Review SIGINT 5/5 · Mar 29, 2026
While I did not buy this game on Switch, the renewed interest in it online after that release got me wanting to replay it in full as well for the first time in a long time. I’ve been happy to see people who never really played Kanto finding it is actually the really fun and addictive adventure that made Pokémon …
While I did not buy this game on Switch, the renewed interest in it online after that release got me wanting to replay it in full as well for the first time in a long time. I’ve been happy to see people who never really played Kanto finding it is actually the really fun and addictive adventure that made Pokémon what it is today and not just something people like for nostalgic reasons.
A lot of what I wrote not too long ago in my revisit review of Pokémon Red also applies to this remake, which does a great job taking what Game Freak learned in Pokémon’s early generations to provide a cleaned up and improved experience. Really my only complaint with what they did here is that I feel like more should have been done to make the towns / areas feel visually distinct beyond just some unique buildings, not a total miss but I just always imagined more and later regions did better at this. The Pokémon themselves look great here, really feeling like it brings the original’s ideas to life, and their gameplay design is made a lot more interesting by adding the ability system and other things that Gens 2-3 brought to the table like held items. I am not particularly excited by the extra island stuff this adds, and double battles feel underused in the main game, but it’s no problem when I still think the original region has such a nice set of places to go and things to do.
I don’t think the originals really needed to be “fixed” as much as a lot of people do, but I have no issue recommending this as a great way to experience classic Pokémon at its best.
