#commodified?

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.)