Ranking the 10 best video game remakes of all time

The most timely entry on this list is also quite possibly the most radical: Despite the word Remake sitting smack dab in its title, this 2020 big-budget re-imagining of 1997's Final Fantasy VII is at least in part a sequel to that game’s ever-expanding, constantly-tinkered-with canon, courtesy of some fairly convoluted time travel shenanigans. Just as drastic: The decision to go almost ludicrously granular with an already epic-sized game, zooming this first entry (of three planned remake games) specifically into the original’s long-ish, but not that long-ish, opening Midgar segment. Buffeted by some of the best combat the entire Final Fantasy maxi-series has ever sported, the result is a far more human experience, giving the audience a chance to connect with characters who were often just blocky abstractions in the original—and Square-Enix an opportunity to sell this “unknown journey” three times over, of course.

Adventure game legends Sierra Entertainment were way out ahead of the pack when it came to remaking (and re-selling) their own games to catch up with advancing technology. Of all the Sierra titles to make the jump from blocky EGA graphics and text parsers to more accessible mouse-based interfaces in the 1990s (Space Quest, King’s Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry all got similar facelifts) we’re especially partial to the second edition of Lori and Corey Cole’s first Quest For Glory game. Beautifully illustrated (in the style of the contemporaneous Quest For Glory III), the VGA version of QFG 1 manages to hold on to the light-RPG combat and multiple character paths that made the original such a bold departure from the standard Sierra playbook, while making the game far more playable for the keyboard agnostics out there. (Meanwhile, if you don’t mind going unofficial, you can also look to the similar remake of Quest For Glory II by AGD Interactive, a near-perfect love letter to a slightly clunky classic.)

The original Yakuza was ahead of its time when it came out in 2005—and not just because its numerous loading screens tended to make the PlayStation 2 sputter and chug every time protagonist Kiryu found himself embroiled in yet another Kamurocho street brawl. Its 2016 remake Kiwami (it means extreme, FYI) preserves most of what was revolutionary about the original—most especially its sprawling vision of the seedy night life of a lightly fictionalized corner of Tokyo—while making the whole thing go down a hell of a lot smoother, thanks to importing combat and quality of life changes from prequel Yakuza 0. It’s a prime example of a remake that walks the line between faithful and improved so successfully that it’s largely supplanted the original as the best way to introduce players to Kiryu’s 20-year story of endless betrayals, street brawls, and weirdly intense slot car racing rivalries.

Sometimes developers remake video games for money; sometimes it’s because there’s a good idea buried somewhere in desperate need of salvage. And sometimes, it’s because a game just kicks so much ass that it can’t be left in the dustbin of history. Hence, we imagine, the 2023 remake of Visceral Games’ Dead Space. Although it makes a few tweaks to the game’s horror-heavy story—including giving everyman protagonist Isaac Clarke an actual voice—the new Dead Space works largely because it doesn’t mess with success. Which, in this franchise’s parlance, means maimings, mutilations, and decapitations, as the team at Motive Studio ably recreated the original’s tense space-zombie combat, with its special focus on severing limbs with a variety of grisly, gorgeous power tools, all in a desperate effort to keep your happy little spine-lights glowing a healthy green.

As we noted in our review of its latest such resurrection, groundbreaking 2006 role-playing game Persona 3 has had more than its fair share of remakes—each adding something unique to its blend of rigorous tactical combat and low-key Japanese high school life simulator. In the case of 2010 PSP remake Persona 3 Portable, that meant a whole other playable character, giving players the opportunity to ditch out their usual blue-haired, mopey male protagonist in favor of a more feisty heroine. The change wasn’t just cosmetic, either: Atlus crafted a whole other set of all-important character relationships for the Female Protagonist to work her way through during her grim year at Gekkoukan High, radically changing how the game’s story plays out. (They also made a number of savvy cuts to accommodate for the game’s move to the handheld market, many of which made navigating its world a bit less tedious.) That alternative character remains a great reason to try to track down a copy—even if the newer remake is a bit more robust, overall.

Few development teams have thought about the philosophy of a video game remake more than the folks making Resident Evil games over at Capcom, something they’ve borne out on multiple occasions over the last decade-plus of necromantic game design. With 2023's Resident Evil 4, that meant finding ways to preserve an original combat system so good that it basically hijacked action game development for the next decade of its existence, while threading a line between which aspects of 2005's Resident Evil 4 were so stupid they were awesome, and which were just… stupid. The result is a thrilling action game that occasionally veers toward being a bit too stolid—we miss being chased by the giant Napoleon statue, not gonna lie—while still presenting amazing new version of some of gaming’s most iconic setpieces.

If the 2012 remake of diabolical Japanese indie game La-Mulana had just made a cult classic far more accessible to the masses—first on Nintendo’s Wii, of all places, before slowly percolating out to most other platforms across the following decade—it would still merit a place on this list. But the second edition of La-Mulana also improves mightily on the original, updating its graphics for a more modern eye, rewriting its numerous brain-breaking puzzles, and easing back just a bit on its utterly cruel combat difficulty. The result is a genuine treat for masochists, who can now explore the horrifying, death-trap-filled dungeon of La-Mulana with a maximum of convenience (and horrible crushed-by-boulders deaths).

This one is kind of cheating—since the original Final Fantasy Tactics is already a masterpiece, and all—but its updated remake, originally crafted for the PSP in 2007, is still hard to argue against. The benefits of War Of The Lions exist mostly around the edges, in the form of new cutscenes, and a new translation of the game’s hyper-dense story that clarifies some of its more slapdash bits of original writing. More importantly, it largely keeps its hands off the game’s still-borderline-perfect iteration of turn-based tactical combat, complete with the single best implementation of the Final Fantasy franchise’s Job system ever put into a game. (Meanwhile, please consider this to also be an honorary shared slot for the similar Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, if only because the Tactics Ogre fans will let you know when they feel like you’re disrespecting their horse in favor of FFT.)

No video game remake has ever spoken to the spirit of its source game better than the 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake, which feels as scary in our hands, today, as the 1998 original does from the depths of our 20-plus-year-old memories. Ditching several extraneous elements of the original game, RE2 Remake instead dials into the all-important feeling of scarcity, danger, and above all else pursuit to make shooting zombies feel terrifying all over again. Its signature sequence—the extended chase through an abandoned, monster-filled police station by the hulking, unkillable, and cunning Mr. X—only constitutes a small portion of the remake’s overall gameplay. But it looms hugely in our minds, leaving a massive impression that easily overshadows the far less deftly executed sequences it’s imitating from the original.

On first glance, 2014's The Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth doesn’t look all that radically different from Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl’s original 2011 indie smash: A few new characters, a graphical overhaul, some new mechanics. The revolutionary stuff only shows up once you start peeling back the layers, starting with the fact that, by 2014, McMillen had already pushed the original game’s Flash design to the limits of what the platform could do, imposing an artificial ceiling on a style of gameplay that would, over the next decade, reveal itself as being somewhere close to infinite. Working with developers Nicalis, McMillen rebuilt his (crying, farting, pooping) baby from the ground-up, crafting a basic platform capable of supporting literally 1000-plus hours of play, and codifying the whole “die, restart, die again” roguelike genre in the process. Even before you take into account its various (fantastic) expansions, Rebirth is the sort of remake that utterly obviates the need to play the original game out of anything but nostalgic interest; by taking everything great about the source material, and then exhaustively fulfilling the untapped potential locked within, it easily qualifies itself as the finest video game remake of all time.