Words On Wednesday

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 t...

“Golden Sun” and it's sequel "Golden Sun: The Lost Age" are a pair of JRPGs released on Nintendo Game Boy Advance in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Frequently featured in lists of the best RPGs and JRPGs of all time, clearly they're good games, but what makes them so special? Also, why would I cover BOTH in the same post? I'm putting these two games together because they're almost more like two halves of the same game. Not quite like Pokémon where it's the SAME story with slight variations between versions. Golden sun is effectively the part 1 to The Lost Age's part 2. Playing JUST Golden Sun would leave you with an incomplete story. I don't want to suggest that this reflects poorly on either game. On the contrary, I think it was kinda nice to be able to sink about 25 hours into the first game, then take a break before continuing on to the second game. A sort of built-in intermission, if you will. I often burn myself out if I bum rush through a singl...

The Pokémon Presents  from last month gave fans a lot of cool stuff to talk about, but what seems to be making the biggest buzz is the announcement of Pokemon Legends: Z-A and the return of mega evolutions. Source:  https://youtu.be/6Qi4COrQ7aA?si=AwXviGCovUZWuhLg Pokemon has been somewhat polarizing with the last few generations, as most generations have introduced some sort of mechanic that occasionally feels a little gimmicky and gets abandoned after a little while. Mega evolutions were first introduced in gen 6, and quickly disappeared besides its presence in Pokemon GO. Similar analogues such as Dynamax/Gigantamax and Terastallization came in subsequent generations, but they were similarly short-lived. The teaser trailer for Pokemon Legends: Z-A ends with an image of the mega evolution logo, which seems to undeniably confirm that they will be making a comeback in some form. For a lot of fans, this is excellent news. Personally, I’m not so positive. Mega evolution in its o...

Competitive Pokemon battling has been in video game news quite a bit lately for some disqualifications and I feel like the traditional Pokemon fan’s perspective has gone unrepresented thus far. To sum up the situation, a recent championship disqualified several players right before the tournament began for using Pokemon generated artificially with a hacking utility. This process is not new, and apparently many or most competitors use the tool to generate ideal Pokemon for their party. And before you automatically write it off as cheating and bad, “While some use it for nefarious means, it’s largely used to save time” (Middler, 2023). The argument is that it makes more sense for a competitive Pokemon player to spend more time planning and practicing, rather than building and training their team manually. Those opposed to the ban and in favor of allowing “generated” Pokemon suggest that it doesn’t make sense to require a competitor to build and train their entire team. Comparisons are ma...

I grew up playing Pokemon. Starting with Pokemon Blue Version in gen 1, I’ve played a Pokemon game from almost every generation released to date. However, the most fun I’ve had in any Pokemon game was doing cooperative double battles in the Battle Tower of Pokemon HeartGold. HeartGold came out when I was a freshman in college, and I preordered it to pick up on release day. Generation 2 was always my favorite, with two full regions and a lot of my favorite Pokemon. Obviously, I was super excited for a remake of that generation. I played through the game like normal, finished all 16 gyms, beat the Elite Four, and took down Red at the top of Mt. Silver. I figured after that, I was done. My roommate at the time got SoulSilver, and he taught me about Effort Values, Inherited Values, and the Battle Tower. The main story of Pokemon was only the beginning. The real game starts once you can access the Battle Tower and breed up some powerful Pokemon. I felt like such a noob, but it was fant...

“Pokemon Red” and “Pokemon Blue” are an RPG pair released on the Game Boy in 1996 in Japan, and 1998 in North America. They have since spawned a huge following, and a number of different sequels, spin-offs, and more. However, were the original games really all that good? Do we remember them with nostalgia because of the quality of the sequels, or were the first generation games as great as fans remember them being? Story - 8/10 The story of Pokemon Red and Blue is inspiring, if not entirely believable. A young boy goes on a journey to capture a team of Pokemon, and take on the Pokemon League. Along the way, he meets new friends, explores the world, and defeats an entire criminal organization. A kid, typically accepted as 10 years old, takes down a crime boss and all of Team Rocket. It’s far-fetched, but boy if it doesn’t send kids a strong message of “you can do anything you set your mind to.” The characters of Pokemon Red and Blue are entertaining, if predictable. The prota...

Finally, after all these years, I have beaten EarthBound. The Circuitous Journey I’ve started and restarted the game more times than I can recall. My first exposure to it was actually in the original Super Smash Bros., as seems to be the case for many younger fans of the EarthBound/Mother series. I’d never heard of Ness, nor EarthBound, when I encountered him as a playable character in SSB. As my blog post from back in 2015 indicated, my cousin had a modded Xbox console at some point in the early 2000s, which had a number of emulators and ROM games on it. When perusing the different SNES games on his Xbox, I stumbled across EarthBound. Recognizing the name from Ness’s info page on Super Smash Bros., I decided to try it out. I played around on the game for a while, making it as far as Threed, before I lost interest and he moved out to California and brought the Xbox with him. I restarted EarthBound numerous times through the years, across several different devices. Most recen...