The video games industry is bad at preserving its history. Rights to various titles get lost or divided between different publishers, technology's constant forward march makes playing some older games impossible and many companies are simply not interested in keeping their history alive for future generations. As a result, despite all the medium's artistic accomplishments, gaming is still worryingly transient in many regards. With this in mind, Square Enix's plan to remaster its Final Fantasy backlog for modern platforms isn't a bad idea at all.

The company has always been very proactive about keeping its history alive, and doing so again ensures that a brand new audience will be able to appreciate its games. The only problem with the plan is that the publisher has arguably chosen the wrong games to update. Final Fantasy already has so many remakes and remasters available that the necessity of these new versions is highly debatable. While it makes financial sense for Square Enix to remaster its most popular games, there is a conservationist argument to be made that the company should be preserving its lesser-known ones instead.

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Square Enix has one of the richest histories of any video game developer. Not only does it have the likes of Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and Dragon Quest under its belt, but the publisher's component businesses also gave the world Terranigma, Front Mission and Treasure of the Rudras. These games may not be as celebrated as Square Enix's flagship franchises, but they still represent an important part of history. It would be a shameful act of negligence to let these titles disappear into the void of history, especially on the part of a company that is otherwise extremely good at keeping its intellectual property in the public consciousness.

Another argument as to why these games deserve a remaster concerns availability. Though once exclusive to Nintendo's systems and later Sony's, Final Fantasy has been largely multi-platform for the better part of a decade. Each one of the series' numbered entries has been playable in one form or another around the world, and Square Enix is always releasing new ports or remasters to keep its legends alive. The brand has sold 159 million units worldwide, making it the second best-selling JRPG franchise after Pokémon, and, by implication, also the second most-accessible. With its abundance of PC remasters, handheld ports and modern remakes, it's never been easier to get into Final Fantasy.

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By comparison, many of Square Enix's older titles never saw worldwide releases. There are several Squaresoft games, such as Bahamut Lagoon, that were exclusive to Japan. Meanwhile, several Enix publications, like Terranigma, were often only released in a few regions. As a result, fans seeking to experience these games can only do so through costly imports or illegal piracy, neither of which is an ideal means of keeping old games alive. To be fair, this problem isn't unique to Square Enix, but it's strange that the company isn't willing to gamble on more classics given how often and successfully the company has done so in the past.

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This isn't to say that every title ever published by Squaresoft or Enix needs a re-release. It's highly unlikely, for instance, that The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner would have much of an audience in today's market. However, there are so many weird and wonderful games in the company's library that it would be a shame to let them all keep gathering dust forever. The Pixel Remaster project so far doesn't look like it'll be a particularly expensive one, so it represents a missed opportunity to give these lesser-known games another day in the sun.

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If such a project were to be successful, it could open the doors to remasters of some of Square Enix's more advanced titles. 3D games like Vagrant Story are getting harder to access on modern platforms, to say nothing of ones like Xenogears that never reached Europe. Perhaps such games wouldn't sell as well as Final Fantasy, but their more experimental ideas might help to inspire a new generation of fans and future developers. Titles like Terranigma were cult classics once upon a time. There's no reason why they can't be again.

It's hard to say what the future of these Pixel Remaster games will be. Perhaps these new versions of the old Final Fantasy titles will simply come and go, or perhaps they will turn out to be Square Enix's way of testing the waters for remasters of niche games. Either way, hopefully Square Enix realizes the potential of all the lost gems buried deep within its dragon's hoard of intellectual property. Some treasures may not shine as brightly as others, but that doesn't mean they aren't still valuable.

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