I played the remake on the Wii. And while the game isn't necessarily an amazing standout on it's own. It deserves much recognition for being a Rogue-/lite/ years before the term was even coined.
It's a procedurally generated dungeon crawler where your goal is getting to the bottom, picking up whatever equipment you can find along the way and using it to fight enemies.
But it has mechanisms for both transferring power directly to your next run, and to power up permanently through an achievment system. Much like you'd expect from a modern title like Rogue Legacy or Hades, only a decade early.
For that reason alone it is worth preserving and looking at.