From Tokyo: there is something almost poetic about a game built on patience — the slow grind through tall grass, the careful rationing of Poké Balls, the agonising choice of starter — becoming the source of sudden, total catastrophe at the press of four buttons. That is the situation greeting players of the freshly released Switch ports of Pokémon FireRed and Pokémon LeafGreen, and the gaming community is not taking it quietly.
The two titles launched on 27 February 2026 as part of Pokémon's 30th anniversary celebrations, landing on the Nintendo eShop as digital-only purchases at around AU$30 each. Unlike the Let's Go titles, this is not a modern reinterpretation — the 2026 release is a faithful port of the original Game Boy Advance games, mechanics, pacing, and quirks intact. For the most part, that fidelity has been celebrated. But one quality-of-life addition is causing genuine grief.
Pressing A, B, X, and Y at the same time in the Switch versions of FireRed and LeafGreen soft resets the game. In the original Game Boy Advance releases, the soft reset combination was A+B+Start+Select, but on Switch and Switch 2, players press A+B+X+Y instead. The change makes the process faster and physically easier — four face buttons clustered together under the right thumb rather than spread across the controller. For one subset of players, this is a genuine gift. Soft resetting has long been a technique used by Shiny hunters — dedicated players who track down ultra-rare, alternate-coloured Pokémon — because for certain encounters like Legendaries and starter Pokémon, the only way to find a Shiny is to repeat the same encounter over and over.
The trouble is that the four-button combination is far too easy to trigger by accident. Because the Switch Joy-Con places all four face buttons within natural thumb reach, a moment of enthusiasm or an awkward grip can send a player straight back to the title screen. The odds of encountering a Shiny Pokémon in these games sit at 1 in 8,192, so for hunters, the reset is a feature. For everyone else, it is a trap. And because FireRed and LeafGreen predate the autosave era entirely, there is no recovery. Hours of progress, collected gym badges, and carefully caught Pokémon simply vanish.
The pain is playing out in real time across social media. As reported by Kotaku, player SavananaBananaz posted footage on 1 March of the exact moment an accidental reset erased a session's worth of work, with the caption: "don't be like me save save SAVE your games." The post struck a nerve, with many players sharing their own losses.
There is, fortunately, a straightforward fix. Kotaku reports that players can head to the Switch's Accessibility menu in the system settings and remap or disable the X or Y button on their controller. Because FireRed and LeafGreen are GBA games, the X and Y buttons already share functionality with the plus and minus buttons on the Joy-Cons, so disabling one face button costs nothing in terms of playable features. Players wanting to Shiny hunt can simply re-enable the button when they are ready.
The soft reset issue is not the only quirk distinguishing these Switch versions from the 2004 originals. As IGN reports, the ports include a profanity filter that prevents players from naming their rival or themselves anything the filter catches, replacing flagged inputs with one of the game's default names. The workaround community has, predictably, been creative. Beyond that, another update spotted in the Switch versions awards players the Mystic Ticket and Aurora Ticket upon entering the Hall of Fame, granting access to the Legendary Pokémon Deoxys, Ho-Oh, and Lugia. Those items were previously only available through Mystery Gift distributions at real-world events, making this a meaningful change for completionists. The Switch re-releases have also quietly patched out at least one significant bug present in the originals.
The broader picture here is one familiar to anyone who has watched a beloved franchise navigate the gap between nostalgia and modern design. The 2026 release stays faithful to the original GBA titles, which means it also inherits all the assumptions those games made about how players would interact with them — assumptions formed before autosave was standard, before every controller had four face buttons clustered in easy reach, and before millions of players would be streaming their reactions live. The soft reset feature is not a design failure so much as a collision between two different eras of game design. It serves a real community of players exceptionally well. For everyone else, the best move is to save often and remap a button before the Kanto region claims another victim.