Super Mario RPG (Switch)
Mario RPG (1996) is a game I replay every so often, most recently a year or two ago, so my feelings about it are pretty fresh. Mario RPG (2023) is a faithful enough remake that those feelings transfer to it more or less intact. The original already feels like a modern thing, a 10-15-hour game with minimal cruft (though a few too many minigames) and an emphasis on personality. It's the prototype of every pixel art JRPG throwback by a four-person indie team.
The changes are fairly minor but nice. Frog coins are more plentiful, meaning you don't have to worry about missing any or hoarding the ones you do find, and the new mechanism for earning them--tougher enemy variants--adds an element of danger to early areas in particular. Being able to switch characters during a fight encourages you to play around with party composition rather than committing to three characters and ignoring the others, and also ...
SMRPG spoilers
The Lazy Shell armor still mostly trivializes the endgame, and it's less of a pain to use when you can start fights with a character who isn't wearing armor that halves their attack power and then swap in invincible healer Peach or whoever else
The addition of a postgame leans into SMRPG's strengths, even if it's routine boss re-fights etc. It's a fairly early example of Nintendo (or Square on Nintendo's behalf, anyway) doing a thing they would become very, very good at, one of the things they essentially opted out of the console wars to focus on: games as not only dexterity or logic challenges or vehicles for plot, but also places where you want to spend time. It's hard to think of a better reward for finishing than an excuse to run around and talk to all the weird NPCs again.
I do think that, as with the Link's Awakening remake, the translation into 3D made movement feel a little less precise. It mostly doesn't matter much, but a few sections--the Bean Valley vines, the Bowser's Castle platforming stuff--can be frustrating in a way that's not consistent with anything else you have to do. I guess it makes you think about how impressive it is that the original had 2D isometric platforming and yet wasn't miserable to play.
I've seen people talk about whether the visuals are faithful enough to the original, or whether they misinterpret the spirit of the original or whatever. I just appreciate the commitment to the scale and proportions of a low-resolution RPG with fairly small sprites. I like how the Link's Awakening and Pokemon DP remakes look for the same reason. 90s console RPG developers came up with a whole visual rhetoric and animation approach for wringing the maximum amount of expressiveness out of 16-by-24-pixel sprites with heads the size of their bodies, and I'm interested to see modern iterations on this, particularly outside the context of pixel art imitation (which, as someone who does a lot of pixel art imitation, I'm not criticizing; I just want to see different approaches to the same ideas). Basically I'm in favor of anything that gets us further from games as movies, so why not this?