Regional Differences

This is a sub-page of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen.

Title Screen#

Other than the logo graphics being altered (resulting in Charizard/Venusaur being moved down), the Japanese versions have "PUSH START BUTTON" at the top while the English ones use "PRESS START" in the lower-middle-left side.

The Japanese versions format Game Freak's name as "GAMEFREAK inc.", which is occasionally used by the company. The international releases instead use the regular "GAME FREAK inc." formatting of the name.

Name Entry Screen#

The Japanese versions' name entry screen allows for five-character names with hiragana, katakana, and alphabet tables. The English versions allow for seven-character names with uppercase, lowercase, and symbol tables.

Japanese	English

Bedroom#

The player's bedroom has a Famicom in the Japanese version, but a front-loader NES in the international versions. The text displayed when pressing A in front of it was also changed in order to reflect this.

Japanese	International

Battles#

The Japanese versions use a font for the "Lv." text and numbers which are very similar to those of Red and Green. The localizations change these to the same font as everything else and move the "Lv." to the right edge of the box due to the longer Western words.

The "♂" and "♀" symbols were also changed slightly.

Japanese	International

Text#

Japanese	International

The Japanese version only uses blue or pink text on the title screen menu for the player's progress entry, depending on whether they are playing as the male protagonist Red or the female Leaf. The international versions use this too, but it is still interesting due to a version difference described below.

Japanese	International

The Japanese versions use black text when talking to people. The fonts used are slightly different between male and female NPC dialogue: for male NPCs a cleaner, computer-ish look is used, while female NPCs use a slightly more wiggly, handwriting-esque font. For example, compare the か and の characters in the sample screenshots.

The international versions use blue or red text when talking to male and female NPCs, respectively, running contrary to the Continue screen's use of pink for Leaf. This was also seen in some pre-release media of the Japanese version. As it is also a Japanese superstition not to write people's names in red ink (due to its association with red-marked gravestones), this may have also been changed to avoid such associations. It is unknown why the international versions continued to use red for female NPCs rather than changing to pink for consistency.

Poké Mart and Pokémon Center Signs#

Japanese	English	French/Spanish	German/Italian

Trainer Tower#

In the Japanese version, Trainer Tower was used to fight trainers downloaded from Pokémon Battle-e FireRed & LeafGreen cards. These cards were not released outside of Japan, and so the e-Reader compatibility was stripped from the US and European versions. Instead, Trainer Tower became an area similar to the Battle Tower in Ruby and Sapphire, with the majority of the trainers from the e-Cards integrated into the game itself.

Nugget Bridge Rocket Grunt Glitch#

The Rocket Grunt at the end of Nugget Bridge gives the player a Nugget before the start of the fight.

In both versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the Japanese and English releases of FireRed and LeafGreen, each time the player loses against the grunt, his script is repeated, thus the player receives another Nugget and battles the grunt again. This suggests that the event flag indicating that the Nugget has been given is not being properly set before the battle.

In European localizations, this was fixed to set the event flag properly, matching the behavior in Red and Blue.

Clear Save Data Areas screen#

Pressing Up + Select + B on the title screen opens a prompt to clear the game's flash memory (or as the game words it, "clear all save data areas"). In the Japanese version, this prompt had a different background color between FireRed and LeafGreen. All the other releases use another background color that is the same for both games.

Japan (FireRed)	Japan (LeafGreen)	All the other releases

Localization differences#

Censorship of references to death/religious concepts (ES)#

The Spanish localization of FireRed and LeafGreen rephrased dialogues that mentioned death, killing or religious concepts (praying, cemeteries, etc.). This is despite the fact that the Spanish release of Red and Blue kept these references intact from the English text (note that, at the time, Pokémon games were translated into European languages from English, not from Japanese). In some cases, the English text already had no direct references to death to begin with.