by Doc – Owner, Founder, Thinks “Wrecked” is Funnier When It’s Spelled “Rekt” But Would Never Use That in a Title Because His Plastic Toy Website is Dignified and Serious
I’ve written about the ins and outs of the Pokemon Home trading economy (insofar as it can be called one) before and have had at the back of my mind a plan for a large, big Pokemon Home trading value tier list for several years now that I need to get to. This may be the kick in the pants necessary.
A few weeks ago I saw news that someone had figured out how to basically spoof another Switch wirelessly trading in the Nintendo Switch port of Fire Red and Leaf Green, but to do it with a Game Boy Advance, effectively breaking the barrier between the old generations and modern Pokemon HOME. Once Bank goes down this will be literally the only way to take Pokemon from a pre-Switch game and put it into a Switch game. (It’s kinda funny that this also only works for a Generation III game.)
Retro Dodo has a follow-up to that story, and that’s reporting that the necessary equipment for that trade will soon be available for sale. I am thrilled. I love the Generation III games, and have replayed them on my old GBA flashcartridge a few times already. I’m definitely buying this.
Great! So what?
Well, if you have a flash cartridge for the GBA that can emulate trades, you can effectively dump all kinds of previously-rare hacked Pokemon into the FRLG save file and then plug them into Home from there, destroying their value. Even if flash carts aren’t able to do it directly, someone with two GBAs, a Link Cable, a flash cart and a real-enough copy of the game from Etsy can still do that. And I can say from experience that FRLG doesn’t have any built-in hack checks at all when generating besides (I think) Mew’s legitimacy check. So any Pokemon that Home is willing to accept, which may very well be all of them, can get into Home. If we get RSE on the Switch as has been rumored, it’s likely that this same hardware will be able to do that with RSE.
And consider the implications of this kind of hardware. If we have widely available adapters that can emulate Switch to Switch communications, we could possibly do this for later generation games should they ever come to the Switch…
…but I’m sure Nintendo will close that hole before long.
