My thoughts: Pokémon Firered and Leafgreen rerelease on Switch February 21, 2026 I already made a pair of ranty toots yesterday, based on my immediate gut reaction on the announcement, pricetag and that the seperate language versions are sold seperately. But I have since given it some thought, and while my overall opinion did not change, I have decided to elaborate a bit more with my opinions, to explain the source of my disappointment more, and share my thoughts on how they could've done better. First of all, for those that didn't read it on my main Mastodon account over on Kind.Social, here are those two toots: https://kind.social/@Bright5park/116104920677237802 https://kind.social/@Bright5park/116105024510925235 And now, for my more elaborate thoughts: ## The Price Tag 20 Euros, for a mere rom-in-emulator rerelease of a game that came out in 2004. Come on, Nintendo/GameFreak/TPC. You can do better than that. I don't demand a full-on Digital Eclipse-style digital museum for that pricetag... but only the rom and emulator - which is likely the same one they use for NSO GBA, just with some special sauce slapped on top to make the wireless stuff work and turn off savestates and whatnot - at 20€ is a bit greedy. Especially considering that there'll be people who want both games. Personally, I would have expected half that, and even that would be with plenty of grumbling about how it ought to just be included in the NSO Expansion Pass on my part. But what would I have wanted to be included to make the 20€ make sense? While it would be a pipedream, I think a native port as a soft remaster would've been nice, with a few accomodations to modernity - as long as there is the option to switch back to the authentic experience of the time, for the purists among us. For example, higher-quality sound samples for the music, fast-forwarding battles or even (toggle-able) auto-battles if the wild critters are *way* under your level, so you don't have to stumble over annoying Lv3 Pidgeys or Rattatas on the way to the Indigo Plateau if you decide to take the scenic route back through Pallet Town and Route 1, or a higher difficulty option. But also, the option to trade and battle online. Perhaps even with a "Pokémon Kanto 30" mode (or however they'd call it), effectively a fast-paced 30-player battle royale tournament in honor of the 30th anniversary, not dissimiliar to Tetris 99 and co. Or, if they're being "budget-conscious" (read: lazy) about it... why not just include the GameBoy originals (with Japan getting Green in Leafgreen, plus Japanese Blue in both editions, while us westerners get Blue in Leafgreen)? Plus a 3D Allstars-esque jukebox for the games' soundtracks. But if they went ahead and made a whole-ass Digital Eclipse-style digital museum, complete with scans of posters, production material and whatnot, scans of the boxart on a rotatable 3D model, developer interviews, and maybe even some playable pre-release versions (I know the proto for Gold is out there!), I'd even be willing to part with 40€, possibly more depending on the scope of it - even if the only fully-playable games end up being the Kanto games. ## The language thing This is the part that *really* got my blood boiling. The game is only 16.8MB large (as-per the ROM file I got on my computer). I couldn't immediately find a number for the different language versions of Firered that exist worldwide (the eShop listing only showed four), but I'll just pull a nice round number out of my posterior for the sake of setting up an example: Let us assume that there are ten different language versions of Firered and Leafgreen that were released globally - for the sake of argument, let's say that's Japanese, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Polish, Ukranian and Korean. Even that would only bring the "raw" size of the games up to 168MB. The download size for Firered as-per the eShop page is 39MB. Subtracting the ROM's size from it, that's about 22.2MB just for the emulator. So, even if we assume that Nintendo and GameFreak never heard of compression before (and I know for a fact that at least GameFreak was taught all about it by Satoru Iwata, may he rest in peace), that would be a slightly wasteful, but still perfectly reasonable 190.2MB. Plus, I am sure that this could be compressed by a lot, given that a lot of the graphics, sound and game engine data is just duplicates between the different languages, minor revisional differences aside. And as mentioned in my toots... even if they want to charge extra for it, and even if they want to release it as a seperate title, even if they want to turn off savestates and rewind to keep you from cheating... they could still use the framework used by the NSO Nintendo Classics apps to give players within the app the option to use whichever language they like (even if I could fully understand it if changing the language would necessitate a full wipe of the savedata). But, even failing that. Even if they - for some reason - didn't want to or couldn't expose the user to even that teensy-tiny little wrinkle, and instead *had* to list each language version seperately on the eShop. Nintendo owns and operates the eShop, and they make and sell the Nintendo Switch hardware, too. They are in full control of the whole technology stack here. They could just give you a license to *all* versions of Firered if you buy *any* of them, instead of relying on a clumsy "Oh, do make sure you buy the right language version!" message, and - worse - making you pay *again* if you want to play in a different language. That is - if not THE worst, then at least pretty close to - the worst possible "solution" that they could've chosen.