5. Final Fantasy (Pixel Remaster)

Though previously available on PC and mobile platforms, it wasn’t until this April that Square Enix’s so-called Pixel Remasters of the first six Final Fantasy games landed on PlayStation and Switch. I think VI remains the best of the early Final Fantasy games, but it was also already so excellent that it didn’t need the benefit of a remaster to reveal its greatness. I’d only ever seriously played the original Final Fantasy, however, in its original form on the NES sometime in the late ‘80s. It was undoubtedly remarkable for its time, but it’s also always been a particularly difficult game to go back to, inescapably sluggish and burdened by needless frustrations like the inability to buy more than one potion or other item from shopkeepers at a time.

Elements like this are a sticky film on the surface that can make it difficult to clearly see the magic residing in the adventure underneath. Thankfully, the Pixel Remaster of Final Fantasy wipes away all the detritus and lets this glorious role-playing game shine. Some may wonder why anyone would want to go back to the original Final Fantasy when its immediate sequels “improved” upon it, giving us more complex characters, more intricate worlds, more epic quests. But this is precisely what makes the first feel so refreshing today. There’s an archetypal purity to its structure and a breeziness to its pacing that were arguably lost as the franchise became increasingly elaborate. Revisiting it today, I developed a new admiration for the way in which its world gradually opens up, and for the ways in which its pleasantly barebones story lets us color so much in with our own imaginations. It’s a stirring adventure that brilliantly set the stage for so much of what was to come in the JRPG series, and it moves along at such a wonderfully brisk pace, you can practically feel the wind in your hair as that first iconic airship takes flight.