For those of you wondering where my Sunday post went this week, I have three words for you: Persona 4 Golden.

Indeed, the PS Vita title has managed to suck up a large portion of my time as of late. As has Resident Evil 6, which I’ve been playing through with Chris. And while I’m not quite ready to settle on a full review for P4G, my experience so far has shown me just how awesome a “remake” of a game can be.

Those of you who are familiar with the gaming industry are probably well aware of the fact that “remakes” aren’t exactly uncommon in this day and age. “HD remakes” and ports of older games to newer consoles are good ways for companies to essentially make profit off the same game twice, with much less effort/money put into the remake then was put into the original. It’s a solid marketing strategy  and one I’m not wholly opposed too. After all, sometimes it’s great to be able to boot up a nostalgia-inducing classic on your new 1080p TV play for hours. That’s the reason I bought the Perfect Dark remake for Xbox 360 a while back, as I relished the opportunity to replay a game that I spent so much of my childhood playing.

Yet as I booted up Persona 4 Golden and started burning through it, I quickly realized that I was dealing with a very different animal then your typical HD remake. I mean, I’d heard they had made lots of changes to the game, but hearing about them and playing through them are two very different things.

From the reworked “shuffle” reward system the game had to the additional skill card system and UI changes, Persona 4 Golden more or less improves every single facet of the game. No joke. While me and Chris absolutely loved the game back when we played it on his PS2 a few months back, there were still small things in the games systems that we wished could have been done better. Tedious things, really.

Like how you fused persona’s in the original version of the game. It pretty much came down to you picking 2 or 3 personas and then making that same selection over and over until you got a mixture of abilities that you wanted on the to-be-created persona. There was, technically, no game system preventing us from getting the perfect combination of abilities that we wanted. But it did require TONS of time as you went back and forth selecting and re-selecting the same things over and over until you were randomly given what you wanted. In Persona 4 Golden? You are simply prompted with a menu and allowed to pick what abilities carry over from one persona to another. Short and sweet; and technically no more “powerful” than what the old system allowed. Just WAY easier to do.

It’s changes like that, changes that keep the experience and thematic integrity of the original content while improving upon it; that really make a title like Persona 4 Golden stand out. I mean this was a game that they could have simply released with new textures or a handful of new events and people still would have went out and bought it. Yet they didn’t just stop with adding fun new content or making the old content look better. They went and completely re-tooled their established systems to improve the quality of the game (and series) as a whole. I can safely say that with the release of Persona 4 Golden, “Persona 4” went from being in my top 10 games of all time to my top 3. And I’m not even that big of a fan of JRPGS. That’s the strength of the experience in this game. It’s THAT good.

Regardless though, I do have to ponder whether or not this kind of remake is really right for every game out there. I mean I’d love to say that developers should look to P4G as a shining example of how to remake a game right; but the fact of the matter is that some games are great because their systems aren’t perfect. Sometimes the flaws (or bugs) in a game are half the fun in playing them, and they’re at the very least a likely source of our nostalgia towards them. So going back and reworking them like Atlus did with Persona 4 might very well harm the game experience instead of enhance it. It’s hard to say, and probably just comes down to each person’s personal experiences with said classic game.

What do you guys think? What games would you like to see remastered and changed for the better? Which games would you not want to see get such treatment? Surely there are some games out there that you remember just as fondly for its weaknesses as well as its strengths. Sound off in the comment below!