How To Avoid Losing Hours Of Progress

One of the quality-of-life changes the Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen Switch ports make to the Game Boy Advance originals is the addition of a simple way to immediately reset the game. While this is a joy for Shiny hunters looking for rare, alternate-colored monsters, for everyone else, it’s basically like having a loaded gun in your hand pointed back at you while you’re just trying to play the game.

By pressing all four face buttons on your Joy-Con at once, you can make FireRed and LeafGreen go back to the main menu. If you’re Shiny hunting, this can be a quick and easy way to reset the game and potentially spawn a different-colored critter. This is especially helpful on certain Legendary Pokémon that you don’t have to search for in tall grass, as they have a set spawn area that you have to interact with before you see if they’re a regular or Shiny version. It cuts several seconds out of the reset process, which is a godsend for the sickos who put all that time and effort into finding those rare colorings. But if you’re just trying to play the game, pressing all four face buttons at once is pretty easy to accidentally do, and since FireRed and LeafGreen don’t have a modern autosave feature, one misclick can lose you hours of progress, gym badges, and captured Pokémon.

Anddddd here’s the moment it happened 😭😭 don’t be like me save save SAVE your games ugh #FRLG #PokemonFRLG https://t.co/LXAdu8Fxk4 pic.twitter.com/KRdW1R6Ey8

— SavannahBananaZ (@SavananaBananaz) March 1, 2026

That sucks, but there is one way to avoid this. If you go to your Switch’s Accessibility menu in the settings, you can change the button mapping on your controller. Turning off X or Y is an easy way of making sure that no matter what you do, the game won’t recognize the soft reset command. Since FireRed and LeafGreen are GBA games, the X and Y buttons double up with the same functionality as the plus and minus buttons on the Joy-Cons, so you won’t lose any features or inputs by turning off one of the face buttons. You’ll just save yourself the headache of an accidental reset. If you reach a point where you’re Shiny hunting, you can just turn it back on in the settings.

As players are progressing through the Switch ports, they’re finding a few other small but noticeable differences between them and the original Game Boy Advance versions.