Not being able to complete the National Dex isn't a matter of player skill—it's that the game itself is missing three pieces of the puzzle. Data miner Meatball_132, digging through the source code of Pokémon FireRed & LeafGreen, found that this remake—which launched on Switch and Switch 2 in February 2026 to celebrate Pokémon's 30th anniversary—actually contains code that "recognizes" Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald, the three mainline Game Boy Advance titles from 2003. As it stands, without those three games available, there's no way for players to complete the National Dex within FireRed & LeafGreen.
This isn't just wishful thinking. FireRed & LeafGreen surpassed 4 million downloads within six weeks of launch, and while it was initially treated as a simple re-release of an old game, players quickly noticed things had been tweaked under the hood: the NSFW filter used for naming Pokémon was updated, and event tickets were added later on, letting players catch the legendaries Ho-Oh and Lugia. That's not the kind of patch work you'd expect from a "just slap it on the store" release—it looks more like groundwork being laid for something bigger.
And then the timeline started connecting itself. Leaker Shpeshal_Nick posted on Twitter that ports of Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald are currently slated for release between late September and October. Around the same time, Nintendo announced on its official blog that FireRed & LeafGreen will support the cross-title transfer system Pokémon Home starting in October: "Once you link your account, Pokémon raised in these two games can be moved over to other titles in the series." That same October, Pokémon Bank—the cross-generation transfer service that's been running for years—is set to officially shut down. Old system exits, new system steps in, and the timing lines up perfectly. Even the Pokémon Trading Card Game side isn't staying quiet—a new card set centered on Rayquaza, the legendary from Ruby and Sapphire, is also expected to launch before the end of the year.
Stack all these pieces together, and the player community has already reached its own verdict. One Redditor wrote: "If this is real, we should get an announcement on the last weekend of August—that's when the Pokémon World Championships take place, and they usually drop one or two smaller pieces of news during the event." Another simply griped: "It's honestly baffling that they didn't just put the entire game library up for sale."
As of now, neither Nintendo nor The Pokémon Company has given any official word on ports of Ruby, Sapphire, or Emerald. All timelines and details currently come from data mining and online leaks, and remain unconfirmed.
