From Dragon Quest’s first moments, Charlock Castle is perpetually within view; it looms just out of reach, the first thing you see when you embark on your quest, and your journey’s final destination. Like the Eye of Sauron, searing cigarette burns in smoggy Mordor clouds, the castle is tauntingly visible, but inaccessible. To paraphrase Samwise Gamgee, the lair of the Dragonlord, is the one place in Alefgard you don't want to see any closer, and the one place you're trying to get to.

Charlock’s mere visibility makes for surprisingly compelling motivation. While the player character’s motivation is to rescue the princess and defeat the Dragonlord, my motivation as the player was simply, “What do I have to do to get to that castle?”

If Alefgard is a wheel, Tantagel Castle, where the player begins, is its hub. In the updated iOS version of Dragon Quest that I was playing, you can quick save anywhere, but in the original NES version, the hero can only record his progress by returning to Tantagel and speaking to the king. You will return to the castle many, many times over the course of a play through, mostly because, as you venture out into a world filled with low-level slimes and high-level Bewarewolves and Knights Abhorrent, you will die and die again. And when your HP inevitably hits zero, you will find yourself before the king’s throne with the aging monarch warning you to not be so reckless.

Everything in Dragon Quest happens quickly. Your trips out into the over world—at least for the first five hours, or so—come to an end as soon as you meet a powerful monster. All the game’s battles are short. With only one character to control—an element the sequel departed from with its introduction of the multi-character party— even the final boss battle against the Dragon Lord is over within 10 minutes.

This structure makes Dragon Quest ideal as a mobile game. I work as a sports reporter for a small daily paper, and I usually picked Dragon Quest up during lulls in games— at halftime, or even during brief, one-minute timeouts. While quitting after a minute of playtime would leave you in the lurch in many games—and in Chrono Trigger, the classic RPG I’m currently working through on iOS, it would leave me stranded in the middle of a battle—Dragon Quest’s 30-second long combat sections enable the mobile gamer to make real progress in small windows of time.

The iOS version is also aided by tight touch controls, a virtual joystick which the player can move to three different locations on the screen, and grid-based movement that makes steering your character in the right direction feel smooth and easy. I downloaded Dragon Quest after a hard-to-use touch interface turned Playdead's excellent three-hour platformer, Limbo, into a six or seven hour slog for me on iOS. I was looking for a mobile game that would deliver more fun by requiring less precision. I had just finished and enjoyed, Final Fantasy XV's 25-hour story mode, so I started scrolling through Square Enix's extensive App Store library.

After seeing the $2.99 price tag, I decided that the turn-based structure would likely make Dragon Quest less demanding than Limbo— a game in which perfect timing is often essential to your progress.

It did. I played the game with one hand, and used one thumb to complete every in game action. Battles require selecting one action from a menu of four, and the screen gives the menu enough space that I never clicked the wrong item by accident. Tapping through these quick battles felt streamlined and intuitive.

However, despite the smoothness of Dragon Quest’s transition to iOS, the game’s forward progress relies on some decidedly dated gameplay elements. In true NES fashion, there are confusing, scour-the-map, “Where do I go?” moments, presumably baked in to keep fans playing longer. These are frustrating. When I found that one key area could only be accessed by walking through a random spot in a random wall, it wasn’t the “Aha!” moment that game developers hope for. It was the “How would anybody figure that out?” moment that developers should dread.

There are a few moments like that in the story. In the age of the Internet, they didn’t ruin the game for me; after an hour or so of banging my head against the wall, I just looked up a walkthrough video. But, Dragon Quest’s original audience had to search the overworld, talking to each of its denizens in a quest to find the one who would give a vague hint about where to go next. This is a distraction from what makes the game great and it feels unfairly rigged against the player.

Also, Dragon Quest gives no directions on where to go after you exit Tantagel. Head clockwise and the difficulty will ramp up incrementally as you become more powerful; head counterclockwise and suddenly you’re up against monsters that can knock you out with a hit or two. I soldiered on and did some grinding and in a few hours I was powerful enough to defeat any opponent in the game. But, when I eventually headed clockwise, I found an item that would have significantly aided my progress had I found it earlier. This isn’t the game’s fault necessarily; there just isn’t anything in the game—besides pretty extreme difficulty—to let you know you’re going the wrong way.

But, despite these minor flaws, Dragon Quest works on iOS because it is an NES game. Handheld and console gaming have always had an interesting, delayed relationship. The Gameboy Color was an NES that you could carry around in your backpack; the Gameboy Advance, a Super Nintendo; the DS, an N64; the 3DS, a GameCube. With console gaming continually getting more advanced, with the Uncanny Valley leveling out more and more with each new Naughty Dog release, with series that trace their roots back to Nintendo’s first system getting bigger and bigger open worlds (looking at you, Breath of the Wild), with increasingly complicated skill trees and combat systems marking this gen’s RPGs, there is something cathartic about heading into an 8-bit world that takes 10 minutes to fully traverse, and in which you kill enemies by tapping on them. We expect more and more from console gaming; from an app that we’ll likely open in small moments of downtime, between Facebook and Twitter, simplicity is good; very good.

Like NES games, mobile games are usually guided by one simple but overarching mechanic or concept. In 2013's sensation Flappy Bird, you tap the screen to jump; in Super Mario Bros. you press A to jump. In Doodle Jump you guide a cartoony character through vertically designed levels; Ice Climbers: same. In Candy Crush Saga, despite the sugary veneer, the player is basically playing Dr. Mario.

While the release of 3-D benchmarks like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Final Fantasy VII in the late 90’s marked the beginning of the end of the reign of 2-D on consoles, mobile has always been a safe harbor for these games. The Dragon Quest series, like every surviving franchise with roots in the 80’s, has evolved over time.