I was young, but I have a clear memory of when I first played Final Fantasy on NES. At a friend’s house, I was sucked into the character creation, the grinding, and the music. It was one of my earliest experiences with turn-based RPGs and it rocked. More than 30 years later, it’s available on a Nintendo console (that isn’t a limited-run mini console) for the first time in the west in nearly 20 years. The Pixel Remaster release of the original Final Fantasy isn’t definitive, but it’s close enough, and the gameplay boosts provide an excellent entrypoint for players of all ages and skill levels to experience an important piece of gaming history.

Final Fantasy begins with picking a party of four characters from six different classes. From there, you journey across the world trying to restore the four elemental crystals and save the world. Along the way you explore towns and dungeons, level up and upgrade, and complete a slew of quests that slowly give you access to all of the expansive multi-continent land. While some of the direction in the game is obtuse at times, it moves briskly and rarely lingers on an area for too long. That pace is made even better thanks to the Pixel Remaster’s new gameplay boosts that let you turn off random encounters and also multiply the amount of experience and money you earn by up to four times (you can also cut it down to half if you want a sterner challenge).

The upgrade to the sprites is very nice, but the fact the backgrounds are upgraded has an impact on the way battles look. Bosses that once looked massive and daunting are now much smaller on the screen in a relative cavern of a background. It’s by no means a gamebreaker, but it’s one of the few reasons why this release does not feel like the definitive version of the NES classic. Another reason is that this does not contain the extra content found in the GBA release from 2004, including multiple new dungeons. It does take some aspects of that re-release, though, including a handful of gameplay tweaks and even the localization.

Having the ability to switch between the newly arranged soundtrack (which rocks) and the original one is nice, but the much ballyhooed font change is still not ideal. The new “classic font” is an improvement over the modernized style used in the mobile and PC releases of the Pixel Remasters, but it’s more of a bandage on a wound than an actual salve.

All that being said, Final Fantasy is still a great game even if it shows its age and this release isn’t the best it could be. I love traipsing around this world with my warriors of light. I love the music and the style. If you’ve never played the original Final Fantasy before, the experience and money boosts make it easy to experience without the grind. This is a good enough release of Final Fantasy and for that I recommend it, but I wish this could have been the slam-dunk definitive version.