Book Report - 'Pokémon FireRed Version & Pokémon LeafGreen Version Player's Guide' by Nintendo Power

I love a strategy guide and the recent release of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen on Nintendo Switch made me break out an old one for maximum nostalgia.

When Nintendo released Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen officially on 27 February 2026 for Nintendo Switch, I certainly wasn't going to buy them again, but I didn't want to miss out on the zeitgeist of a new(ish) release. I bought the original cartridges back in the day, and GBA games are extremely easy to emulate, so I had no moral scruples in emulating those titles to play alongside the people who did choose to buy the port.

Fortunately, a 2026 re-release of a 2004 remake of a 1996 game means we had two decades of guides, content, and forum posts about the games still relevant for the latest port. It was trivially easy to look up nearly anything about FireRed and LeafGreen and get an immediate and in-depth answer. Although that is beneficial in a sense, it's also fundamentally different from the way those of us old enough to play the original games experienced them.

I wanted to recreate that original sensation to an extent. Before internet forums were so prolific - heck, before we HAD reliable internet in my case - these online guides weren't so easy to come by. In fact, my only tool available at the time was the Official Nintendo Pokémon FireRed Version & Pokémon LeafGreen Version Player's Guide by Nintendo Power. My books are still scattered in a few different locations since we moved, but I fortunately had easy access to that one in particular.

For most of the game, I played through more or less from memory. A few things, however, I did look up in the guide to remind myself where they were - leftovers, for example. Using the exact same physical book that I used for the exact same purpose over 20 years ago felt almost surreal. I had become so accustomed to the transience of library checkouts, the lack of corporal form that ebooks and audiobooks share. Having immediate access to a literal piece of my childhood was a surprisingly foreign experience.

I played through and beat the Elite Four, but I accidentally precluded myself from the Solo Mastery achievement because I got too much Pokedex completion before my first attempt and accidentally advanced to the next phase of the story before I could grind out a successful solo pass on the original Elite Four. After that, I put the game down for a bit, but I'll come back later and finish out the main story. Maybe in a future run, I'll speed run through with a single-member team and get the achievement, but that ship has sailed for this run.

For a lot of people, I'm sure this process would've felt archaic and cumbersome. Why would I use a physical book with dated information when I have literally the entirety of the internet at my fingertips from any device that I own? It's a reasonable criticism, and I can understand why it may be unappealing especially to younger gamers. If you lived through this era, though, it is a visceral blast from the past that will make you feel like it's 2005 all over again.

I really like strategy guide books for their art value, but using them again for actual game information was crazy. As I pull in more of my books, I may recreate a similar plan for some other games. Depending on how close the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is to the original, that would be a wild one to reuse the old game guide for.