I played it on my phone which nowadays is the port of the pixel remaster. I loved it and I thought it was great! I definitely felt a little overpowered due to not fleeing at all. I would recommend checking it out, I got just under 28 hours of playtime on my first run.
Haha, well, to each their own, but the way I see it:
The second has a skill system that I like more than the first one, and it starts to have more of a semblance of a story. The NPCs in the first one basically just exist to tell you to go to place A, then B, and so on. To be honest, I couldn’t even finish the first one.
Don’t know how drastic the game was changed in the pixel remaster (sounds like for the better), but all of the fun ideas fell flat when you played it on the Famicom. As good as the Star Wars story was, the dialogue system had waay too many key words to choose from when you talk to NPCs, so even hunting for the word you want, let alone guessing, was a nightmare. There were also tons and tons of rooms in dungeons that led to nowhere, and the progression system could easily be exploited by both the player and the CPU. Maybe the pixel remaster irons these flaws out, but it was not a fun experience at all the first time I played.
The pixel remaster attempts to do for FF2 what its GBA grandfather did for FF1: force a weird old game into later series mechanics, balance and challenge be damned. It went even worse than you’d expect due to a weaker understanding of FF2’s mechanics. It is easier in more respects than not, though, and it got rid of the special monster closet encounter rate.