20 Years On, It’s About Time These Pokémon Games Got Switch Remasters

Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over. Today, ahead of its 20th anniversary on 21st November, Nathanial looks back on a Pokémon region that’s been pretty much ignored for two decades…

A common mislabelling seen online is Pokémon X and Y as the first fully 3D Pokémon RPGs. Of course, those in the Poké-community know better: it is 2003’s Pokémon Colosseum for GameCube that holds this distinction.

Colosseum was the first game developed by Genius Sonority. Colosseum and its 2005 sequel, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness famously threw out gym battles and wild encounters in favour of a grittier story and only a handful of ‘Shadow Pokémon’ to ‘snag’ from the evil Team Cipher. While these changes limited team-building opportunities, both games set in the barren Orre region ramped up the difficulty and crafted an aesthetically unique and engrossing Pokémon experience like no other.

So, on Pokémon Colosseum’s 20th birthday, there seems no better time to ask: could Game Freak package them up into an emulated collection akin to Super Mario 3D All-Stars, a remaster like Metroid Prime, a remake like Pokémon Mystery Dungeon DX, or even deliver a long-awaited sequel taking cues from New Pokémon Snap?

The answer is likely disappointing, but there’s still a glimmer of hope; a small glowing Manaphy tail for fans of these forgotten gems who want to play them on modern hardware.

Why Pokémon Colosseum and XD would be perfect for Switch remasters

Pokémon Colosseum and XD: Gale of Darkness sell for big bucks at secondhand game outlets. Even if fans do have the necessary equipment (the games, a memory card, a GameCube with controller, plus a GBA-GC cable if you want to connect to the handheld games) the chances of having a scratched disc or malfunctioning hardware aren’t zero. To avoid piracy — or to save plenty of Pokédollars — Game Freak and Nintendo would be wise to re-release both games in some form or other.

In addition to making life easier for Pokémon fans looking to re-experience Orre, a remaster or remake also makes sense from a technical point of view. Pokémon Colosseum has its fair share of dodgy human character models, which a Nintendo Switch remaster could nicely iron out. It could also improve gameplay, speeding up Colosseum’s long-winded double battles and removing the need to save at PC terminals, something Pokémon XD already fixed.

There is precedent for porting older Pokémon games. The Generation I and II games were famously brought to 3DS Virtual Console, yet the release of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon DX presents perhaps the strongest case. The original Mystery Dungeon was released the same year as Pokémon XD. If Nintendo and Game Freak can see the value in crafting a loving remake of the first game in the Mystery Dungeon series, perhaps its spinoff cousins in Orre could also be on their radar. Colosseum and XD did sell nearly 4 million units, after all. While this pales in comparison to the core series’ sales figures, it could be enough for Game Freak to recognise a potentially solid return on investment in remastering them.

Why Orre fans might be out of luck

It’s true that Genius Sonority has been making Pokémon games as recently as 2020. However, the developer hasn’t made a full-scale Pokémon RPG title since XD, back in 2005, instead having developed puzzle titles like Pokémon Shuffle and Pokémon Café ReMix.

Additionally, many of the original team who worked on Colosseum and XD have since moved on to new horizons, such as Art Director James Turner co-founding his own studio, All Possible Futures. Considering all this, banking on Genius Sonority’s existing relationship with The Pokémon Company and Game Freak doesn’t mean a remaster is on the horizon.