SNES Why many Super NES games felt like remakes of NES ones?

[moonbits]

Your examples don't exactly mean remakes but developers circling back to what made those games click, since some of those franchises really tried different approaches, like Zelda. Nintendo kind of does this every generation in a way, the SNES established their formula of making sequels.

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Super Castlevania IV was just a reboot of the original NES Castlevania.

I don't know if "reboots" were a thing yet for gaming (since it was fairly young) but I wouldn't be surprised if the staff at Konami was like "okay so we got a new hardware, what could we do with Castlevania? Revisiting Dracula's Castle as Simon Belmont?"

If find it funny that CV had a game, a sequel than changed the formula (like SMB 2 USA or even Zelda II) then went for a prequel in the third episode like Dragon Quest III did on the NES featuring another Belmont (with a similar sprite) then went back to the first game with a new coat of 16-bits paint (like Battlemaniacs in a way).

But as people said: the SNES was such as massive gap in videogaming (like the PSX years after) so they had to revisit the classics with the newer technologies allowing more ideas to be done.

Your examples don't exactly mean remakes but developers circling back to what made those games click, since some of those franchises really tried different approaches, like Zelda. Nintendo kind of does this every generation in a way, the SNES established their formula of making sequels.

ALTTP still felt different I agree but the name A Link to the Past also implied a "back to the roots" after the odd Zelda II.

Super Mario World was at least an entirely new adventure as well.

Maybe back then the name sequel was mostly "doing the same thing but better" like Megaman has done for the six NES MM games.

 

[Bluewyne]

The culture of gaming was different back then. When new hardware would come out, beloved games would get a graphically updated port with new features and easter eggs.
A lot of games didn't even have stories tbh. The manual might have given some context, but most games in the NES era was just about gameplay.