Yoshinori Kitase, producer for Square-Enix, said the company would remake Final Fantasy VII if the project could be completed within a year, but he estimates it would take over a decade. That’s because he assumes a potential FFVII remake would incorporate the same level of graphical detail as Final Fantasy XIII, which took three and a half years to develop.

When viewed alongside the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII and  Square-Enix’s recent justification for removing traditional towns from FFXIII, that they’re too difficult to render in graphics worthy of high definition, it becomes clear the company is holding FFVII up to impossible standards, preventing it from receiving the modest remake it deserves.

Majority of people clamoring for an HD remake of FFVII for Playstation 3, featuring Advent Children visuals, probably haven’t played the original game in a long time, say three and a half years. If they had, they’d recall the awkward Wall Market scenario, the potential Gold Saucer date with Barret, chatting with Hojo and his arm candy in Costa del Sol, and other bizarre situations 1Up’s Jeremy Parish mentions in his assertion that FFVII is “a damn weird game.”

In an episode of the Retronauts podcast, Parish and his panel discuss remaking FFVII in a similar style to the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV, which incorporates a somewhat super-deformed style in its gameplay while using an impressive realistic style during cinemas. FFIV’s new styles are very similar to those used in FFVII, but the former’s will stand the test of time while FFVII’s visuals have long been considered ugly and blocky.

Rather than try to recapture what made it successful in the first place, it’s impressive scope and visuals for the time, FFVII should embrace the ugly, weird game it has become by not taking itself as seriously as its bloated Compilation. Announcing such a game would elicit an even larger tidal wave of hate than The Windwaker’s announcement, but FFVII fans would should be more thankful in the end. At least that way, they’ll actually get a remake sometime this decade, and Square-Enix will not have gone bankrupt in the process.

Majora’s Mask seems to be the most well-known, but a quick Google search reveals a handful of games notable for their “Groundhog Day” concepts. I haven’t played, much less heard of, many of them. Flower, Sun and Rain was my most recent venture into living the same day over and over again, but I’d like to throw a more recent, lesser-known (and free) game into the discussion.

Every Day the Same Dream, a free indie game , illustrates its “Groundhog Day” connection right in the title. The concept is simple, and painfully familiar.

You wake up to a grating alarm and get dressed: black suit, black tie. Breakfast in the kitchen smells delicious, but your wife reminds you that you’re late for work. In the elevator, you meet a strange, old lady who relays a strange message. “Five more steps and you will be a new person,” she says.

You sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic in your cramped, little car. Vehicles start and stop, start and stop, over and over. When you arrive at the office, your boss is waiting for you, hands on his hips. “You are late,” he says before telling you to get to your cubicle.

The walk is long. You pass a few soulless faces, generic co-workers toiling away at their  computers. Then you pass a few more and a few more: a mindless army of frustrated pencil-pushers.

When you finally arrive at your desk, the day becomes a blur and you lose track of time. Before you know it, the same grating alarm is telling you wake up and live through the same day again.

It shouldn’t take long for you to realize that there’s more to life in Every Day the Same Dream than getting up and going to work, and that’s when the game really begins. Your goal is to search for the beauty in life despite your mundane responsibilities.

Every Day the Same Dream’s side-scrolling layout, combined with its limited locales, makes finding every way out a bit difficult but rewarding. At first, it’s hard to see how you can avoid living the same day over and over, but some clever thinking results in some interesting, sad, or just plain humorous situations.

Potential for endless repetition makes for both a subtle tutorial and introspective look at the way we live our lives. The game’s ending is a bit more depressing than I expected, but the parts in between leave you with a familiar message found throughout the many “Groundhog Day” spin-offs: It’s the little details that matter. We should live our lives rather than become slaves to routine.

Pretty powerful stuff for a free, indie game.

Flower, Sun and Rain relayed a nonsense plot to American gamers last year through the use of boring, number-related riddles. It also dared them to question the very reason they play games with its characters’ long-winded, often self-referential soliloquies.

Metacritic: 54

Killer7 treated its audience to an ultra-violent, ultra-confusing tale of multiple personalities centered around infinitely respawning, suicidal, invisible zombies. It also united gameplay and plot by allowing players to guide themselves along a critically misunderstood rail system.

Metacritic: 74

No More Heroes exposed players to an open, yet barren Grand Theft Auto-inspired world of sexual innuendo and mindless violence. It also showed players that it’s okay to not have fun in a video game through its use of mundane but satirical mini-games and side-missions.

Metacritic: 83

Let’s be honest: Suda51’s games are not fun. They’re hardly even games in the traditional sense. They are, however, where games should be going.

Debate over whether or not video games are art aside, it’s obvious the medium has a unique potential to provide its audience with experiences that can’t be found anywhere else. The resolutions to each of Suda’s three titles deemed “good” enough to make it to America leave the player with mixed emotions. They’re not emotions regarding whether or not the game was good or long enough to justify our purchase, but emotions that make us wonder about life and the medium of video games itself.

We don’t go into serious movies, critically acclaimed for their acting or themes or messages about society, to be merely entertained. We go watch these movies to be moved, or intrigued, or impressed. Unfortunately our preferred medium has the word “games” in its name, and no one wants to play a boring game.

Suda’s titles cling to some gameplay traditions, but they fail to entertain. Flower, Sun and Rain has the player searching a guide book for answers to cryptically worded puzzles, but it’s so traditionally boring to play and ugly to watch. Killer7 allows players to fire guns at glowing weak points and build stats to earn new abilities, but players are restricted to rails and are punished for backtracking by an endless horde of invisible enemies trying to blow them up. No More Heroes forces players to explore a bland, empty world and repeat mindless fights, which consist of little more than button-mashing, in order to reach mindless boss fights, which consist of little more than button-mashing.

These games aren’t fun, but Suda is obviously getting better with each new release according to Metacritic; “better” meaning giving in to modern gameplay trends. Suda’s titles have inspired cult followings that struggle to express why it is they love his creations, but it should be obvious after experiencing each one that they offer something unique that we can only hope future releases can replicate more frequently and efficiently.

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be crazy to assume this week’s No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle will clearly mark the point that Suda’s knack for bizarre, existential games begins to diminish. Don’t be surprised when the game ends up with a Metacritic average in the high 80s.

Sure, it’ll be great to have a new and enjoyable reason to turn on the Wii again, but if Suda pulls out on making games that really make you think, who will pick up where he leaves off?

Today’s victims: Bayonetta and Dante’s Inferno

Whether it’s a “beat ‘em up” or a “hack ‘n’ slash” may depend on the player character’s weaponry, but games like Bayonetta and Dante’s Inferno share a similar, defining element that makes them much easier to group together: They’re “button-mashers”.

Bayonetta’s demo begins with a tutorial illustrating the bare bones of the game’s mechanics and it features short practice sessions highlighting a variety of combos while the game loads. The titular heroine can riddle enemies with light gunfire, but majority of her arsenal consists of punches and kicks. Various combinations of these attacks can result in devastating techniques, but it’s easier to get through the demo’s handful of battles with the incessant mashing of a single attack. The full game may be expertly crafted to ease players into using more and more elaborate combos stylishly and effectively, but the demo gives no indication of that.

The demo’s battles are given no context. The player begins fighting a horde of bird-like angels upon a fragment of a clock tower careening off a mountain top. Bayonetta leaps from fragment to fragment until a big-dragon thing comes in for the kill. Then, she’s suddenly in a train. The player resumes control in a terminal occupied by ghosts. Wandering into a beautiful garden initiates the next battle, which is capped off by a large mini-boss (oxymoron?). Finally, the player wanders onto a bridge and begins fighting an even larger creature before the demo ends. A bit of back story is given early on, but that’s not what the player is there for. They’re trying to glean some semblance of what it’s like to play Bayonetta, but if this is what it’s like, then it’s just a series of random battles won through random button mashing.

Dante’s Inferno’s demo goes the opposite route of Bayonetta’s by offering way too much context. The game supposedly takes place in the ultimate set-piece of Hell, featuring all nine circles of sinful abominations, by crapping all over classic literature, but the player doesn’t get to experience any of it. Instead, they’re guided through the game’s prologue, a poorly pieced together afterthought meant to justify the abuse of The Divine Comedy. And like Bayonetta, Dante’s Inferno is a game about pressing a couple buttons in rapid succession.

Dante wins Death’s scythe and later acquires a holy cross, both of which are used as weapons against Hell’s minions. The weapons play on the themes of good and evil present within the game’s skill-building mechanic of absolution and condemnation. The former earns points for the light side of the skill tree while the latter earns points for the dark side. When Dante has earned enough points, he can purchase new skills, which take the form of combos, attacks, and static abilities. The moment the player gains access to the tree, he has enough points to purchase all of the dark abilities offered in the demo. There are two light abilities available that are also easy to earn. It would be safe to assume the rest of the two or three dozen abilities aren’t nearly as easy to unlock in the full game, but the demo does nothing to confirm that. As with Bayonetta, the player isn’t given much of a clue as to what Dante’s Inferno is like outside of its basic mechanics.

It’s obvious that while Bayonetta is going for style and sex appeal, Dante’s Inferno is going for style and controversy through the violent depiction of Christian imagery. Both games do an excellent job of selling themselves as over-the-top, action-packed experiences. The Bayonetta demo’s opening sequence of leaping across the broken fragments of a clock tower hurtling down a cliff is great to watch, and Dante’s Inferno’s world dissolving into a hellish nightmare is jarring and exciting (though the gameplay’s graphics are relatively bad compared to the great cinematics).

From a visual standpoint, both Bayonetta and Dante’s Inferno demand the player’s attention, but neither are designed in a way that demands the player’s purchase unless they’re perfectly satisfied exploring the myriad ways to mash buttons. Bayonetta has already been released and is enjoying a strong 91 (360) and 86 (PS3) on Metacritic, so reviewers must have found something deeper to experience within the game, and it’s a safe bet they’ll do the same with Dante’s Inferno, but these victories won’t be a result of the respective demos. They’ll be the result of extensive marketing campaigns and months of hype from the major players in the online video game community.

Majority of Phoenix Wright reviews praise the DS port’s inclusion of a fifth bonus case, which made use of the handheld’s touch controls. Meanwhile, most reviews of Justice For All and Trials and Tribulations lament the inclusion of psyche locks, a mechanic added to break up the monotony of investigation sequences. To understand why these cheers and jeers should be the other way around, it’s important to first understand what it is that makes the Ace Attorney series work.

Each Ace Attorney game is broken up into two sequences of significantly different types of gameplay. There’s investigation, where the player gathers evidence and details on the case at hand in order to piece together a winning defense strategy to use in court, and then there’s litigation, where the player uses what he’s gathered and learned in court to defend his (usually uncooperative) client. What unites the two sequences is the use of logic, or at least the series creators’ concept of logic, and a text-heavy plot. The former comprises the traditional gameplay aspect by rewarding the player for being clever while the latter offers the more substantial satisfaction that comes with reading a good book or watching a great movie. It’s the plot, no matter how bizarre and contrived it can be, that players play for. The gameplay is just there to keep things interactive and to motivate the player to press on.

When Capcom added the bonus case to Phoenix Wright to convince new players to buy the game, they shot themselves in the foot as far as the two sequels were concerned. At first glance, it makes sense. After Phoenix Wright’s dramatic conclusion, an even bigger, more dramatic case was unlocked and featured touch controls, allowing players to manipulate evidence and look for clues in new and interesting ways. Players loved it, but when Justice For All was released without touch controls, reviewers were sure to take note. A sequel shouldn’t do away with mechanics that worked in the previous game, but what reviewers and fans were unaware of was how the added touch mechanics really didn’t work. It wasn’t until the first true Ace Attorney game made for the DS came out, Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice, that the issue of touch controls was made more apparent.

The primary use of touch controls in Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice are in the manipulation of evidence in a 3D space to uncover hidden details and in the use of crime scene investigation tools. Instead of having the games’ characters explain that a fingerprint was found on a gun or at the scene of the crime, the player could discover this for himself through touch controls. There were other uses, some effective, but overall, these added controls only add an extra step in the gameplay process, which is only there to urge players through the plot anyway.

The only other notable addition of a gameplay mechanic in the series came in the form of JFA’s and T&T’s psyche locks. By presenting uncooperative witnesses with a magical stone called a magatama, players could see secrets literally locked away by the witness. These scenarios worked similarly to those found in the courtroom where the player must present evidence to point out lies and contradictions in the witness’ testimony. Presenting the correct evidence breaks a lock, while presenting the wrong evidence costs the player health. The main issue with the psyche locks was that the games never make it totally clear when a player possesses all the evidence he needs to break all of a witness’ locks, dragging out the investigation sequences. That’s a legitimate criticism, but it would appear that no review makes mention of the greater implications made by the psyche locks. Understanding their importance requires a bit of spoilers, so be warned.

The first three Ace Attorney games form a trilogy revolving around the Fayes, a family of women who practice the traditional spirit channeling techniques of their hometown, Kurain Village. While alive, the Fayes can channel the dead, and in death, they can possess the living. Both of these techniques are used throughout the trilogy for good and evil and become the driving force for the series’ unique take on legal proceedings. They even affect gameplay in that the magatama is spiritual treasure of Kurain Village.

While the magatama, makes it possible for the player to discover bits of plot and evidence through an extension of the courtroom gameplay, it adds to plot on its own by allowing the non-spiritual characters insight into the spirit world. In fact, the trilogy’s dramatic conclusion in Trials and Tribulations, which is perhaps the series’ best entry, relies heavily upon the magatama as a tool to connect the material world with the spirit world. Without it, the series would had to have found an alternate method to capture such a bizarre and intriguing plot arch.

So, perhaps its for the best that the bonus case is excluded in Phoenix Wright’s WiiWare port. It will allow players outside of Japan to experience the game, or at least its plot, in its original form. It’ll also allow the bonus case to serve as a cheap yet epic demonstration of what the Ace Attorney series is capable of without too many heavy spoilers, since it excludes the spirit world in favor of the CSI-inspired mechanics Apollo Justice built upon.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves appears to be receiving this year’s award from many outlets but I’ve never played the game and never had any desire to do so. The award means nothing to me, and it shouldn’t mean anything to you.

“Game of the Year” implies that there was a consensus among the staff of an outlet that this one game is better than every other game that came out that year. I imagine it’s left up to little more than a vote and maybe a bit of debate, but that isn’t representative of a staff’s opinion. What if some of them hated Uncharted 2 or didn’t even play it? A simple vote doesn’t convey that, but this only sheds light on a bigger issue that plagues all attempts to rank video games.

Outlets are always sure to make it clear that just because one game gets an 8 and another gets a 9, that’s not an outright claim that one is better than the other. Yet, when the year ends, they lay it all out on the table and explicitly state that this one game is better than all the rest. In the end, it’s just a culmination of the staff’s opinions, but I think this honor loses its meaning when it’s filtered and processed, usually for the sole purpose of gathering more traffic. Listing the runners-up accomplishes the job that should be done, shedding light on a year’s worth of quality games, but the big “Game of the Year” title seems to devalue all of the games involved.

Unless you agree with the result, a “Game of the Year” doesn’t represent your opinion, and that’s fine, but it may not represent some of the people tasked with awarding the honor either, and that seems counter-intuitive to me.

[And for the record, I honestly can't decide what my favorite game of 2009 is. You would think Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box would clinch it for me, but I had a lot of fun with Borderlands' co-op, Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer, coin-collecting in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and being immersed in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Of course, those were all released in the latter half of the year and are still on my mind because of how recently I played them, but that's getting into a topic for another day... ]

Muramasa’s painted backgrounds and elaborate sprites, combined with Japanese voice acting and music, result in a gorgeous video game experience. I shouldn’t have enjoyed the game, though, because it also combined repetitive beat ‘em up gameplay with unintuitive JRPG elements to create a mindless video game experience. Once you understand the mechanics behind the game, however, Muramasa becomes the perfect kind of mindless a good video game should be. The story makes no damn sense, at least not to anyone who didn’t grow up with or study Japanese history and mythology, and you do little more than run back and forth while button mashing, but it’s all very addicting. The entire experience is devoid of motion controls, and that’s what got me asking “Why the Wii?”

The answer is pretty obvious. Smart developers must work around the Wii’s graphical limitations if they want to stand out among the system’s vast library of games. They typically do this by utilizing unique art styles, like with MadWorld, but occasionally make a project of attempting to push the hardware to its limit, like with The Conduit. While the latter failed in it’s attempts to look good, the former succeeded. What Muramasa and MadWorld also had above other Wii titles were unique gimmicks. Muramasa had its distinct JRPG mechanics and MadWorld had stylized, over-the-top violence, two elements sorely missed on the platform by the ignored “hardcore” audience.

So, while both would have been noticed on other platforms, neither would have garnered the attention of consumers and the gaming blogs had they not been developed exclusively for the Wii where people were starved for what the two games appeared to be on the surface. The Conduit even managed to become a hot topic throughout the community, entirely because it was a Wii exclusive. It would have been completely ignored had it been released on the 360 or PS3.

I did enjoy both Muramasa and MadWorld (too short, unfortunately), but I’m not sure this is how a video game platform should work. Is it better to be able to occasionally get the games you want and be consciously aware of how you appreciate each one , or is it better to be consistently satisfied but unaware of how lucky you are to have so many games developed just for you? Given the way Nintendo has been running its business the last few years, I would say the second option is best because, when it’s obvious the company only cares about the cash of its newer, non-traditional audience, why should it care whether or not its older, loyal fans appreciate its work?

Don’t take that to mean Resort wasn’t a fun game. It offered a fun distraction for my friends and I for about a month, but in the end, it’s just a collection of mini-games made to demonstrate the Wii MotionPlus. The device was designed to finally show off what the Wii can really do, but instead, it highlights what the Wii hasn’t done and how it will most likely struggle to remedy that.

Nintendo spent the last three years manipulating us with exaggerated and misleading demonstrations of what the Wii is capable of, but when they finally have that capability in the hands of consumers, they fail to deliver. Resort is the only game requiring the use of MotionPlus and, while it does an adequate job of demonstrating various applicable motions, we haven’t seen any significant use of the device since, with only Red Steel 2 earning the slightest bit of interest as a future release.

To further sour the situation, MotionPlus is yet another peripheral, so even if quality games were developed around the device, there would always be the issue of getting the device to the consumer. Do you bundle it with future games, hope they’ve already gotten one, or require them to spend the twenty-five bucks on one individually? If the latter becomes the case, a fully-functional Wii remote with Nunchuk and MotionPlus would cost eighty-dollars.

It’s a shame a genuinely fun, but shallow, game like Wii Sports Resort had to get caught up in illustrating Nintendo’s failed promise, but it was inevitable from the moment the company decided a collection of mini-games was all it needed to convince people it was telling the truth.

The combination proved perfect, encouraging short play sessions, but rewarding players to stick around with a simple yet satisfying plot. If there was a downside to Curious Village, it would have to be the disconnect between the puzzles and the mystery. Not until the end of the game did it make sense why the village was obsessed with unrelated puzzles, but one could have argued the puzzles needed to be unrelated in order to maintain the game’s casual style. The sequel, Diabolical Box, proved this when it attempted to tie the two elements together.

Curious Village would occasionally require you to have solved a certain number of puzzles before allowing you to progress the plot, but Diabolical Box takes the process a step further by occasionally requiring you to stop what you’re doing and solve story-related puzzles. While the former method allows you to progress while avoiding puzzle types you dislike, the latter forces you to solve a specific one. In response, these puzzles are impossible to fail and can be solved with brute force, taking away from the experience.

Diabolical Box also attempts to remedy an issue some players had with Curious Village, taking place entirely in a single village, by revolving around the mysterious Molentary Express. The train takes Layton and Luke to two separate yet mysteriously linked towns to solve a murder, but the plot falls flat early on and never recovers. The train theme also fails by making the early portions of the game incredibly linear. Nevertheless, Diabolical Box manages to survive thanks to its charming atmosphere, characters, and music (especially the music).

In the end, that’s all that really matters for a Professor Layton game. The puzzles are still great and accented by clever illustrations (this time with fun, recurring characters from one of the game’s towns), the pacing is well done, and the experience is just as charming as before. Charming, charming, charming… That’s all pretty much every review of Curious Village devolved into and it’s just as true here with Diabolical Box. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait as long for The Last Time Travel as we did for Diabolical Box, but nowadays, games like these are usually worth waiting for.

UFC 2009 Undisputed isn’t for everyone, but that’s only because it goes to great lengths to accurately portray the ground game, which often elicits groans from the sport’s more casual viewers. Your first time grappling on the ground will probably be a frustrating one due to the unique, right stick-oriented control scheme, but Undisputed does an excellent job in both its tutorial and career modes to ease you into the process.

The result is a dynamic game, allowing for drastically different outcomes depending on personal preferences and skill. Once you understand how the controls work, they’re yours to manipulate granted your opponent can’t manipulate them better than you can. Unfortunately, this style of understanding controls to understand how to win isn’t present in the year’s most famous fighter, Street Fighter IV, at least not in my experience.

Anyone who thought Undisputed’s ground controls of quarter and half rotations of the right stick were convoluted must not have ever attempted Guile’s super and ultra attacks in SFIV. I prefer to play as the easier to understand command-style fighters like Ryu and Sakura because I can use all of their regular moves, I can even launch (and occasionally connect with) their supers and ultras but never consistently.

The control input sounds easy enough for most of these fighters (usually down, slant, towards, down, slant towards, punch or kick, whatever the official terminology is), but in the context of SFIV’s fast-paced arcade-style gameplay, these inputs are misunderstood by the game and fall flat. It’s not enough to just understand how to input the commands. I had to turn to the internet to figure out how to get past some of SFIV’s tutorials and even then couldn’t finish because of the ridiculous pace the game demands of its players.

Both Undisputed and SFIV have steep learning curves, but while the former understands its controls can be complicated and helps the player to understand them, the latter just tells them how to do it, forbidding them to progress in tutorials if they can’t keep up. Both games are extremely fun, but it can be frustrating when you can’t execute commands despite understanding their inputs.