The Nintendo Change ports of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen have formally been out for just some hours, which can as effectively be a number of months so far as dataminers are involved. Up to now two hours alone, the web has been doing its finest to speedrun all the secrets and techniques hidden throughout the ROMs for FireRed and LeafGreen.
That features the saddening information that profanity is now banned when naming your in-game character/rival and, in accordance to 1 participant who has in some way already made it to the top of the sport, the inclusion of the Aurora Ticket and Mystic Ticket limited-time distribution gadgets. You’ll be able to shiny-hunt Deoxys, however you possibly can now not name your arch-nemesis ASSCLOWN. Nintendo giveth, and Nintendo taketh away.
Nonetheless, essentially the most fascinating revelation, based on a dataminer by the title of Yakumono/LuigiBlood, is that the emulator used in addition Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen reportedly helps ROMs for Pokémon Sapphire, Ruby, and Emerald as effectively. That may trace at doable plans for Nintendo to deliver extra traditional Pokémon video games from the sequence’ GBA days to the Change and Change 2 libraries.
In line with a dataminer, the Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen releases from in the present day internally additionally fit for Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald, that means these might be coming sooner or later. pic.twitter.com/MvdB0sJS7N
— Centro LEAKS (@CentroLeaks) February 27, 2026
In a publish on Bluesky, LuigiBlood acknowledged that they’d uncovered a number of fascinating tidbits concerning the new GBA Change ports, together with that the emulator in query is Sloop, the identical emulator Nintendo makes use of for the Sport Boy Advance video games featured within the Nintendo Classics library, and that the ROMs have been “closely modified and rebuilt.”
In fact, that’s small potatoes in comparison with their greatest reported discovery. “The one different data I’ll put out is that the emulator explicitly acknowledges ROMs of Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald alongside FireRed and LeafGreen. I discovered this alongside the initialization code that’s associated to enabling emulator hacks for particular video games.”
If that is certainly right, does this imply that ports of the third-gen Pokémon video games is likely to be coming to the Nintendo Change eShop within the close to future? In a follow-up reply, LuigiBlood was fast to state that we shouldn’t be getting forward of ourselves on that entrance. “What we see is a snapshot of present code in the intervening time it was constructed. It’s not an oracle. Possibly it means RSE is subsequent, possibly it’s by no means really taking place. It simply means they’d intentions at one level and nothing else.”
