[COLUMN] The Joy of the Replay | by Marty Sliva

Backlogs. Backlogs never change. Despite flipping the page to a new calendar year, my list of games, movies, TV series, anime, books, comics, music, and travel destinations that I’d love to experience for the first time is only growing bigger and more unwieldy. I keep telling myself that THIS is the year I finally get to monolithic franchises like Mass Effect, Xenoblade, and The Witcher, just to name a few. And yet, when I found myself with some free time over the holiday break to finally make a dent in some of these, I instead got lost in the quicksand that is yet another Persona 4 Golden replay.

And you know what? After rolling credits on it 50 hours later, I have zero regrets. Part of this is  because I was playing the game alongside some of our Patrons via an impromptu book club kind of thing that stretched across our Discord and streams on my personal Twitch channel. Seeing how other pals feel about story choices and mechanics as we all made our way through the game was great, and something I want to keep doing throughout 2025.

But part of why I had no regrets about this replay is that solving crimes with my Inaba pals solidified the fact that the older I get, the more I love replaying games. And not just ones like P4G that I enjoyed the first time around, but games that I either have very few memories of, or even ones that I was a bit cold on originally. Because for me, a replay can bring just as much fulfillment and revelations as a fresh experience.

On a first-time playthrough, I’m generally focused on the big picture. In P4G, that means trying to solve the mystery of who’s committing these crimes throughout Inaba, making the most of my limited free time to max out stats, and attempting to fuse a Persona powerful enough to literally kill god. In the final in-game month of the story, I was scrambling to finish off every lingering social link, treating it like a math equation rather than a life simulator.

But on this subsequent revisit, it feels like those burdens have been completely taken off my shoulder, and I could just vibe out and live in the moment. I found myself talking to more NPCs, even if they didn’t have a quest to offer. I tried using my freetime for various activities that I never really paid attention to, like fishing and building sick-ass mech models to display in my bedroom.

This even led to a revelation that I embarrassingly didn't know about until this replay – I had no idea you could unlock a final third level Persona for each of you party members by hanging out with them one last time in the final months after you had already maxed out their social links. I found this out because I didn’t care so much about min-maxing my playthrough, and instead just wanted to hang out with them one last time in the cozy blanket of winter just because it felt like a nice thing to do. There’s probably a lesson applicable to real life somewhere in there.

But this certainly wasn’t the first time a replay has done wonders for me. I’ve really enjoyed making big projects out of replaying an entire franchise or author’s body of work over a span of a year or so. I did this with Zelda games leading up to Tears of the Kingdom, and Final Fantasy leading up to VII Rebirth. These revisits ended up taking a life of their own, creating a mental timeline that stretches from the opening spark of an idea, through its evolution several decades and iterations later. 

I love seeing how a visual, audio, or mechanical motif in a modern instalment is in conversation with games from back in the 8-bit era. How the open-ended exploration of the original Legend of Zelda feels like a framework for the open-air adventures of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Or how Final Fantasy IX contains a multitude of callbacks to the original NES games.

Speaking of FFIX, my recent revisits of the PS1 Final Fantasy trilogy has also reminded me of just how damn gorgeous the pre-rendered backgrounds of the era were. I spoke about it at length in my episode of The Archive on Parasite Eve, but Square was on a whole different level that generation when it came to crafting memorable spaces that truly felt lived in. For the Final Fantasy games of this era, I especially adored poking around each and every inn I came across. Instead of just having a copy-pasted background with a few things shifted around, each one presents as a bespoke respite that reflected the city or area that they’re found in. Cozy as all hell.

A replay with time and distance from the original release also allows me to gain a newfound appreciation for a game that I might not have had at the start. Back in November, I decided to do a cheeky little replay of MachineGames’ Wolfenstein games in anticipation of Indina Jones and the Great Circle. And while I had held 2017’s New Colossus in incredibly high regard, probably considering it to sit alongside Titanfall 2 as my favorite FPS campaigns of the past decade, for one reason or another I never really gelled with The New Order. 

But lo and behold, a fresh set of eyes 10 years after release, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time through BJ Blazkowicz’s 2014 adventure. The writing, the pacing, and a ton of little moments sprinkled throughout the campaign really stood out to me as the framework for what the studio would go on to do with their latest Indy project. I especially loved the moment in the last act where your hideout – which has acted as a safe space and hub for a bulk of the game – is invaded by Nazi forces. I’m always a fan when a game takes a place that you’ve grown intimately familiar with during peaceful times and forces you to navigate it in combat. Perfect Dark, Silent Hill 4: The Room, and Doom Eternal all do a bang-up job of this.

Wolfenstein isn’t the only game that I warmed up on thanks to a recent replay. Jamming through Asura’s Wrath the other year made me realize that there’s nothing inherently bad about QTEs, it’s just about how a developer chooses to use them. And holy moly, they’re used to perfection in Asura in order to create an anime power fantasy that displays some of the most batshit insane action ever featured in a video game. Same goes for Ryse: Son of Rome, an Xbox One launch game that was chastised for being all looks and no substance. And yeah that’s absolutely true, there’s not a whole lot of depth to be found in its combat and systems, but it’s wild how well its visuals hold up 10+ years after release, and I had a blast playing through its big, dumb, gorgeous, and wonderfully short campaign.

That said, there can be times where a replay has the opposite effect, and actually diminishes the quality of a game in your eyes. Going back to FF, this happened to me just a few months back when I replayed Final Fantasy VIII for the first time in 25 years or so. While I dug the art, music, and characters that filled Squall’s adventure, I was left incredibly cold on the game’s battle system and messy slew of minigames strewn about. The clumsiness of all things Junction felt like a constant roadblock between me and the next area I might enjoy just puttering around.

Thankfully the modern remasters have various quality of life features like 3x speed and god mode to help sand off some of those rougher edges, but the fact remains that this recent replay ended up placing VIII quite low on my ongoing personal ranking of the series, right down there with Final Fantasy II when it comes to the entries I’ve replayed so far.

So yeah, while in my head I know I should probably be giving something new a try, I also don’t feel like a replay is ever a waste of time. A fresh perspective can shine an entirely new light on a game, and make me appreciate it in new and wonderful ways. Life’s too short to turn art into a backlog checklist. Play what makes you happy, even if that play is a replay.