On the one hand, this is a remake of one of my favorite games of all time that tightens up the mechanics and makes things not ugly to look at, and the five star rating reflects that. On the other, this really feels like a bare minimum for a remake and, especially knowing how well HeartGold and SoulSilver would turn out with all of its rebalancing and expanded content, feels sort of light in comparison, I blazed through this game really quickly because I was making a beeline for the new content after having played the originals so recently, and I can't say any of it was particularly gripping or anything.
All of that being said, I think the more interesting case for this game isn't for me, or for someone who is deep enough into video games to be reading this, but for someone new to JRPGs as a whole. The Kanto Pokemon games, with all due respect to Final Fantasy VII, absolutely blow every other JRPG out of the water in terms of mainstream cultural understanding and accessibility, it didn't launch a multimedia empire that goes toe-to-toe with anything Disney owns by accident. Let's Go Eevee and Let's Go Pikachu are fun diversions that I enjoyed my time with, but this remains the best true remake of those games, and if someone asked me "hello, I would like to get into Pokemon" or "hello, I would like to get into Japanese RPGs", I would hand them this. Accessible enough so that the average ten year old child can beat it, customizable enough that there's an entire cottage industry of people doing insane teambuilding challenge runs of the game. If you bounce off this game, the genre almost certainly isn't for you, and if you like it, there's suddenly a whole world to unlock for yourself.
So here's to Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen, the best entrypoint to the genre that taught me that video games are more than just "run to the right and jump on the bad guys".