Last week gave us the announcement of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen coming to the Switch systems. This would've been celebrated under normal circumstances, but Nintendo and The Pokémon Company chose to skip the Nintendo Switch Online service in favour of a paid re-release of the original games at £16.99 (or $20) each. A silver lining was mention of support for the Pokémon Home service, but now that's up in the air.

From the get-go, the official return of FireRed and LeafGreen to celebrate the franchise's 30th anniversary felt a bit barebones. With no new content or graphical upgrades to speak of or online play/trading (only local wireless), the only thing that was half-justifying putting down the cash many would rather spend on an indie was the Home functionality, which allows players to freely transfer Pokémon between games, even those of different generations.

Now, as pointed out by fans shortly after the announcement, mentions of such a feature have been scrubbed from the eShop listings for both versions of the game. Maybe that simply wasn't meant to be announced before this week's Pokémon Presents stream, or maybe it's only planned to arrive post-launch and the powers that be aren't ready to fully commit yet in case development hiccups happen. As it stands, a potential Pokémon Home integration would be the only new feature being added to the FireRed and LeafGreen ports, so the information could've broken containment earlier than planned.

In any case, it's worth underlining that, at the time of writing, Pokémon Home isn't officially locked for this re-release of the GBA classics, which are priced at £16.99 each and only include a single language per purchase (pick yours carefully if you're biting the bullet). All this hasn't stopped FireRed and LeafGreen from climbing to the top of the eShop's charts ahead of their launch on 27th February though.