Pokémon Emerald

Mainline Pokémon games almost always seem to be excluded from Nintendo’s various retro collections. The various Virtual Consoles sometimes feature spin-offs like Mystery Dungeon or Pinball, but only the 3DS’s incarnation ever saw a core entry, and then it was only the games from the 1990s.

Of course, Game Freak and Nintendo like to remake Pokémon games ad infinitum, so perhaps they’re afraid to preclude yet another remake of an earlier entry in the series, but surely 2005’s Emerald is fair game 20 years on?

The third game set in the Hoenn region, Emerald combined Ruby and Sapphire, fixed a bunch of issues and improved a lot of details, added some post-game content, and made Rayquaza the star.

Of course, then there was Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire in 2014, and that’s generally the end for the relentless reinvention each entry receives. So maybe we could have Emerald as part of our fifty dollar subscription to two-decade-old games now?