It’s a strange feeling revisiting a game that you know so well from your formative years that has been ever so slightly tweaked. Like meeting your childhood best friend for the first time in 25 years, only to see that somehow they’ve kept their youthful enthusiasm and looks and somehow even enhanced their appearance to look even more full of life.

For me, playing Pokémon FireRed on Nintendo Switch 2 is a bizarre experience. I remember being eight years old, parading around the school playground with my Pokémon trading cards as the first in my school year to have hopped on the trend. It wasn’t much longer that I was sneaking my red GameBoy Colour into classrooms to play Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow during breaktimes.

Back then, eight-year-old me would pride himself on being a bit of a Pokémon pioneer, introducing friends to the franchise that became a global phenomenon. But after completing my favourite all-time Pokémon game in Crystal by 2001, I had begun to look away from Pikachu and pals and every generation of Pokémon since passed me by.

As such, I didn’t own or even play FireRed and LeafGreen when they came out on GameBoy Advance. Despite being heralded by many as the definitive versions of the original games, I’d never touched them until this year’s Switch re-release.

So by missing out on their original 2004 release, it’s an odd emotion to play what is, on the surface, very much the same game I knew like the back of my hand a couple of decades ago. But as soon as you delve into FireRed and LeafGreen – in my case, it’s the Charizard-fronted version – you realise that there is much more than meets the eye.

While it looks to be, on the face of it, a faithful, colourful remaster of the iconic 1990s game – albeit it a 2004-style remaster rather than by 2026 standards – there’s some hidden content and under-the-hood tweaks that make it almost a brand new adventure.

Exploring Kanto has only ever felt and looked better in the Pokémon Let’s Go games, released on the Switch back in 2018. While that was very much a modern re-telling of the original games, FireRed is a nostalgia drenched experience that immediately transforms long-term Pokéfans back to a happier, simpler time.

Hearing that iconic soundtrack for the first time in decades, enhanced compared to the original GameBoy version, was a pure hit of dopamine that may as well have been delivered directly into my veins. But what really gripped me was the twists FireRed has had all along that I’d missed out on.

FireRed and LeafGreen introduced some late and post-game content, including the trip to Sevii Islands to find some second and third generation Pokémon. There’s also the Trainer Tower, which offers a host of new battles to test your party once you’ve completed everything else.

These are back in 2026, as well as access to Birth and Naval Island where you’ll find more legendary Pokémon. There are a few more of those super-rare beasts to be found, but I won’t spoil how or who here.

The upscaled visuals are a joyful addition and playing a ‘proper’, old school Pokémon game both via the docked Switch 2 and in handheld mode is a dream come true. Having not touched a mainline game since Gen II, my last real Pokémon experience – apart from Let’s Go – was on a tiny LCD screen.

This is a faithful adaptation of the 2004 game many Pokémon fans know and love. But in some ways, it’s too close to the original.

The black borders used to mimic the smaller GBA screen are jarring when you realise that the wider Switch 2 screen isn’t used to full capacity, and even more so on a bigger screen in docked mode. There’s also a huge missed opportunity to have found a way to incorporate Switch Online features, like GameChat, and trading can only be done locally which is a huge disappointment when the days of LAN parties are long gone.

That wouldn’t be quite so upsetting if it weren’t for the fact that these Pokémon games traditionally relied upon trading with owners of the other game. Trying to ‘catch ‘em all’ is a logistical nightmare – in my case, completing the Pokédex when the only other person I know with LeafGreen is 90 miles away would have been so much more appealing if we could do it online.

The other especially jarring aspect of this re-release is the fact that, on the day of Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, this was the way Nintendo chose to celebrate. It’s not a proper remaster because the original – albeit enhanced – graphics are here, and you can’t help but wonder if there was something more special they could have pulled out of the bag.

Asking fans to pay £16.99 (or $19.99) a piece is a bit of a cheek from Nintendo, especially given the GBA Nintendo Classics emulator available free to Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack subscribers. If you don’t have anyone local to trade with, it means spending the best part of £40 for an enhanced version of a game that came out more than 20 years ago.

That’s not to say that FireRed isn’t good, or fun, or even arguably the best way to play these classic games 30 years since we were introduced to Charmander, Bulbasaur and Squirtle. All of these things can be true at the same time as there being a tinge of disappointment that we didn’t get something a bit bigger; a bit more ambitious.

What FireRed did do, however – and you’ll need to excuse the pun here – is relight a burning need in this writer to revisit the franchise that sparks such childlike joy inside. So if you don’t mind, I have a Pokédex to fill.