Time was, you could rely on a remastered or remade edition of a game to add something substantial to the experience, but more and more frequently over the past couple decades we've been seeing lacklustre and poorly executed efforts from developers. Indeed, it seems many studios aren’t interested in bringing back classic games in all their glory, so much as just filling their pockets a second time around.

Be honest: Did Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD rekindle the flame or kill the franchise? Did Sonic Colours Ultimate give you a good time or an epileptic fit? And did Return to Arkham have you reaching for your old consoles instead?

We want better graphics and textures, more modern gameplay and mechanics, expanded content and features, and the overall sense that, rather than returning to something from the past, we are bringing it into the future. And yet.

Either outright, by introducing glitches and faults, or merely on balance of good vs bad, so many remasters and remakes have made promises they just couldn’t keep – and these twenty in particular have ended up being worse than the original. 

16-bit, nineties RPG Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan) offers players the opportunity to step into a rich high fantasy world hovering in the space between Mana proper and Final Fantasy. We play as three unnamed heroes – the hero, the girl and the sprite child – who journey out on a quest to restore mana (a sort of magic energy) power to the legendary Mana Sword.

It’s fun, it’s cute and offers a good thirty-plus hours of playtime, with plenty of story and surprises to keep it chugging along. So it may have seemed an easy win for Square to dig this old SNES game out of the archives and remake it for modern systems. Except the systems in question are the PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Windows…

Q Studios jumped in to handle development of Secret of Mana 3D, and they managed to go too far without going far enough. The danger, of course, in turning a 2D game 3D is having to overhaul the look of the entire thing, and if you’re not careful you can lose the unique aesthetic of the original. And that’s precisely what happened with Secret of Mana, with the remake broadly maintaining the same story and gameplay but giving it sixth-gen Pokémon game graphics. The mechanics feel thoroughly out of place on current hardware, with none of the upgrades to combat or controls that could have made it worthwhile, and thus it winds up being the worst of both worlds.