BODY: Fans of Kanto's classic adventure have a date to circle. The Pokémon Company has announced that the Nintendo Switch editions of Pokémon FireRed and Pokémon LeafGreen will begin linking with the cloud service Pokémon HOME starting in October, giving trainers a way to shuttle their teams beyond the confines of a single cartridge era.
Pokémon HOME acts as the franchise's central storage locker, a subscription-backed cloud service that lets players deposit, organize, and transfer Pokémon across compatible titles. Once the link goes live, creatures raised in these Switch remakes of the beloved Game Boy Advance originals will be able to move into the wider HOME ecosystem, connecting the Kanto region to the modern lineup of games.
The Pokémon Company has not yet detailed every rule that will govern the transfers — historically, HOME connectivity comes with restrictions on which species can travel where, and one-way moves are common when older regional Pokédexes are involved. Expect the finer print on eligible Pokémon, held items, and any move compatibility to surface closer to the October rollout.
For collectors, the timing matters: HOME integration is often the trigger that lets long-term trainers consolidate decades of catches into a single, future-proof account rather than leaving them stranded on aging hardware.
The insider take
From Tokyo, this reads as more than a convenience update. The Pokémon Company treats HOME as the connective tissue holding a 25-plus-year franchise together, and every new title's HOME linkup is a deliberate lifecycle milestone rather than an afterthought. Timing the launch for October — comfortably ahead of the year-end shopping rush, when Pokémon merchandise and software peak in Japan — is a familiar playbook. It keeps the remakes commercially relevant and nudges lapsed players back toward a paid HOME subscription, quietly one of the company's steadiest recurring revenue streams.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).