A blockbuster franchise, too. After more than a dozen games and more than 70 million cumulative units sold, Final Fantasy for the Playstation Portable marks the series' 20th anniversary with a few modest enhancements. It fuses the lavish CGI sequences from Origins (the 2003 Playstation remake) with the four bonus dungeons tacked onto Dawn of Souls (the 2004 Game Boy Advance port), sharpens the visuals by increasing the resolution and gives you a smidgen more to eyeball courtesy of the PSP's widescreen display. You also get a gallery of unlockable stills from legendary series artist Yoshitaka Amano and one more uber-dungeon—a maze dubbed "Labyrinth of Time" that auto-saps your party's health as you explore it.

Otherwise this is the same Final Fantasy you've either played before or been hearing about for years from your slightly older friends who experienced the original back when Reagan was holding forth about tearing down walls. "The world lies shrouded in darkness," declaims the stormy intro, which is where you come in, rolling four characters from four possible professions (warrior, thief, monk, red/white/black mage), then trudging, sailing and eventually flying around three continents sprinkled with towns and punctuated by dungeons. The hook? Combat, random and relentless, against a bestiary of more than 200 creatures. Win a few battles, auto-level up, and haul your booty back to the nearest town to trade for better weapons, armor, magic spells and miscellaneous goods. Rinse. Repeat.

For serious fans only

You've probably heard this a million times, so once more can't hurt: Either you love the Final Fantasy series or you wouldn't really care if its creators switched to selling bricks, teakettles or kites. Obsessively methodical, tortuously complex, embarrassingly melodramatic, unimaginably epic, perennially polarizing—all are ways of describing a Final Fantasy.

All that aside, jumping back to the very beginning if you're fresh off something like Final Fantasy XII can be especially jarring. Final Fantasy was hot in 1987, but RPGs tend to sacrifice "timeless appeal" to the god of dated detail. For all its extra-shiny new lacquer, the 20th-anniversary edition of Square's then-opus is thus more a love letter to fans than a great way to spend 30 bucks. With a story so threadbare it's almost irrelevant and with creaky archaic-gen mechanics, this isn't a game for casual role-players looking for the PSP's Golden Sun.

Towns are undeveloped safe zones with same-same shops, while everywhere else is mostly an excuse to cue the series hallmark random battles, where you engage in simple turn-based combat (fight, use magic, use an item, run away) against the bestiary. And you'll fight. A lot. Every 10 or 15 seconds for the dozen hours it takes to round up the main story's four crystals. Those 200-plus creatures slide by pretty quick, too, if you don't count all the filler between look-alike forests, deserts and swamps, where you'll battle the same inanimate goblins, bigeyes, creeps, slimes and sphinxes.

In the end, this Final Fantasy update turns out to be more of an archaeological curiosity, a way to have a look at the one that started it all—or, if you're an anomaly like me, a chance to play a key slice of history that you shamefully missed on the first go-round.