Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen are officially available on the Nintendo eShop, and we’ve learned a lot of incredible things about these versions.
As explained by Meatball_132 on Twitter, these turned out to be ROMhacks of these games; in fact they recompiled the code from scratch. And that allowed Game Freak to add a lot of QOL changes and features.
The big one is adding the event Pokémon. The Pokémon Lugia, Ho-Oh, and Deoxys were originally highly rare in these games, requiring that you trigger Event Encounters. Now, the Event Encounters are immediately available as soon as you beat the Elite Four.
Players also found that holding A while you’re catching a Pokémon increases your chances of success.
Meatball_132 also found the game does telemetry, but this is no different than other games under Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, and Epic Game Store. You can disable this on your Nintendo account games here, under Data Usage.
Meatball_132’s most interesting finding is that the build date for these ROMs are December 2025. They had been working on them relatively recently.