It shocks me how I wish for…what is lost and cannot come back.
Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story
Hoo, boy. The entertainment media sphere is in an interesting spot, isn’t it? I know, if you’re around my age you’ve been saying for a while now that there doesn’t seem to be anything besides sequels and remakes hitting theaters, but the age of repetition has been growing in the gaming world as well with a slew of remasters and remakes both currently in the market and on the way.
This isn’t an innately bad thing. Nostalgia is a powerful thing for a reason, and this is called the “entertainment” industry for a reason. Leaning into things that have already entertained us just makes sense. However, there’s an implicit danger here that I want to explore, one I think we’re seeing across both mediums. I’ll be the first to admit I suffer from a prodigious use of the rose-tinted glasses. I still hold Final Fantasy 6 as one of my favorite games of all time, though I’ve struggled to go through another playthrough. There are a ton of schlocky movies I love despite them being objectively poorly made and exceedingly dumb.
With those qualifications out of the way, I want to talk about what I consider a couple shining examples of use of nostalgia in recent times. On one hand, we have Spider-Man: No Way Home and Metroid: Dread. On the other, The Matrix Resurrections and Warcraft III: Reforged.
I’m not a comic book nerd, but I enjoy a movie where I can turn off my brain and just have some fun every now and again. The MCU was great for this and before that, the older Spider-Man movies the job. Some… better than others. You know who you are. But that said, the most recent film was a phenomenal example of use of nostalgia. The inclusion of “past” versions wasn’t used solely to try and bait the audience into the dip into that honey pot, it was a core tenet of the experience. The characters weren’t treated as irrelevant or washed out, they were given their own arcs in which to grow. You got to relive something, but see it used to pass a torch. You saw it respected. In much the same way, Metroid: Dread arrives almost twenty-five years after another of my all-time favorite games, Super Metroid, and lovingly crafts a game so elegantly designed and faithful to the original style you can almost remember the original playing like it. It takes everything the old game was and improves on it. Samus is an absolute unit – the way she is represented is incredible, showing obvious character growth from the past games in the series and in terms of gameplay, I’d say essentially everything is improved. At its core, this is still a Metroid game, but it has clearly entered the modern age. It’s an absolute masterpiece.
What of Resurrections and Reforged? Well, where No Way Home brought back characters to give you another part of their lives and bring you on a new journey of growth for them, Resurrections brought you the characters to undergo the same thing they already had again. The same treads, the same beats, only with the heart of it all removed. There’s no real growth, no notable adaptations to the next generation. A lot of what made the original what it was is stripped away, leaving an ultimately dull film. Imagine, managing to make the Matrix dull. And Reforged? Yikes. It shouldn’t be hard to literally modernize a game by updating graphics and adding better online features. Somehow, Blizzard managed to ruin everything by releasing a clearly unfinished cash grab that lacked anything of the love that made the original.
So, what’s the difference in these? How does one end use nostalgia to garner enjoyment and respect while the other uses it as bait? I find it’s in the understanding of what makes a thing what it is. The creators of Dread clearly understood what makes a Metroid game. They focused on the smooth play, feeling of power, sleekness of design, and outright trolling that the originals were known for and treated each with the love and care that made it clear. The same could be said for No Way Home. People love Peter Parker, so getting the chance to watch each of them continue their stories in ways which each would grow in their own way, redeem or fulfill themselves in the way that version needed, showed that the writers understood people’s love of the character. Reforged expected the love of Warcraft III and World of Warcraft to get buyers in the door, and that was about it. Resurrections literally interlaced scenes of the original movie on top of the new one in what I can only assume was either absolute shameless bait or an outright attempt at making the thing worse. I’d like to believe Red Letter Media’s guess that this was almost a Gremlins 2 subversion, but who knows.
This article is ugly as hell so I’m going to stop rambling, but let me just say that I went with Resurrections simply for how new it is. The worst offender of nostalgia bait in recent history – maybe of all time – is the sequel Star Wars trilogy. I could go off on that thing for hours, but I won’t. Since I don’t see this trend easing off for a while, I hope that critical successes like No Way Home and Dread will lead to creators understanding the importance of grasping the core of what brought people to the properties to begin with. I’m not optimistic.
On that note, when are they going to give us more Final Fantasy 7 Remake news!?
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