling on about Final Fantasy 1 not being available on modern platforms.
Square-Enix is a very mixed bag when it comes to re-releasing their older games. They have some of the most iconic games in gaming history. Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest 5, Xenogears, the list goes on. But can you play any of those on the 3 big systems out right now? No.
Square Enix even messes up the games they put out. Almost all the Final Fantasy games before 10 on steam are, at the least, bad ports, and at the most, the worst way to play the game.
Let’s look at Final Fantasy 6. It’s a classic on the SNES with amazing pixel art. One of the best looking games on the system.
Now, lets look at the Steam port.
I didn’t think it was possible to mess up a port this bad. The pixel art was perfectly fine! Why did they have to make the characters so over-saturated and blurry? And the UI, oh man. This version is based off the mobile port they made a year before, and it shows. Look at this abomination. All the buttons are so huge so you can hit them with your sausage fingers, but when playing on a PC, it’s just unnecessary and looks terrible.
Chrono Trigger was released on steam 2 years ago and it was in a similar state. But there was major backlash by players and news sites. I think the reviews hit Mostly Negative on Steam at one point. I think Square knew they couldn’t have one of their most beloved games sit at mostly negative on steam, having that awful red text on the same screen as the buy button, so they put in the effort to fix the port. And after a few patches,.. it’s okay. There’s still better ways to play the game, but it’s definitely not the worst way to play.
I don’t think Final Fantasy 6 on steam will ever get that treatment. It looks like an awful flash remake, but it’s sitting at Very Positive on steam. There’s no active outrage like with Chrono Trigger, so it’s very unlikely that Square will just decide to make this version look good any time soon. And it isn’t just this game. Each of the steam ports up to X and X-2 have really obvious flaws. Some of them are fixable with mods, but a lot of them aren’t.
I’ve been playing through the Final Fantasy series for the first time, and it sucks having to choose the right version to play. There’s so much research to be done about which ports are based on which earlier ports and there’s often not an obvious choice.
With Final Fantasy 6, I had to decide between the SNES original or the gameboy advance port. The GBA port has more content and supposedly a more accurate translation, but I think the SNES version looks and sounds better. So in the end, I went with the SNES version. And since there’s no good way to play that version short of playing it directly off an SNES I emulated it.
Oh fine, I’ll talk about it.
Emulation is VERY important when it comes to discussing how to play older games. In a majority of cases, I think it’s the best way to play games a few generations back. It gives the player the experience that people had decades before, but without the complication of trying to hook up an SNES to a modern HDTV or having a CRT around just for retro gaming. Some people love that, but I think a majority of people don’t have the space for an old console and CRT or just flat out don’t care.
Sometimes though, emulation is the only way to play a game. Are you going to spend over a thousand dollars to play Panzer Dragoon Saga? No, you’re gonna download whatever Saturn emulator is out there and play it on your computer monitor. As for Seiken Densetu 3, you technically had the option to buy a reproduction cart where someone just put the fan translation rom in an SNES cart so you can play it on official hardware, but I doubt that’s how most people play it and how it got popular in the first place. It got popular because you could download it for free and play it on something as weak as a smartphone from like 5-10 years ago.
The vast majority of games released before the PS3 and 360 are easily emulatable. It’s been harder as the years have gone on, but it’s still fairly easy to find and download any game at least a few generations old that you want and play it on a modern PC. In addition to that freedom of choice, the freedom offered by emulator settings is insane. With the right emulator, you can customize the experience on playing a game to exactly how you want. Remap the buttons however you want, upscale the game, use save states, and even customize a filter over the game to make it look like a CRT.
Even within those categories you can get more specialized. You can bind turbo buttons that might not have been on the original console, you can choose the type of scaling you want the emulator to use, tell the game to save state when you exit automatically, and fine tune your CRT filter so it looks exactly the way you want it. The options are near endless.
Developers can’t compete with that. Nintendo is never going to give you the choice of fine tuning a CRT filter in their NES emulator on Switch to make your 4k TV look like that CRT you had as a kid. They only gave us one filter. The options offered by the NES Online App are laughable if you’re used to playing games in an emulator.
But I don’t think it’s realistic to expect Nintendo to compete with emulators in terms of features. They don’t have to. While I think more options would be great in their NES and SNES Online apps, they’re fine as is. But that’s as far as I’d go. They’re just fine. The games are presented in the way Nintendo deems appropriate to play. And a lot of people are okay with that.
I have a lot less sympathy for them in terms of library size though. It’s pitiful the amount of games they have on their service. Of course they launched with Super Mario World, Super Metroid, A Link to the Past, and some good lowkey games like Super Puyo Puyo 2 and Demon’s Crest. However, they launched an SNES emulation service without games like Donkey Kong Country and Kirby Super Star. Luckily, those games have been added since it was released. But what about games like Super Mario RPG, Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Mega Man X, Super Castlevania 4, and Contra 3? Those are iconic games that defined the SNES. And you can’t play them through Nintendo’s official emulation service.
There’s one thing in common with all of those games though. They’re all third party. Hell, the first 4 of 7 I listed are made by Square. I didn’t even plan that out, they were the games that came to my head first. Looking back, it’s surprising how many of the SNES’s best games were made by Square. And SNES online has none of them. Why is that?
To put it simply, I think it’s because developers like to release their games for themselves.
Take Secret of Mana. Square put it out, bundled alongside Final Fantasy Adventure and Trials of Mana, on the eshop for $40 dollars. 40 bucks. For 3 roms. And no bonus features of any kind, just the roms with some filters and backgrounds. Granted, they did translate Trials of Mana for the first time for this collection, but $40 is still a steep price in my book for the offering.
Do you think Square would have made as much money if they had Secret of Mana available on SNES online alongside their Collection of Mana game? I don’t think so. If someone wants to play Secret of Mana on their Switch legally, the only way to do it is to pay $40, or whatever sale price, for the Collection of Mana. They might not be interested in FF Adventure or Trials of Mana, but they still have to pay that full price. And the $40 (mostly) goes directly to Square Enix, instead of the player paying Nintendo monthly for a handful of games.
I think this line of reasoning partly explains why Nintendo’s offering on NES and SNES Online has been so spotty. A ton of the games that defined the system were made by other developers and they’d rather put the games out themselves and take a bigger cut.
There’s a fair amount of developers making collections of their older games. There’s the previously mentioned Collection of Mana, but there’s also the Mega Man X collection by Capcom and the Castlevania collection and Contra collection by Konami. And they’re great packages in comparison to the Collection of Mana. The Mega Man X collections feature tons of concept art, a music player, and extra challenges that the developers of the collection added. The collections put out by Konami have bonus books, featuring concept art, tips, and even interviews with some of the original developers.
That’s the one way I can see developers competing with emulators. Offering behind the scenes looks at the games themselves. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Mega Man legacy collection just browsing through the concept art of the game. There’s so much side content offering insight into the development back in the 80s its crazy. And when you’re on a Bosses’ page, you can just press a button and fight them. How cool is that?
But that’s a lot of effort. The developer really has to care about preserving the games that made them who they are today. Some developers aren’t willing to, or flat out can’t, put time into their older games. Hamster have been putting out a truckload of games from both the NEOGEO and various Arcade cabinets. They don’t put in all the bonuses that companies like Digital Eclipse put in, but they still have enough bells and whistles to make it feel like spending $8 on Metal Slug 5 isn’t a complete waste of money.
But some developers aren’t even doing that. There are hundreds of games that would hit the top of the best selling list on the Switch eshop if developers just put out their old games. Let’s look at the games I listed earlier.
Here are the games that are playable on the Switch as of writing. But that still leaves the question of these games. How has Square not made Chrono Trigger playable on the Switch? It’s just baffling. Chrono Trigger is THE game people label as their favorite SNES game, and some even pick it as their favorite game of all time. It’s a classic in every sense of the word. And you can’t play it on Nintendo’s most recent console! The 3 games left that I mentioned earlier are by Square. Granted, Super Mario RPG is a special case that I’m not going to pretend like I understand. There’s some joint ownership or something between them and Nintendo that’s stopped them from doing a whole lot with the game. But the other two are no brainers! Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger would sell gangbusters on the eshop. But Square has shown that they have no interest in porting those games, for some brain-melting reason.
Lets go over your options to play Final Fantasy 6, the game many people cite as their favorite in the series, today. The most recent release of it was on the SNES classic. But uhh… I don’t think that’s a great option to play just one game. Oh it’s on the playstation network! So you can play it on a PSP, PS3, or PS Vita. I think that’s a pretty good option. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s very likely that people will have any of those platforms, especially as we go into the next generation. It’s on mobile too, but I hate playing games for a long time on my phone. And I wouldn’t want to delegate the beauty of Final Fantasy 6 to a small phone screen. So the last modern option is the Steam port. And… yeah. We’re back here.
Or you could just emulate it. You can even download a patch to use the translation of the GBA script. You can scale it up to 4k on your nice 4k TV. You can customize a CRT filter just the way you want it so the graphics look the way they were intended to look. You can even speed up the gameplay to skip long parts of just walking if that’s your jam. An official release of the game will never compete with that.
But like I said, developers don’t necessarily have to compete with the feature set of emulators. Plenty of people, myself included, would love to be able to buy Final Fantasy 6 on the eShop, even if it’s just a barebones port, assuming the price isn’t crazy. I love Square Enix and the games they’ve created. I want to be able to support them when playing their games. But when it comes to choosing between emulating the game as it was originally released, or playing THIS, I don’t think there’s much of a choice.
But that’s… just me. How do you feel about emulation? Would you be willing to pay for a lesser version of a game just to support the developer? Leave a comment telling me what you think. Also, if you liked the video, a like and subscribe would be nice. If you disliked the video, I heard there’s a button somewhere near the like button that you can use to express that distaste for my video, but I’ve never seen it. I think they might just be rumors frankly.
Thanks. And I’ll see you on the flip side.