Nintendo Switch versions of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen will be updated with Pokémon Home support this fall, as speculation mounts that Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald ports are also on the way.

Today, Nintendo officially confirmed that FireRed and LeafGreen would become compatible with the franchise's cloud-based Pokémon storage service via an update scheduled for this October. While we knew that Home compatibility would be added at some point, we didn't know when.

After this update, anyone who has completed their Pokédex will be rewarded with the Mythical Pokémon Celebi, who will pop up as a gift in Home. (Professor Oak will also be very happy.) Luckily, you won't need to actually transfer each species to Home to get that Celebi — the app will simply detect them as caught and update its Pokédex accordingly.

As we've known for some time, transferring Pokémon to Home from FireRed and LeafGreen is a one-way trip once your creatures have journeyed on to other games in the franchise. Additionally, there's no support for Pokémon from other games in the franchise transferring into FireRed and LeafGreen.

But while Home support is commonly added to Pokémon games post-launch rather than on day one, fans think there may be more to Nintendo's October update timing than meets the eye. On social media, speculation is swirling that ports of Pokémon Ruby, Emerald and Sapphire will launch around the same time — giving players another reason to finish off their Kanto Pokédex sooner rather than later.

Why Ruby, Emerald and Sapphire? Well, these were the mainline games launched just before FireRed and LeafGreen, all for the Game Boy Advance generation. Fans suspect that Nintendo is prepping similar ports of these titles, and will only have been spurred on further by the huge sales of FireRed and LeafGreen so far.

In just six weeks, the two retro games sold a combined total of more than 4 million copies. That's an estimated $80 million in revenue, despite an online backlash to Nintendo's release and pricing model for the games — which it previously defended as a "fun" celebration of Pokémon's recent 30-year anniversary. If you want to know why these games aren't just being placed on the Nintendo Switch Online service like other GBA titles, this is — at least partly — the answer.

In other cloud-based Pokémon storage news, today's update confirmed the death of Home's predecessor Pokémon Bank, which began life on the Nintendo 3DS. You have until February 25, 2027 to transfer creatures to/from that and into Home before its servers are switched off and all its remaining Pokémon perish in the ether.

Finally, Pokémon Go creatures caught in Safari Balls will also become Home-compatible in October, just in time for 2026's Wild Area event. It's unclear what the hold-up has been for this to happen, though Wild Area creatures do have extremely high stats, which The Pokémon Company may have been cautious about allowing.

Next up for the Pokémon franchise will be the Switch 2-exclusive 10th generation games Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves, although these are not set to arrive until 2027. There's time, then, for another set of ports to keep sales ticking over in the meantime...

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

This is an IGN opinion piece from writer Jeremy Peel, who had played over 200 hours of 'regular' Marathon before trying out the new experimental Vault Breaker PvE mode, which is live until August 18.

The vault’s door rolls back with a yelping alarm, as if the very act of opening comes as a shock after a century of stillness and silence. Its stalactite-strewn staging area is home to trolleys laden with toolboxes – a suggestion that this place once knew human hands. But further in, the walkways narrow to crawlspaces walled by thick pipes and electrical cabling – the domain of only the most unfortunate engineers aboard the UESC Marathon. Vents coat the floor in frost, and a simple sign warns staff to ‘WORK IN PAIRS, LEAVE IN PAIRS’. Certainly, a trio of consciousness-imbued metal shells armed with blades and shotguns was never meant to be here.

For 200 hours in Marathon’s company, I was never here either. During that time, I navigated Dire Marsh in the dark, relying on blueprints drawn only in memory. I cracked open the Pinwheel at the heart of Outpost and shanked teams in its clinical corridors, where greed runs rampant. I foiled ambushes in the ravines of Perimeter, picking out the giveaway sounds of player movement against a backdrop of buzzing robots and squawking birds.

But the secrets of Marathon’s raid map, Cryo Archive, remained largely closed to me. Partly that was because of its entry requirements – weekend only, and restricted to those who’d put in the hours to level up two dozen times in a season, which ruled out any friends with children or a sensible set of priorities. But even once aboard, newcomers were victim to the tiny subset of top players who had already learned the Archive’s labyrinth, and who ruled its gangways. The rest of us – distracted by dazzling loot and the fundamental puzzle of how to disable the Archive’s security - became easy prey.

Don’t get me wrong: I fully believe that the magic of extraction shooters lies in the way they split your focus, between a hostile environment and the everpresent possibility of player attack. The trouble with Cryo Archive as a PvPvE proposition, though, is that it asks too much E from you. Its Destiny-style vault puzzles, steel-hard bot encounters and vertiginous maze are more than enough to grapple with; the sprinkle of sentient, highly-skilled enemies on top merely overwhelms the majority of players, before they can ever hope to find a foothold on the map.

Bungie’s new Vault Breaker mode solves that problem by taking out one of the Ps, making a satisfyingly knotty PvE shooter of Cryo Archive. It may not be the approachable co-op entry point that longtime Destiny heads have been crying out for – it’s frankly a little too brutal for that – but it does reduce the cognitive load just enough to allow the map’s majesty to slowly bloom in the brain.

Upon loading up Vault Breaker – a temporary addition to Marathon which will run until August 18 – you’re handed a key to one of the Archive’s lowest-security vaults and pointed in its direction. To get there, you’ll fight through waves of defending bots, either alone or with a team, and gradually expand your access to different areas of the ship. Many thresholds are blocked until you can upgrade your security clearance, by hacking terminals and looting tags from enemies. And the vault doors themselves are powered by batteries; they’re scattered liberally throughout the Archive, yet tend to go unnoticed during a hurried search. Thankfully, batteries emit a telltale sound when near, and can otherwise be uncovered by activating wall scanners.

Victory isn’t particularly likely on your first couple of attempts. But over time you’ll find your way into those first vaults, and pull out the Indexes – little doodahs that constitute currency in Vault Breaker. This is how Bungie protects the rest of its PvP game from a sudden influx of Archive riches: by restricting your winnings to Indexes only. Any high-level weapons you come across during a Vault Breaker run might well be useful in the moment, but they won’t be coming with you on exfil.

Instead, you improve your odds for future runs by spending Indexes on permanent improvements to your Vault Breaker kit – better shields, bigger backpacks, spare batteries, and starting upgrades to your security level. It’s a roguelike-adjacent system that helps ensure steady progression through the Archive. On early runs, you might be grateful for the pickings of Vault 1, and trigger an exfil right there and then. But later, you’ll be tempted to break open multiple vaults back to back, plunging deeper into the Archive’s network of grand fridge-freezers.

In the higher-numbered vaults, things get more complicated. You’ll often need to come prepared with containers filled with coolant, a head for pattern-matching puzzles, and a trigger finger ready for boss fights. In at least one vault, an ambient virus attacks the very operating system your avatar’s shell runs on – eating away at your health bar, like a nightmare dreamed up by John McAfee.

Despite the difficulty, the extra breathing room afforded by removing enemy players allows you to take it all in. You start to notice the details in the level design. The body-shaped compartments, carried on racks in morbid mimicry of a dry-cleaning service. They must once have held passengers in stasis. Then there’s the screening room, where row after row of seats face an image of floral bliss. Was this how the crew kept ahold of their sanity across generations, with bittersweet echoes of home? “Reminder,” says your onboard AI, Oni. “300 years of cryosleep is not recommended.”

Most striking of all is the vast Panopticon, at the centre of it all – an awesome sight, straight from the scribbles of ‘70s sci-fi concept artists. Here, real-life reference points simply fail. Is it a dark metal pineapple, draped in strawberry laces? A squat sea mine, under assault from a misguided jellyfish? Though humanmade, it’s as alien as anything found on the surface of Tau Ceti IV. Perhaps that’s only appropriate; the ship was built inside a moon from Mars, after all.

The Archive may keep beating me back in its original PvPvE format, but thanks to Vault Breaker, I finally feel like I’m learning something each time I go up against it. I haven’t had to compromise Marathon’s sense of mystery by digging into wiki entries or watching YouTube explainers. Instead, I’ve been able to muddle through, picking up knowledge through trial and error, and via the example of grudging Sherpas. One player I was grouped with initially tutted at my inexperience, but ultimately taught me a couple of valuable tricks: where to find the direct route from Control to Cold Storage, for one. And how to take advantage of the Medic’s passive to spread anti-virus protection among a team. “We’ve all had to learn it,” he acknowledged, a touch of Midlands melancholy to his English accent.

I don’t get the butterflies in my stomach while booting up a game of Vault Breaker, the way I do in Marathon’s standard modes. Co-op can’t match the adrenalised terror of PvP; the tension of stealth or shootouts when your life and gear is on the line. But Vault Breaker has a valuable role in the push and pull of normal play. Raid enough vaults and you can cash out, exchanging Indexes for powerful blue shields or killer weapons you can bring back to the main game. Then, when PvP inevitably goes wrong, you can crawl to Vault Breaker to lick your wounds, replacing your lost guns in the process.

Marathon regulars have appreciated the yin and yang between PvP and PvE modes before. But dismayingly, never for long. Bungie has always marked its non-competitive modes as ‘experimental’, and ripped them away just as they’ve become familiar and welcome parts of player routine. Evidently, the studio has been concerned about splitting its playerbase between too many modes when matchmaking is already slow. And perhaps it believes there’s value in the artificial scarcity of temporary modes, too – a kind of FOMO that keeps us logging on.

Thankfully, Bungie has promised a permanent PvE outlet – a way to cool down between the more painful bouts of competitive gear-snatching. It’ll arrive with Season 3, on September 22. And I wouldn’t mind if that eventual mode turns out to be a lot like Vault Breaker. As it transpires, Cryo Archive’s warrens and conundrums are engaging enough without the threat of ganking from enemy players. Given a space of its own, the map blossoms, and you can feel your synapses crackling as you come to understand it in new ways.

Bungie would tell you that Vault Breaker’s final boss is the Compiler, the multi-phase monster that awaits in Vault 7. But a part of me hopes that, one day, I’ll bring all I’ve learned about Cryo Archive back to PvP, and get revenge on the high-level hyenas who’ve become so accustomed to playing with their food in the shadow of the Panopticon.

Jeremy Peel is a freelance journalist and friend to anyone who will look at photos of his dogs.

Key Preview Takeaways:

After seven years, Fire Emblem is finally returning to the world introduced in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. There’s a lot of similarities to be found in the structure of Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, but there are also plenty of ways that developer Intelligent Systems is building out the features that defined Three Houses in some pretty exciting ways. Even though I was only able to get just a few chapters in with each of the main heroes, I’ve already found several new additions I’m very fond of… and maybe one that I’m not as high on.

It was only after a few quick prologue missions in Fortune’s Weave that I realized my silent yet slightly customizable player character, Eshmel, was in over their head as one of the last lines of defense in a land overtaken by the undead. With no hope of winning the war on their own, Eshmel quickly took a backseat as I traveled back in time to control one of four heroes (dubbed Flame Lords) competing in coliseum battles known as the Heroic Games.

Though you’re supposedly sent back to the past to “assist” one of the heroes so they can survive to help you back in the present, I really like how the hero’s own personal stories usually take center stage over the distant threat in the future. This lets each story path have a unique flow as you uncover mysteries relevant to one particular character, rather than having to tread familiar ground across each hero. For example, playing as the young boy Cai wastes little time in having you travel to the capital city of the Dagdan Empire where his father is soon imprisoned, and must attend a qualifying event just to prove he’s tough enough to earn a spot in the games. However, playing as the vengeful musician and dancer Leda throws you into the middle of a revenge plot to track down and kill everyone responsible for her father’s murder. That bloody road leading to the coliseum ended up being an entirely different one compared to Cai, and thanks to the help of a goddess, Leda gets entered even after arriving just as the games start.

So far, it seems like Fortune’s Weave is taking the opposite path of Three Houses, front-loading a more unique and personal story for each of its main heroes, before funneling their journey into the near future where you’ll presumably team up with any story path you’ve completed to face off against the undead army that has now overrun the land. It feels like a very smart move, and I’m hoping the latter half of the game makes use of all the different ways you can team up with the characters you’ve built up over the earlier parts of each story path.

Another welcome addition to making each story path feel unique is the addition of each hero getting their own slew of abilities, headlined by new moves called Blaze Arts. Each of the main characters comes into possession of legendary artifacts that all seem to be cursed, and allow you to develop new battlefield strategies, whether that’s hurling a ball of explosive fire as Cai, teleporting through barriers as Dietrich, or bolstering your allies with a song as Leda. These powerful moves come with a few interesting side effects to consider: Using them saps a portion of your health, but also starts to build a gauge (one of the few ideas Fortune’s Weave seems to have taken from 2023’s Fire Emblem: Engage). Use enough Blaze Arts across a single battle and you’ll get a substantial stat boost for that hero. However, if you start to rely on it too much and fill the meter entirely, you’ll suffer a “burst” and have your max HP reduced for the remainder of the battle. It’s a really fun risk/reward system that allows you to experiment in finding a sweet spot of using these new powers without putting your hero at risk.

Even beyond battle, the unique backgrounds and quirks each hero possesses add new possibilities not found in any other story path. Cai’s innate kindness allows him to detect more people in need leading to bigger boosts of renown to make up for his inexperience, while Leda can perform at towns across the world map to earn unique rewards and new songs for her Blaze Arts. It’s little aspects like these that can end up influencing very different paths to take while exploring the world, depending on who you’re playing as.

Speaking of exploring the world, Fortune’s Weave has its own unique spin on a traversable world map. After getting acquainted with the Dagdan Empire and reaching its capital, I was soon invited to spend a bit of my free time before my coliseum games to go exploring the continent. While there are still plenty of things to do in the city (as was the case in Three Houses’ Garreg Mach Monastery), activities here rarely actually cause time to advance. To really pass the time, you need to get out into the world. The more you travel its roads, the more you’ll discover new landmarks: places to gather food and resources, towns to trade at and find unique items, and of course, enemies or mini-dungeons that can blockade your path.

When combined with the calendar of events happening back in the main city, exploring the world adds another layer of strategy and nuance. Undertaking subquests and the like helps you earn renown to unlock more of the map and other rewards, but you also don’t heal up unless you find a spot to make a feast, or return to the capital to rest at an inn. I also had to set a few reminders for myself of special events happening back at the capital, and made sure I had a few days to spare traveling back the way I came to reach town before the event was over (just don’t be like me and set the reminder on the day of, or you’ll eventually make it back four days after it’s over).

Since Fortune’s Weave has less of an emphasis on training than the school teaching in Three Houses, there’s a lot more freedom to focus on the aspects that interest you more, and exploring its world is one of the best ways to get stronger and more prepared before the next big battle. Of course, there’s only so much your rag-tag crew can do on its own.

It’s no secret that one of Fire Emblem’s most iconic features is the ability to grow your army by recruiting a colorful cast of characters to your side, and Fortune’s Weave plays on the idea of a massive tournament of heroes by turning the capital city of Dagsion into the world’s biggest shopping mall for sellswords.

The city streets are teeming with all manner of recruitable characters from different walks of life. Many of them are technically part of different clans that you may be facing in battle or allied with temporarily during certain rounds, giving you a chance to see them in action. Recruiting these gladiators takes both renown from your deeds, and getting to know them by using gifts or sharing meals together. Each character has their own requirements, so you’ll need to work harder to impress some more than others, and the story path you're on can also dramatically change these requirements (some might be off-limits entirely!). Peter might be Cai’s childhood friend, but apparently that doesn’t mean I can’t be his new best friend if I gift him enough treats.

While I loved each of the grand sweeping stories in Three Houses that you could choose from, I will admit having to replay the similar intro each time was a bit daunting. Not only is Fortune’s Weave remedying this with the more unique intros mentioned earlier, they have also added the ability to freely swap between hero paths as much as you want. As soon as you reach the capital city of Dagsion, you can have Eshmel return to the ruined present time, and select from one of the other hero paths to progress, or go back right to where you left off.

Not only does this give you the freedom to decide when you want to experience the other hero’s stories without starting the game over from scratch, but it also feeds into the larger story beat of trying to change fate to ensure these heroes can assist you at the story’s climax. In many ways it feels like Fortune’s Weave took notes on the recent Zelda games. Presumably, you'll be able to attempt the final boss with or without backup. This might mean that you can approach the finale with a fighting chance after completing just one story path, but you’re also able to go back and see them all to completion to give yourself even better odds. Just… don’t be like me and try to have Eshmel solo everything, because it did NOT end well.

The only glaring caveat of this approach is that it seems like Fortune’s Weave only has one save file to work with, which I expect not everyone will be a fan of. There is, however, a silver lining: when you interact with one of the obelisks that sends you to a hero’s path, I was able to turn back time to any chapter I had completed, which would erase all data after that particular moment in time. It’s a nice little compromise that allows for quick replayability, but I don’t know if you could keep a completed path once you rewind the clock again.

So far, a lot of what Fortune’s Weave has introduced to build off the features of Three Houses have been welcome additions. But I’m feeling like I need to put my foot down on at least one of them. If you played Three Houses, you might remember a little thing called Tea Time. It was a way for the player character Byleth to get to know everyone over a nice cup of tea, and if you handled conversation topics well, you got a support boost. I was a fan of this little feature (I even participated in a silly video where we discussed character rankings over a cup of tea). Fortune’s Weave has a… slightly different spin on this idea.

Instead of sharing a cup of tea, you can have a character feed the Pale Raven (aka Eshmel) to enter a similar scenario, complete with random conversation topics that you have multiple choices to reply to. Leda might mention to you that when she plays her vihuela instrument, she tends to get nostalgic. But here is where we get to the root of the problem: I’m a bird. My responses are quite ridiculously limited. Such a conversation may give me such amazing choices between “flap your wings,” “sing a tune,” or “gaze intently.” Apparently, there are correct and incorrect ways that birds are expected to respond to these topics!?! Unsurprisingly, I failed all three on my first Bird Time.

Still, it’s not the worst thing the series has ever done (I still do my best to pretend Fire Emblem Fates didn’t have a face-rubbing feature). I remain very interested to see how your decisions in the past will have an effect on characters interacting with Eshmel in the present timeline, and I’m more excited than ever to see each of the story paths to completion to see how they’ll help me turn the tides and save the world from its ultimate destruction.

Brendan Graeber is a senior guides editor, and after writing both the review and guide for Fire Emblem: Three Houses at the same time, he swore he'd never do that again. Guess how that's turning out. Follow him on Blue Sky at @raggafragga.bsky.social