Pokémon is popular among many communities, but the long-running series has an especially strong hold on the speedrunning community. The earliest games are built on fragile coding, with certain glitches becoming apparent to even the most casual schoolyard players. Any exploit is a rare candy to speedrunners, which is why a new time skip, discovered in the recent Pokémon FireRed Switch port, has put some records back on the table.
Released as part of the franchise’s 30th anniversary celebration, the new version of Pokémon FireRed has invited speedrunners to reopen the hunt for potential new exploits. The best of the bunch was found completely by accident. Swiss runner iamClemi was in Professor Oak’s lab, hoping to pick up a Charmander with good stats. The runner accidentally pressed the L button, larger on a Switch than on the native Game Boy Advance, bringing up the help menu, and noticed something was off. A sound cue that usually plays when picking up the Poké Ball was absent. It didn’t save seconds then and there, but as all good runners know, where there’s smoke, there’s FireRed.
Bringing up the help menu did, in fact, cancel out many sound prompts through the game. In some instances, like picking up items or healing at Pokémon Centers, the player character still stood still in silence, as if honoring the missing jingles. However, when catching a wild Pokémon, the usual pause for fanfare gets skipped entirely, fast-forwarding the player to the PokéDex entry.
“[This is] by far the largest time save discovered in any Game Boy Pokémon game since RNG manipulation was found nearly a decade ago,” said runner Gunnermaniac in a YouTube video. “This is huge.”
Gunnermaniac is the current record holder for clearing the Elite 4 Round 2 category, an epilogue added to the FireRed and LeafGreen versions of the game. Completing this challenge requires certain conditions to be met, such as capturing at least 60 unique Pokémon. The new skip saves 2.68 seconds for every captured Pokémon, which doesn’t sound like much, but those seconds add up quickly for a number of speedrunning categories. Gunnermaniac acknowledges this discovery puts his own record in danger, which is always exciting.
