Over the weekend, the dust seemed to settle around Nintendo’s unexpected (and, in places, hotly debated) re-release of Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen, and I found myself feeling rather out of step. When Nintendo first announced these ports, available via the Nintendo eShop at £16.99 per title, the reaction from the community was immediate and loud. Before this, we’d already seen Game Boy Advance entries show up in the Nintendo Classics lineup, accessible through a paid Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack plan. A bit cheeky, no doubt, yet for anyone craving a hit of nostalgia, it was still a satisfying bonus.
For Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen, though, you’re essentially being asked to pay nearly £35 for the set. That’s the price of a full year’s subscription to a single Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack Individual membership, if you’re counting. Unsurprisingly, many Pokémon fans have pushed back against these ports from the beginning—and that’s disappointing. Still, this release represents a comparatively rare moment where Nintendo reaches back into Pokémon’s past to bring older games forward for today’s hardware. The last time we saw something genuinely similar was the arrival of Crystal on the 3DS in 2018 (also at roughly the same price, as I mentioned).
As someone who’s followed Pokémon since Gen 1—though Gen 2 remains my firm favourite—I’m genuinely excited to play these games properly again, without turning to emulation. Getting the GBA versions of Red and Green on Switch felt like a long-held wish coming true, and this weekend I even caught myself winding down on the sofa, playing it on my big HD TV. Seeing an older Pokémon title like this would’ve blown my younger self away. So I’m thankful to Game Freak, The Pokémon Company, and Nintendo for making it happen.
That said, there are drawbacks. This isn’t a simple one-for-one port. If you’re naming your rival (or yourself) using anything like “Ass,” “Asshole,” or “Dick,” the game doesn’t even register your choice—it just skips ahead to the next screen, automatically swapping in one of its set, predefined alternatives instead. In practice, it’s a straightforward profanity filter. You can get around it with Welsh swear words, or by typing “azz” instead of “ass,” and similar tweaks. Even so, it’s still a change to the original experience—whether you see that as improvement or not—and a glance at social media shows the reaction hasn’t been great.
Of course, there’s a rationale for the choice. I suspect the profanity filter is there because you’ll be able to transfer Pokémon to Home (and from there move them into newer games, including features such as Wonder Trade, among others). Nintendo likely wants to avoid situations where parents are upset when their child trades Pokémon with names like “Dicknose,” while the original Trainer is “BastardMan,” or something along those lines. It’s a departure from the original games, but Nintendo has long leaned toward family-friendly content. Honestly, can’t we just accept that?
Still—wait a moment. There’s more. I’m not one of those joyless puritans who rejects every change made to a port you’re buying up front. The original version remains accessible, and with enough searching online you can still find… certain routes to experience it. Want to call Green “Twatbag,” for example? On Android, the option is there through a Cloyster. But the other smaller tweaks Nintendo included are starting to look more interesting.
So far, I’ve noticed one standout improvement over the original baseline that I genuinely appreciate: the “Roaming Roar bug” is gone. Over the weekend, a user on Twitter said the Roaming Roar issue that caused serious losses in the original games has been fixed. Put plainly: if the roaming legendaries Raikou/Entei used Roar after they showed up through a random encounter, they’d vanish from your save for good — permanently. That problem appears to have been resolved in the Nintendo Switch versions.
This change hasn’t been promoted, and Nintendo hasn’t officially confirmed it at the time of writing. Even so, it matters. It suggests that somewhere, someone went into the code and altered a line or two that has been infamous in Pokémon circles for decades. It’s also kind of amusing—if not exactly encouraging—that the IV values for the legendary beasts (the hidden stats) are still completely off, though fixing that may have been a more stubborn task.
In the non-European versions of the games (sorry, friends), the infamous ‘Nugget Bridge Glitch‘ is still completely there to be found. Bear in mind that you need an NA or JP edition of the game for it to work—even on Switch. That said, watching Nintendo mend “bad” bugs while leaving in something entertaining like this… is certainly an interesting way to handle it. It also brings back how much fun we had with these games all those years ago.
Finally, there’s the addition of “Event Tickets” inside the game—special items that were previously tied to region-only events, which enabled encounters with Ho-Oh, Lugia, and Deoxys. Once you defeat the Elite Four (meaning you’ve entered the endgame), these items will simply appear in your inventory, so you don’t need to travel to Japan during a specific week just to get a shot at catching Deoxys, for instance. Even better, these “mon aren’t “shiny locked,” so players with patience (and plenty of spare time) can try to coax them into spawning as shinies—something you couldn’t do in the original releases. Niche, maybe, but Pokémon fans are nothing if not devoted.
I’m still a little bothered that Nintendo priced these games at £16.99 each. If that amount were for both, I’d probably accept the cost more easily. I’m also torn about adding the profanity filter. Still, the games have fixed a well-known bug, they’ll let me move my “mon” to Pokémon Home, and they also give me—at least for a short while—another chance to recapture the spark that made my childhood feel a bit more enjoyable.
I genuinely hope—hope—we’re next in line for Pokémon HeartGold/SoulSilver. Those are my favourite Pokémon games, and perhaps among my favourite games overall. And if someone told me, “Fine, you can have them, but with a profanity filter and some bug fixes,” would I complain? Or would I be happy with an even better take on a game I love, with a few minor adjustments? Honestly, I’d expect the second option. After all, if I take issue with anything Game Freak/Nintendo does, I can always go back to the originals.