There’s a Right and Wrong Way to Remake A Classic Video Game—And The Iliad Explains How

Enix went in and relocalized it for its Game Boy Color remake, which was the right call—Nintendo of America made a choice about what to retain and what to change, what might resonate with the brand new audience it was intended for, and then the original Japanese publishers, Enix, went in and corrected that later on when given the opportunity, giving the game what felt, at that point, like an inarguably more authentic-sounding Dragon Quest-style script. These were conflicting ideas about what would make this game work for an audience it was not necessarily written for in the first place, happening basically concurrently when compared to the length of time it took for these divergences to occur with the work of Homer.

As Howley said, “Translation inevitably is not just about language but ideas—sooner or later there’s a word that doesn’t make sense if you translate it directly, or a reference to some cultural practice for which we might think of a better modern analogue.” Take The Iliad once more: when Alexandria’s librarians set to work on the poem in the 3rd century BCE, it already featured archaic words and meanings, “relics of oldness” as Howley called them, where “everyone who is preserving it in its form is deciding ‘Yeah, it should sound old, it should have this old stuff in it, that’s part of the original text.’” To go back to Dragon Warrior, the NES version actually had enhanced graphics and a battery-backup save on the cartridge, rather than the password system of the Famicom version, because in the nearly three-and-a-half years between its Japanese release and its North America one, programming and cartridge improvements made for different player expectations—the password save system of the original had actually been a major technology revelation in 1986! The gameplay, though? That remained in place for America, and still felt new and contemporary to that audience that lacked Japan’s familiarity with this style of RPG at this point, which was already a few Dragon Quests deep by 1989.

Shakespeare’s work, in the time of the Bard himself, was both contemporary and progressive in its use of language: William Shakespeare is credited with creating more than a few brand new words, even. And yet, a mere 409 years after his death, it has run into the same problem that Homer’s work did millenia ago, in that the language has evolved in additional ways to make it seem as if this playwright of the common person is actually only for people who would pronounce “theater” with the chosen inflection of 30 Rock’s Jenna Maroney. Shakespeare can be taught in its original form, perhaps with annotations and footnotes from whoever authored this version of the work, or it can be adapted in a completely new way, as in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which kept the language of Shakespeare but traded in swords for guns while adding in plenty of cigarettes and unbuttoned, very-1990s-shirts. According to Howley, where Shakespeare—or any classic work, really—is experienced can play into how a specific form of it is received, as well, not just when. “Shakespeare is very popular in Russia, but Russians who hear him for the first time in English get confused because the standard Russian translation is far more contemporary.” It turns out Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country wasn’t forcing the “Klingons love Shakespeare, also the Klingons are Russian” angle after all.

Emily Wilson, translator of a 2023 English-language version of The Iliad, published what you would refer to as a “poetic” translation of the poem—distinct from Richmond Lattimore’s “faithful” edition, which comes off as archaic in the present due to the language choices, and also different from the poetic versions of the book from Robert Fagles and Robert Fitzgerald, which are both lauded but deviate from the original text in a way that would make someone whose ideal is a faithful translation mad online about it. Wilson’s attempt was intentionally written in a style that would be deemed approachable to a modern audience, as if Homer’s Greek was also the spoken Greek of the day, with the idea being that it would fit in with the language of today where it made sense (though, with modern conceptions and updates like “celebrity” ignored in favor of the “honor” that these Greek and Trojan warriors were after). 

As Wilson put it in her translator’s note, “No translator, including me, can fully replicate all of the poetic, dramatic, and emotional effects of Greek. No translation can simply be ‘the same’ as the original. A translator who underestimates her task will produce a clunky, incoherent mess. So I knew from the start that I had to make careful decisions about which features of the Greek poem I most wanted to echo, and work with diligence, humility, and creativity to find ways to construct those effects from scratch, within the entirely different palette of the English language.” 

For Wilson, that meant a focus on sound and rhythm. Homer’s poem was originally not just spoken, but sung: as she noted, the majority of translations of The Iliad are written for the page, not the ear, and “do not provide the auditory experience of immersion in a long narrative poem, where the immutable pattern of sound is as omnipresent as the waves beating against the shore.” She also wanted to avoid the sameness in language that had permeated too many English translations, from her point of view: the poem is “shaped by many minds and voices, and its narrative includes a multitude of perspectives, voices, and points of view,” but in spite of this, many English translations read as if uttered by one specific voice.

Which is to say that there is also a wrong way to do all of this, in terms of properly modernizing a work, resulting in either a wasted effort or an “incoherent” one. For Wilson, the wrong way was avoiding the rhythmic beat of the poem’s origins in translations, and in limiting the translation to a single, samey point of view. For a video game remake like 2025’s Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, the problem has more to do with another point she brought up: “literary translators should not grind the beef, pork, and lamb of their originals into an unidentifiable hot dog.” Metal Gear Solid Delta attempted to be both a remake presenting new ideas and overly faithful to the original, resulting in failure at both. Or: unidentifiable hot dog.

Video games do not just deploy language in terms of the written word. Their language is spread across multiple axes, with visuals, sound, and mechanics as other forms of language to communicate with the player, that sometimes needs to be translated and updated to be understood by the “modern” masses and their familiarity with the languages of their day, no different than the works of Homer or Shakespeare. Delta retained the original’s classic and familiar voice work, but in its quest to create the most realistic possible Snake Eater in the present missed the point of what the thematic visual choices in the original signified back in 2003 on the Playstation 2. Which yes, makes it a “prettier” game as far as fidelity goes, one that sells you on the idea that you are in a living, breathing jungle, but at present is “written” in an inferior language for the chosen task of replicating the original game’s visual language. The same goes for Delta mechanically: by adding in an over-the-shoulder gameplay mode reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid V, they tried to square a circle by placing modern mechanics into a two-decade-old game, without updating the space in which those mechanics are utilized in any way besides in terms of visual fidelity. The end result is a game that does not know what it is nor who it is for, and it plays like it, too.

Meanwhile, the Trails in the Sky remake is updating itself visually and mechanically but in a way that follows the trajectory of its successors, which are both more “modern” visually and mechanically than when the series started over two decades ago—even compared to where the series was when the original game received its initial worldwide releases. Those games, in that newer style, have also already reached a much larger audience than the original(s) ever did—hence the remake’s existence in the first place. Players who have never touched the original adventure of Estelle and Joshua Bright, who have no idea of their origins, can still be intimately familiar with the most recent Trails releases in the Daybreak subseries. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is a fundamental overhaul two decades later that catches the original up in a conversation the series is having with itself through Daybreak and Daybreak II, as well as the fans who have come onboard well after that initial date. As if Homer updated his works himself, because the technology and audiences moved at the same speed within his own life as they have for Falcom, and he decided to do a revised Iliad rather than unknowingly leaving that task to a bunch of librarians centuries later. 

Trails is not missing the point as Delta did, so much as bringing the other elements of the original to the same place that the games that followed in its footsteps find themselves in. It is still Trails in the Sky, even if it’s received a makeover across multiple axes of language; like with Wilson’s modern translation of The Iliad, or Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the hope is that updating certain portions of the text for the moment and audience it is being released for will draw people who otherwise would not bother to experience Trails in the Sky to it, without dishonoring the original, and therefore make new fans and appreciators of the work. Leading to further engagement with, in the case of Wilson, more classic literature like The Odyssey (which she also translated), and in the case of Falcom, the eventual Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter remake, to better set you up for the rest of a series meant to be played in order—and one that will have an end despite its popularity, even if it’s not best for business in the way remaking Resident Evil 4 was for Capcom.

For this extended analogy and ideal of games remade with the same spirit and purpose of classics to work in reality, and for more than just what Falcom is up to, continued access to the original versions of remade games is necessary. Wilson’s approachable Iliad might be your preferred version, or maybe you’re more of a Fagles or Lattimore reader, but the key is that these translations remain available and revisited in the present: you get to choose, rather than having the “definitive” version of a text chosen for you. Trails in the Sky FC is set to remain available on Steam, Humble, and GOG, so Falcom is passing that test, and they have not been shy doing this with the original editions of various Ys titles as well. For all the grief given to Capcom over Resident Evil 4’s remake, they have been historically good about allowing the original editions of their games to exist on modern platforms alongside their remakes. This needs to be the norm: Sony and EA have thankfully kept previous iterations of The Last of Us and Dead Space in digital circulation despite their remakes, but when a Nintendo game is remade, the original usually vanishes from existence, while Konami can be hit or miss with this sort of thing. Metal Gear Solid 3 is available in both its Delta and original forms (albeit in HD), thanks to a 2023 collection released that includes the latter, but Silent Hill 2, for instance, is in remake or bust territory.

Video games do not need to reinvent the wheel here, necessarily, but borrow from existing media and their history, then adapt for their specific audience—much like the act of translation and remaking these works in the first place. “Remakes” and “definitive editions” are a tradition stretching back millenia, as old as the idea of translation itself. Games, like the classics, could also afford to adhere less strictly to the text of the original and take some stylistic swings with far more freedom if publishers were better about keeping said original alive for those who are plenty happy with what they already have. For all of Nintendo’s problems in general in erasing their past or locking it in a vault when a remake is finally made, they actually achieved an ideal state of this decades ago themselves: when Metroid was remade on the Game Boy Advance using an updated engine and gameplay from Super Metroid, the original version of the game was contained on the same cartridge, unlocked once you finished the new edition. There’s an easy fix for the missing Silent Hill 2 in this post-remake world, is the thing, one that is games-specific since, unlike with Fagles’ Iliad, no one made that disappear once Wilson’s showed up. They exist in conversation with each other, with Wilson’s translation a reaction to Fagles’ text, and this has been going on for nearly as long as The Iliad itself has existed.

If games are to be remade and remade again, then, at the least, they should have purpose and vision to those remakes, a dedicated focus as to why that doesn’t come back to dollar signs at the top of the list. The existence of a remake should not preclude the continued availability of the original, or any other remakes or editions that exist, either: like in the literary classics world, the options should all be laid out before us, with the audience each work was intended for reveling in their chosen favorite. And for those who want to experience a game in every possible “translation,” all they will need is time and room on the shelf to do so.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin