Who Knew That 10-Year-Olds Would Love Pokémon… Pokémon FireRed, That Is?

Who Knew That 10-Year-Olds Would Love Pokémon… Pokémon FireRed, That Is?

Sometimes, the old ways are best… even for the younger set.

How simple or complex should a game be? This is one of the most important questions a game designer must answer. There’s no true north for those decisions, and the direction that a creator’s internal compass points them is a big part of what defines them as an artist. For the Pokémon series, the creators behind the most recent titles in the series have aimed towards giving players something bigger, more layered, and more open-ended. But do those elements always necessarily add up to more fun?

Taking that question to Pokémon’s core fans—kids—yields some pretty interesting answers. The newest, biggest thing will always bring a special kind of excitement with it, but so does discovering a relic from a forgotten time. Recently, we’ve talked to a few kids who have responded to the Switch eShop releases of 2004’s Game Boy Advance remakes of the first-generation Pokémon games (FireRed and LeafGreen versions) with that kind of enthusiasm. It turns out they love Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen more than the original monochromatic version of the game, maybe for obvious reasons, but also than the more Gen 1 remakes for Switch (Let’s Go, Evee! and Let’s Go, Pikachu!). Not only that, but they’re more engrossed by the GBA remakes than all of the other Pokémon games available on modern consoles. And that makes us think.

From talking to them, it seems that the core appeal of FireRed and LeafGreen has a lot to do with focus. They’ve grown up in a complicated, overstimulating world on a media diet of quick-cut TikTok videos. Games have become immense, endless play spaces like Minecraft and Roblox. And even the most recent Pokémon games with their ever-growing Pokédexes can be too much. By contrast, FireRed and LeafGreen don’t demand so much from your brain. Their worlds consist of a simple grid that’s easy to navigate, and the pokémon they contain are like comfy stuffed animals in a big, grassy bed you can just roll around in. They’re all familiar faces to kids these days, which somehow makes it more exciting when they finally see those again.

And the game itself, with its top-down perspective and relatively small scope, never exhausts your ability to feel out what you want to do next. Nevertheless, there are still problems to solve and decisions to be made. Should you teach the mandatory “CUT” navigational skill to a pokémon that you love battling with, knowing that they’ll lose one of their better combat moves as a result? Or should you saddle some low-level flunky that you could care less about with CUT, knowing that (ironically enough) this means that pokémon will be shackled to your party forever thereafter as the designated “CUT Guy”?

It’s a tough but suitably small-scale question for a kid to grapple with. Certainly it seems more age-appropriate than, “How am I going to find enough Blaze Rods in the Nether to make some Eyes of Ender, which may or may not break before I can use them to find an End Portal and finally beat the Ender Dragon at the end of Minecraft”?  Frankly, that feels less like a good time, and more like being an adult dealing with the grueling realities of the working world.

We’ve known for a while that nostalgic, grown-up Pokémon fans have cherished FireRed and LeafGreen for their ability to make adult responsibilities wash away. For adults, playing old games can feel like rinsing the mud from your shoes after a hard run: refreshing and satisfying. But it turns out that kids also love a game where everything fits together, like so many squares in a glorious mosaic, one where all you have to do to beat the odds is consult your handy Type weakness chart.