Why Were There So Many Throwback RPGs and Remakes In 2023?

gameinformer.com:

The quality of video game releases in 2023 has been discussed in detail by many, and it will absolutely go down as one of the best years the medium has experienced, strictly in terms of the excellent games that were released. The larger industry and its members will always look back on 2023 with justified frustration.

Patterns in any year are always a given. Trends inspire entire genres to be prevalent, and we also have events like 2009, where there were two high-profile open-world games about super-powered humans: Infamous and Prototype. This year will certainly be remembered for games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3, among others, but I can’t help but notice that RPGs citing a specific era of the genre were also, inexplicably, hugely popular.

Earlier this year, we featured Sea of Stars on the cover of Game Informer magazine. Talking to the team at Sabotage about its inspirations, it specifically cited the classic Super Nintendo game, Super Mario RPG. And when I played Sea of Stars a few months later, I could clearly see how the developer pulled from that game. One of the reasons Sea of Stars exists is because games like it are rare today, which makes it all the more surprising that Nintendo would announce a full remake of the game shortly after. What are the odds?

And then, within weeks, Square Enix saw it fit to announce and release an excellent remake of the beloved 1998 Star Ocean sequel, Second Story. That game fits right alongside Sea of Stars and Super Mario RPG as an RPG of a specific era – one interested in telling a linear story without overcomplicating its primary mechanics.

Before all of these games, however, we had Octopath Traveler II, a well-liked sequel to a game that