The Switch 2 launch lineup is not exactly bursting at the seams. While Mario Kart World is the banner game, the handful of others coming on June 5 are mostly ports of existing games. Among those, Bravely Default is an oddball, as it’s an HD remaster of a game that’s more than a decade old rather than a modern game like Street Fighter 6 or Cyberpunk 2077 that can finally run on Nintendo hardware. But for my money, Bravely Default is also an all-time RPG classic, and as strange as it feels to be nostalgic for the 3DS era of games, Switch 2’s Bravely Default: Flying Fairy HD Remaster looks to be a great way to play it.

For those unfamiliar, Bravely Default was a riff on the classic Final Fantasy formula, making it FF in all but name. Four warriors of light, holy crystals, the whole enchilada. It sported a robust class system that encouraged players to find game-breaking combinations, and it was one of the first to sport the ability to speed up encounters and auto-battle–both now mainstays in classic RPG remakes–or even turn them off entirely. The title referred to one of its battle mechanics, the ability to “Default” (defend and store an extra Brave Point aka BP) or “Brave” (spend extra BP, or even go into BP debt, to take extra actions). So for level-grinding, you could Brave every time to burn through low-level enemies, and against tougher enemies and bosses you would need to take a more considered approach.

It was followed by the semi-sequel, Bravely Second: End Layer, and a full sequel, Bravely Second. Notably unlike the Final Fantasy series, the Bravely games take place in one consistent canonical world, so the sequels build on the stories and continuity that came before them.

But like much of the 3DS library, Bravely Default is not exactly easy to play anymore. You need working 3DS hardware and a game cartridge, and unlike Bravely Default 2, it was never released on another platform like Steam. That makes it a prime candidate for the HD remaster treatment, allowing fans to own it in a format that continues well into the future. After a brief hands-on, I’m convinced that Bravely Default will be my most-played Switch 2 game outside of Mario Kart at launch.

To start, the game looks fantastic. The prerendered painterly backgrounds look incredible and vibrant on the big screen, which is all the more impressive when you consider they were originally made to appear on a 3DS. This visual style–your polygonal characters running against a painted backdrop–was itself a throwback to early 3D RPGs like Final Fantasy 7, but it looks especially wonderful here. Meanwhile, the style of the character models themselves largely holds up. It’s a testament to the strength of the art style that these characters–squat chibi characters rendered in the unmistakable style of Akihiko Yoshida–still look so elegant in their simplicity. I wasn’t able to tinker with the job classes to see the lovely way these models look when donning their various outfits, but I’m looking forward to it.

The battle system remains untouched as far as I can tell, which is fine by me because it’s already perfectly balanced. I only played a little bit of an early area but I know from experience that the combination of the Brave/Default and job-class systems creates some engaging combat puzzles, especially once the game starts challenging you to split its systems wide open. This is a game that absolutely wants to make you feel like you’ve outsmarted it.

The newest element is a pair of minigames, which seem well designed even if they’re temporary diversions at best. Both use the Switch 2 mouse functionality, challenging you to use both at once in different ways. The first is a rhythm game that has a glowing tether between your two cursors, and so matching the rhythm means lining up the tether to intersect with the music prompts, or hitting exact notes with the cursors themselves. The second is an airship-piloting game set in the first-person perspective of a pilot, so you have to manage steering the ship’s wheel while also tending to other tasks. Imagine Steel Battalion but cute, with its massive controller being virtualized on screen. Neither game feeds back into the main game, but you can use the job-class costumes in the minigames as you unlock them for a bit of personalization.

I doubt I’ll play much of the minigames. They’re neat little showpieces for the Switch 2 mouse functionality, but they aren’t the draw. The real prize is Bravely Default, one of my favorite modern(ish) RPGs, getting a beautiful restoration and being released from 3DS jail. If you haven’t played it before, or even if you have, this looks to be the way to experience it.