Glow-Up or Cash Grab? Ranking the Most Controversial Anime and Game Reboots From 'They Actually Did It' to 'Put It Back in the Vault'
Photo by Photo by Dominik Puskas on Unsplash on Unsplash
There's a very specific kind of dread that comes with seeing a beloved franchise get the reboot treatment. It's that gut-punch moment when the announcement trailer drops and your brain starts running probability calculations: Is this going to be the one that actually respects the source material, or are we about to lose two hours of our lives we can never get back?
The answer, historically, is a coin flip. For every remake that becomes its own masterpiece, there's a live-action adaptation that sends fans into a five-stage grief spiral. This is the definitive tier list of the most talked-about reboots and remakes in anime and gaming — ranked not just on quality, but on the audacity of the attempt.
S Tier: They Understood the Assignment (And Then Some)
Remakes That Earned the Right to Exist
Final Fantasy VII Remake (and its sequel, Rebirth) sits alone at the top of this category, and if you want to fight about it, the comments are open. Square Enix did something that seemed genuinely impossible: they took one of the most sacred texts in gaming history and expanded it into something new without gutting what made it special. Cloud is still brooding. Aerith is still heartbreaking. Midgar still slaps. But the game also dared to go off-script in ways that made longtime fans simultaneously furious and intrigued — which is honestly the ideal reaction for a remake of this scale.
The Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime deserves its place here too. After the catastrophic launch of Cyberpunk 2077, nobody was asking for an anime adaptation. Then Studio Trigger dropped a 10-episode gut punch that made people fall in love with Night City all over again — and actually drove players back to the game in massive numbers. That's not just a good adaptation. That's a full franchise resurrection. Respect.
A Tier: Not Perfect, But Genuinely Good Faith Efforts
The 'I Had Concerns But I'll Admit I Was Wrong' Zone
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is technically a reboot of the original 2003 anime, and while the original has its defenders (loudly, on Reddit, at all hours), Brotherhood's decision to follow Hiromu Arakawa's completed manga is objectively the correct call. It's tighter, the payoffs land harder, and it gave us Roy Mustang in full villain-stomping mode. A-tier reboot energy.
The Resident Evil 2 Remake also earns its A-tier badge without much argument. Capcom took a game that many considered untouchable and rebuilt it from the ground up with over-the-shoulder horror that made Leon Kennedy feel genuinely terrifying to control again. It didn't erase the original. It made you appreciate both versions for different reasons. That's the dream.
B Tier: It's Fine. It's Just… Fine.
The Solid But Uninspired Middle Ground
Shadow of the Colossus (PS4 remake) lives here. Bluepoint did a technically flawless job. The visuals are stunning. The colossi look incredible. But something about the sterile perfection of the remake stripped a little of the haunting, melancholy weirdness from the original. It's like getting a museum-quality reproduction of a painting you loved — accurate in every detail, but somehow missing the soul of the brushstrokes.
The Berserk 2016 anime adaptation also parks itself in B Tier, though arguably it's being generous. It gets credit for attempting to adapt the post-Eclipse arc, which is genuinely difficult material. It loses points for the CGI that looked like it was rendered on a gaming laptop from 2011. Berserk deserves better. Berserk always deserves better. That's just the Berserk condition.
C Tier: The 'Who Was This For?' Section
Reboots That Missed the Point Entirely
The live-action Death Note film on Netflix (2017) is a masterclass in how to adapt a psychological thriller by removing all the psychology and most of the thriller. Light Turner — not Yagami, Turner — is a fundamentally different character in ways that betray everything that made the original so compelling. The cat-and-mouse tension between Light and L is what makes Death Note electric. The film traded that for teen drama and a climax set at a homecoming dance. We're not making this up.
DmC: Devil May Cry (2013) still triggers a visceral reaction from the community a decade later. The reboot swapped Dante's iconic white hair for a darker, edgier design that felt less like a creative evolution and more like someone Googled "how do teenagers think is cool" and ran with the results. The gameplay was actually decent — genuinely. But the character redesign became a rallying point for everything fans felt was wrong with the reboot-era philosophy of "what if we made it grittier?"
D Tier: The Franchise Disrespect Hall of Fame
You Owe the Fans an Apology
The live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender film (2010) is the answer to the question "what if we made an adaptation that managed to get almost everything wrong?" Mispronounced character names. Stripped out the humor that gave the original its emotional weight. Compressed three seasons of carefully built worldbuilding into 103 minutes. The original creative team left the project during production — which should have been the warning sign — and the result is a movie that exists primarily as a cautionary tale in film school curricula.
Honestly, the fact that Netflix's live-action Avatar series (2024) landed as well as it did feels like a direct response to how badly the bar had been set in the basement.
F Tier: Sealed in a Vault, Never Spoken of Again
The Ones That Made Fans Genuinely Sad
We're not going to name every entry here because some wounds are still fresh. But the pattern is always the same: a studio acquires a beloved IP, strips out the elements that made it beloved (usually because those elements are "too niche" or "too expensive"), and delivers something that shares a name with the original and absolutely nothing else.
The real F Tier isn't even the bad reboots. It's the unnecessary ones — franchises that were perfectly complete, pulled back out of retirement for no discernible reason other than brand recognition and quarterly revenue targets. You know the ones.
Final Verdict: The Remake Problem Has One Solution
The through line between every S-Tier and F-Tier entry on this list is simple: the best remakes are made by people who genuinely love the source material. The worst ones are made by people who love the IP's market value.
Audiences can tell the difference in the first five minutes. Every time. The discourse around reboots isn't just fandom overreaction — it's fans doing quality control that studios sometimes refuse to do themselves. Keep the debate alive. Keep holding the remakes accountable. And for the love of everything, stop mispronouncing Aang.
