STAHN: Dymlos....
DYMLOS: I want to say one final word to you.
DYMLOS: I lied to you. You were not chosen.
STAHN: .........!
DYMLOS: In the beginning, people were blessed with the power to truly understand one another.
DYMLOS: However, this power was lost by the time of Aeth’er Wars.
DYMLOS: But you found that quality within yourself even before you met me.
DYMLOS: It was very unusual to find someone like you, but your abilities are not extraordinary.
DYMLOS: This is because this power, this ability lies dormant within everyone.
STAHN: Is that all? Hey, don’t worry, it doesn’t bother me at all.
When people (usually English-speaking people, because Japanese fans of Destiny often have this attachment to the original game because of nostalgia) ask me if I seriously prefer the original version to the PS2 remake of the game in terms of overall narrative and characters, I really mean it unironically.
I feel like in the bigger picture, the message of the original game (like why it was even called Tales of Destiny, for instance) had truly been lost when it was remade, and I lament for this loss more than anything else. In terms of gameplay, yes, it’s more polished and I’d argue they had turned one of the most horribly-aged games to something that’s so damn fun to play, and I know that’s what matters the most when it comes to videogames in general, but I wish it had retained what made the original game so special to the people who have played it, despite of all of its faults. (As a disclaimer: I started with this game, however, I don’t have nostalgic attachment to it like a lot of people do; that nostalgia is for D2 in my case, as it was the first one that wholly captured the magic of Tales to me. However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate D for what it was at the time.)
Sure, you can say more details are fleshed out (debatable for the characters, as I feel they have become more of flanderized or even outright contradictory versions of themselves at worst, and ‘softened’ at best, not allowed to act truly like humans at times, compared to their original counterpart with all their 人間臭い qualities), but is it worth it in place of muddying or even distorting the message it was meant to convey in the first place? I’ve said before that in my opinion, overcomplicated worldbuilding just for the sake of it is overrated. In trying to explain how the Swordians work in the remake, they changed the setting, but then the above doesn’t work anymore in this context. It’s gone. Just like that.
Making the characters more ‘palatable’ beats the purpose. I deliberately used the word 人間臭い because you know what? Yes, they stink, but you can feel the humanity exactly because of the stink. Humans are good, but humans are also bad. If you’re gonna say Stahn (or anyone for that matter) is not that special, then show it to me, show how human he can get. I’m not saying the original version of the characters are that well-written either, because honestly, they could’ve been fleshed out more... just not in the way how the remake does it, if you can call that fleshing out the characters. There are so many ways you could’ve expanded on them without truly erasing what made them charming in the first place. As well as, again, I want to believe the characters were created and written that way for a reason, and getting hung up in the details of these characters make a lot of people miss the point.
(There’s a beauty in Stahn having done all the things he did in the game because he believed he was destined to do so, but deep inside, even if he wanted to tell himself that, he was still doing all of these because he believed in what he had already believed, long before even meeting Dymlos. That’s an admirable character.)
(By the way, I know a lot of these issues also stemmed from how D2 tried to expand on the world of D though they can't even be consistent with D2 despite coming after it; for the record, I’m not absolving D2 for these problems either. However, at the same time, if you let my bias speak for just a moment, D2 is there to tell its own story. It doesn’t try to override D. The remake of D’s raison d’être is to be the definitive version of D. That’s the biggest problem there.)
These details don’t matter much to me, what matters is if these details truly serve their purpose, which in my opinion is the themes along with the messages. For me, everything has to begin with an intent, with a broad idea, as well as end with that intent, that idea. And I’m not sure if the remake manages to expand on the idea the original game represents... it just seems like they were confused about what D was really about in the first place. Applied to things like world and characters, it might make it seem like I don’t really care about the individuals, that it might make me seem so detached, but on the contrary, I want to appreciate something as a whole, and to appreciate that whole, I need to appreciate every individual element that is there, that is needed to build it. Because the individuals, when divorced from their contextual whole, mean almost nothing to me. They shine more because they work together to make up something that is whole.
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