Here’s a mystery: why aren’t the original Pokemon Red and Blue on the virtual console? People love those games, surely they’d throw money at them if they could. But judging from Game Freak’s response to a question during a Q&A at E3, people probably shouldn’t get their hopes up — they’re not coming anytime soon.
“We’re always very careful — we believe that Pokemon is best on a handheld…if we were to put it on virtual console, on the home console, what would you do with the Pokemon you caught? It would be kind of stuck, was one of the concerns we’ve had.”
While not an outright no, they spent much of the start of the presentation talking about how important connectivity between all the games is. The combination of thinking that the main Pokemon games are best on handhelds, plus the inability to figure out how to make Red and Blue on consoles connect to the other handheld games makes their appearance on virtual console unlikely…for now. Hey, they’ve thought about it at least!
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6 responses to “Don’t Hold Your Breath For Pokemon Red Or Blue On Virtual Console”
Beyond the linking and later generation compatibility issue, they are extremely buggy, and filled with many programming shortcuts (primarily database issues, as the game is just told to go to the xth entry in a database, and there are a whole lot of glitches that will cause the variable to be misdirected) and oversights, primarily due to the small capacity of the gameboy’s cartridges.
Heck, apparently space was so tight, when mew was added after the testing features were removed, there was not enough space to add it back (which is why the addition was apparently kept a secret).
Not to mention the fact that the game has severe balance issues that go beyond psychic being unresistable and its weaknesses either being filled with under powered moved (or in the case of ghost, accidentally set to have no effect, as well as the aforementioned issue that ghost type attacks are either set damage or low power).
The Wii U and 3DS can talk to each other right?
So make you VC Pokemon transferable to your Pokemon X/Y on 3DS….surely not difficult.
They can, but it’s not an issue of the hardware communicating, it’s an issue of the software. From third gen onwards, the data that describes a Pokémon was radically overhauled from first and second gen. Heck, who knows, even sixth gen might completely redefine the data structure once again. They were coy about confirming backwards compatability with fifth gen, after all.
If I may use an analogy, trying to send a Pokémon from RBY to XY would be akin to trying to insert a floppy disc into a Bluray drive. It might look similar-ish, but it simply doesn’t work.
Huh, interesting…did not know this.
Even still couldn’t they just delete the one on the VC and create a comparable clone on the 3DS?
I love Nintendo, but sometime I feel like they only do whats easy for them, not what would make their fans happy.
GF, just shut up and make a Pokemon MMO and i’ll downright buy a Wii U for it alone.
They are literally sitting on a gold mine. Release them on the 3DS, I am sure it will be the highest selling eshop title for years to come.