Obviously this game is the ultimate example of musing on the nature of remakes.
Time ghosts aside, this remake makes a lot of interesting changes that broadly fall into two different categories:
Expansions such as the increased attention on side characters or the new battle system and graphics, so things that reasonably could have been in the original had it been released in 2020 instead of 1997
Reinterpretations such as Shinra using Avalanche for warmongering or turning Wall Market into an actually nice-ish place. And the time ghosts of course.

I've seen a lot of people being okay with the expansions but not the reinterpretations but I actually love the reinterpretations while feeling like a lot of the expansions are just bloat.

I think I'd feel very differently about this game if its director hadn't also worked on the original or if I felt like it was trying to replace the original.
Also, depending on Rebirth and the third one my opinion on this could change drastically.

In my review of this game I say "This is what a remake should be like" by which I meant that it should be a reinterpretation of the original that doesn't feel forced to be too close to anything.
While I think that this game is great and that both it and the original can exist side by side with no issue, I'm not sure if Capcom agrees.
The original isn't available on any digital stores, the same goes for the original RE1 and 3. The original RE4 has been renamed to "Resident Evil 4 (2005)" on Steam so the remake can be the "true" RE4.
This is horrible. Please stop erasing your history capcom.

Ver. 1.22 is an interesting case of a remake adding new things to a game because Louise and ending E were supposed to be in the original but had to be cut for budget reasons. I think them getting to exist in the game is pretty great though I guess it's comparable to the director's cut that Archagent also critized.

But of course that wasn't the only change this version made. The updated graphics and animations are pretty and feel generally pretty faithful to the original, but I'm not sure why the music needed a rerecording. To be honest, I barely know the music of ver. 1.22 because it's not on spotify so even though I never played the 2010 version, that's the soundtrack I'm listening to most of the time.

The changes to combat are pretty divisive. I've seen people argue that combat shouldn't be fun because this is a game about how awful violence is. I personally think combat should be fun because fighting is fun to our protagonist. I think both interpretations are valid and ideally you'd be able to choose which version you want.

This being a remake of Replicant with no equivalent for Gestalt is interesting. It's great that the western market finally gets to experience this story with the brother protagonist, but I don't think the father should be erased either. The common narrative is that the brother is Yoko Taro's original vision and the father was just created to appeal to western markets. But I don't think that makes him inherently artistically worthless. This is once again a case of "ideally you should have both options"

Lastly, the voice acting. You could argue that choosing which lines to voice was an artistic decision in the original that has been erased but I won't do that.
Also, the rerecorded voice lines are often different from the original. Afaik the voice actors all stayed the same but it's been a decade and they might have been given directions.

Tl;dr: While I personally think that every change was for the better, that doesn't justify this being treated as a "definitive" version

Without the story additions from SotFS, the story of Dark Souls II would feel incomplete to me but I can only say that as someone who has only ever experienced the full thing.
I'm sure the people who played the original were fine with the story.

SotFS also made some other changes that are about as controversial among the DS2 community as DS2 is among the Dark Souls community.

I'm mostly just really fascinated that this game exists in the first place. Why did they remaster a 1 year old game?

I was actually going to make a point here about how most people wouldn't call this a remake but rather a reboot of a series and then I'd argue that there's no real difference but as it turns out, this is actually officially a remake!

I can't really comment on it's differences to the original because I haven't played the original much. I tried but the game doesn't have a tutorial and it's very unintuitive and while I could read the manual online, I could also just play a different game.
I also haven't played much EU either because I'd rather play Xcom 2

On that point, I think calling it Xcom 2 is kind of shit. It's ignoring so many games and on top of that, it's a boring name. Imagine if it was called Xcom: Rebellion or something like that

For series like Civilization or Crusader Kings that don't have a set story, what is the difference between a sequel and a remake?

Well, by including numbers in the titles they're certainly giving more credit to what came before than a lot of remakes at least.

And you still can get into arguments online over which version/installment is the only true way to experience the game.

Tetris is probably the most remade game in the world (citation needed)
Most remakes just change the graphics and/or scoring system but very rarely, they try a bit more.

I think Tetris Effect is a pretty remarkable remake because I feel like it fundamentally changes what the game is about.
If you play Tetris, your goal is usually to reach a high score. Tetris Effect still keeps track of your score, but I feel like it's more about the journey rather than the high score itself.
It's amazing how this remake feels like such a fundamental change while not really changing that much on a technical level

Choosing one version of a piece of media as the "right" way to experience is something critized in Archagent's video.
How do expansions play into this?

I think Reaper of Souls improves Diablo III to such a degree that it turns a bad game into a pretty fun one.
But is that opinion actually all that different from someone who thinks that a remake makes the original "difficult to go back to" or whatever?

The thing that shocked me about Persona 5 Royal isn't any of the changes it made but just how expected it was.

When after finishing Persona 5 I could already see so many people talking about the changes they wanted to see in the inevitable expanded game, I couldn't help but feel tricked into playing an incomplete game.
Which is kind of unfair to the game, isn't it? You can think of P5 whatever you want but it is its own, complete game. It didn't need a "royal" version, and now nobody ever goes back to the original.
But hey, I'm sure Atlus made a bunch of money selling the same game twice.

If the remake is artistic violence, Demon's Souls is 9/11.
Pretty much everything that can be wrong with a remake is present here, and the worst part is that most people don't even mind.
Sure, the highest rated reviews on this site are all negative, but it still has an average rating of 3.9 stars, pretty comparable to the original's 4.1.
On Metacritic, thing are even more depressing. The original has a metascore of 89. The remake has 92 and is marked a "Metacritic must-play"
Please don't play this game. If you're lucky you can pick up a ps3 + the original for about the same price as this, and then you'll even have a ps3 which you can use to play a bunch of other original games over their remakes.

MMOs, as the progenitors of the life service game, are constantly evolving.
This doesn't just mean adding new content, it also means removing old things.
It's perfectly normal for an MMO to just remove parts of its story, make it unplayable. I am honestly a bit disgusted by that.

FFXIV is a bit special in that regard, having done only one big removal of story, alongside a massive reboot of the entire game.
But this big realm rebirth makes it easy to forget how much the game has changed since then. I only started playing last year, but I've heard from people who've played since the beginning that the difference in gameplay between 1.0 and 2.0 is about as massive as between 2.0 and now.

And it's not like story has stopped
disappearing either. Especially A Realm Reborn has gone through massive cuts, removing things in an attempt to make the game more bearable to new players.
But occasionally there will still be remnants of what was removed, like scars hinting at a removed body part.
The Sylphs no longer pretend to be the Scions, but Yda still pretends to be a Sylph pretending to be a Scion.
You no longer have the option of telling Gaius for whom you fight, but he still calls your nonexistant answer "very glib".

Or at least he did until a few months ago. Bring back the glib!

I honestly don't really have any strong feelings on the Pixel Remasters but Archagent specifically mentioned not liking them in her video so I feel the need to say that I personally think they're fine.

When the Playstation release of Undertale included the Dog Shrine I thought it was a pretty funny parody of ports/rereleases/remakes/whatever feeling the need to force new content into a game.
And then the Switch release included an exclusive boss.

When this came out, people made fun of how devoid of new content this was.
I personally didn't mind that, I was perfectly happy buying a version of this game that was just a port to the ps4/a port to pc that doesn't suck and the temporary revival to the online community was a nice bonus.

What I do mind however is that the Prepare to Die edition is now no longer available anywhere.
Yes, it's a shit port of a great game, but it is still worth preserving.

Disco Elysium received multiple content updates over time, but only one of the was marketed as a new version of the game.
Obviously that was just a marketing stunt, but it worked!
I don't have any date on it but I feel like Disco Elysium got much more popular after it became "The Final Cut" even though it really didn't change that much.

One thing it did change though was the voice actors for some of the characters. And obviously there is no way to play with the old voice actors, at least not without mods.
Common art preservation L

Katamari Damacy Reroll was really inoffensive as far as remasters go, it was basically just a port.
But now the upcoming We <3 Katamari remaster is going to include additional content. In a game that is mostly about how the game only exists because of fan expectations, that feels incredibly wrong.
I'll still buy it though, I just would have been content with a normal port.

Sony's plans for Bloodborne are a mystery.
Why aren't they putting it on PC? It can't still be selling consoles at this point, right? Are they planning a remaster, or perhaps even a remake? I hope not!
I own a fifth of one share in sony and they still won't tell me.

The Nier Automata anime is really good.
At first I thought it was gonna be shit because the first episode is basically just exactly retelling the story of the tutorial, but later episodes were happy to change things. I am interested to see where this adaptation goes.
Is an adaptation into a different medium also a kind of remake?