Game Review: Pokemon FireRed and Pokemon LeafGreen (Switch/Switch 2)

Twenty years ago when the Game Boy Advance was dominating the handheld market, Nintendo re-released a bunch of their older games on the current-gen console. Games like Super Mario Advance and Metroid: Zero Mission brought the original games to modern audiences who may not have played the original games on the NES or SNES but with upgraded graphics.

For Pokemon specifically, the need to re-release Red and Blue (or Red and Green in Japan) as FireRed and LeafGreen was not just about bringing old games to the current generation. Because of hardware limitations at the time, the Game Boy/Game Boy Color could not connect to the Game Boy Advance, making anything caught in Pokemon Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Gold, Silver, or Crystal essentially stranded in their original games.

Now as fan-made ROM hacks have shown us in the years since (and the Action Replay at the time), there was more than enough room to put all 386 Pokemon introduced between Gen I and the end of Gen III on one cartridge and make them all able to be caught. That said, why sell one (or two with Ruby and Sapphire) when you can sell between 5 and 7 games to collect them all?

This brings us to FireRed and LeafGreen, games which introduced the original 150 to Gen III through a ground up, fairly faithful remake of the original games with full trading compatibility. There are some post-game additions through the Sevii Islands, but by and large these are the same games as Red and Green but with better graphics and some of the glitches fixed (the critical hits aren't based on speed, Psychic is weak to Ghost, not vice-versa).

This iteration on the Switch and Switch 2 are basically just straight ports with minor adjustments. The most notable two are that the event tickets to encounter Ho-Oh/Lugia and Deoxys are built into the game itself, and the Roar glitch with the legendary dogs (if you encounter Entei, Suicune, or Raikou and they use Roar, the original games logged this as them being knocked out and they could never be encountered again) was fixed. Kind of in the same vein but not really is the fact that I accidentally activated the Q&A screen with L and R because the Switch is more ergonomically designed, but accidentally hitting the button did still happen on occasion.

There are some issues that remain from the originals. The berry system is severely lacking, leaving the player largely reliant on catching pokemon already holding berries or finding small marks on the ground where you can grab one. The move tutors are also a little short-sighted and require the player to remember where these important moves are, assuming they don't rush through and accidentally give it to the wrong pokemon and lock that move from being learned again.

The handling of the National Dex is also a little weird in this game, granted handling next generation evolutions was a new concept at the time. Since the PokeDex is still locked to the way it was in 1996, new evolutions like Crobat, Umbreon, Espeon, Hitmontop, Porygon2, Kingdra, and Blissey aren't able to be obtained until after the main narrative is completed and the PokeDex is updated. While the baby forms like Pichu are narratively locked through a reasonably natural process, as are the ones who evolve through held items, it just feels strange when your Golbat keeps giving what's basically an error message when it tries to evolve.

For modern players who are unaware of the franchise's history, the quest to find the Ruby and the Sapphire on the Sevii Islands means next to nothing. In the original games, this was to unlock trading between these games and the other Gen III titles, but since (as of writing), Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald are not available on the Switch or Switch 2, this quest is just post-game content that unlocks nothing.

That said, this is probably the definitive way to play Red and Green, even if there are some things they attempted to "modernize" that feel a little off now. It's still a ton of fun and the easiest way to shiny hunt Deoxys in modern consoles.

★★★★