Over the weekend, the fog around Nintendo’s unexpected (and, in some ways, controversial) rerelease of Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen has lifted, and it’s all left me feeling rather peculiar. When Nintendo first announced these ports, released via the Nintendo eShop where they retail for £16.99 each, there was a lot of community outcry. Previously, we’d seen Game Boy Advance titles added to the Nintendo Classics catalogue, accessible viaa paid Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack membership. A bit cheeky, fine, but for those that wanted to partake in some retro goodness, it’s always been an indulgent bonus.
With Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen, we’re being asked to shell out nearly £35 for the package. That’s a full year’s subscription to an individual Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack Individual membership, for anyone keeping count. From the off, then, large parts of the Pokémon community were pitched against these ports – and it’s a shame. This initiative marks a rare moment of Nintendo reaching into days of Pokémon past to make older experiences relevant again on new hardware. The last time we saw this in earnest was with the launch of Crystal on the 3DS in 2018 (at a similar price point, I might add).
As someone that has been a follower of Pokémon since Gen 1 – with Gen 2 being a firm favourite – I am happy to be able to play the games properly, without having to emulate. Getting the GBA versions of Red and Green on Switch is something of a dream come true, I thought to myself this weekend, as I sat on the sofa playing it on my nice big HD TV. Playing an older Pokémon game like this would have blown my teenage self’s tiny mind. I am thankful that Game Freak, The Pokémon Company and Nintendo have worked whatever magic to make this happen.
However, there are caveats. This isn’t a straight-up port. For the child-minded amongst us, you can’t name your rival (or yourself) names like “Ass”, “Asshole” or “Dick”, with the game not even acknowleding your input and just moving onto the next screen, using one of the game’s default names used instead. It’s a rudimentary profanity filter, as it stands: you can get around it with Welsh swear words, or by using “azz” instead of “ass” and so on. Still, though, it’s an edit of the original game – for better or worse – and a cursory look at social media will tell you that it’s going down like a bag of cold Poliwags.
There’s method to the madness, of course. I’m assuming the profanity filter has been added because you’ll be able to transfer Pokémon to Home (which can then be used to migrate them to newer games, with features like Wonder Trade, and so on) and Nintendo doesn’t want a situation where parents get angry because their child did a trade and the Pokémon is a Hypno called “Dicknose” and the original Trainer is called “BastardMan” or something. It’s different from the original games, but Nintendo has always been family-first. We can take the hit, surely?
But, hang on. There’s more. I’m not the sort of boring puritan that is dead against any change being made to a port we’re buying in this manner. The original game still exists, and there are still… certain ways to play it… if I look hard enough online. If I want to call Green “Dickmuncher”, the world is my Cloyster on an Android, for example. But the other little changes Nintendo has made, now, they’re interesting.
So far, I’ve encountered one major fix compared to the base game that I think is extraordinary: the “Roaming Roar bug” has been eradicated. Over the weekend, a user on Twitter reported that the Roaming Roar bug that caused some pretty high-value losses the original games had been fixed. To explain simply; if roaming legendaries Raikou/Entei used Roar afer appearing via random encounter then they would permanently despawn from the game. Forever. This has, seemingly, been fixed in the Nintendo Switch version of the games.
This hasn’t been marketed, or – at the time of writing – confirmed by Nintendo. But it makes a big difference: it means someone, somewhere, has dipped into the code to tweak a line or two that has been infamous in Pokémon communities for decades. The fact that the legendary beasts’ IV values (read: hidden stats) are still completely borked is amusing, though – assumedly that was a tougher problem to address.
In the non-European version of the games (sorry, pals), the infamous ‘Nugget Bridge Gltich‘ is still alive and kicking. Bear in mind you need an NA or JP version of the game in order for this to work – even on Switch! But seeing Nintendo fix ‘bad’ bugs whilst leaving fun ones like this in the game… it’s an interesting tactic. And it helps remind us all of the fun we had in these games when we first played them years ago.
I’m still a bit sour on the fact that Nintendo issued these games at £16.99 each. Maybe if it was for both, I’d be able to swallow the hit a bit easier. And I am torn about the inclusion of the profanity filter, too. But the games have also fixed a famous bug, they will allow me to migrate my ‘mon to Pokémon Home, and they let me – for a fleeting moment – recapture some of that magic that made my childhood just a bit more bearable.
I pray – pray – that we get Pokémon HeartGold/SoulSilver next. They are my favourite Pokémon games, if not some of my favourite games of all time. And if someone said to me “OK, you get them, but with a profanity filter, and some bug fixes” would I bemoan that? Or would I embrace an even better version of a game I love with some slight changes in them? Probably the latter to be honest, because after all, if I have an issue with anything Game Freak/Nintendo does, I can just go back and play the originals.
