What Pokémon WaveBlue changes
How the game plays differently from Pokémon FireRed, then every stat, type and ability it alters next to what the official games do.
How the game plays
WaveBlue is raduziel's rebuild of FireRed around a current battle engine. The Pokédex stays Kanto's, so the game you play is still the one you remember — but every move is now physical, special or status on its own terms rather than by its type, the Fairy type exists, abilities and base stats are the ones those Pokémon have today, and the clock decides whether it is day or night. The trainers were rebuilt to match: gym leaders, the Elite Four and most of the people standing on the routes carry held items, a chosen ability, a nature, an EV spread and four moves picked on purpose. Holding all of that together is a level cap keyed to your badges — Level 14 before the first badge, rising to 80 by the end of the postgame — which stops your team outgrowing the game. If you would rather play without it, one button press in the overworld turns it off. A handful of Pokémon from later generations appear where they belong in the Kanto families: the babies, and the evolutions Gold and Silver gave to Kanto's own.
The level cap, badge by badge
Your Pokémon can grow to the cap and no further: at the cap they stop gaining experience altogether, so there is no quiet grinding past it. Each badge lifts it, each Elite Four member lifts it again, and beating Professor Oak at the very end removes it.
The cap only ever applies to your own team. It never changes a wild Pokémon's level or a trainer's. You can switch the whole system off from the overworld by holding L and pressing Start, and switch it back on the same way.
| Once you have | Your Pokémon stop at |
|---|---|
| No badges yet | 14 |
| Boulder Badge | 21 |
| Cascade Badge | 24 |
| Thunder Badge | 29 |
| Rainbow Badge | 43 |
| Soul Badge | 45 |
| Marsh Badge | 47 |
| Volcano Badge | 50 |
| Earth Badge | 54 |
| Lorelei beaten | 56 |
| Bruno beaten | 58 |
| Agatha beaten | 60 |
| Lance beaten | 63 |
| Champion | 70 |
| Giovanni beaten in Cerulean Cave | 80 |
The physical/special split
In the original FireRed a move was physical or special purely because of its type — every Fire move was special, every Rock move physical. Here each move carries its own category, the way the later games do, so Fire Punch is physical and Hyper Voice is special. The move list on this site shows each move's real category.
The Fairy type
Fairy exists, and Kanto's Pokémon that were given it later have it here: Clefairy's family and Jigglypuff's are Fairy, Mr. Mime is Psychic and Fairy. Dragon, Dark and Fighting moves are weak to it, and Poison and Steel moves are strong against it.
Day and night
The game reads the console's clock, so the overworld is lit differently through the day and the Pokémon that only evolve at a certain time of day can do it. The wild tables themselves do not change with the clock in this game — the same table is rolled against whatever the hour is.
What the trainers are carrying
Nearly every fight was rebuilt. A gym leader's Pokémon has a held item, a chosen ability, a nature, an EV spread and four moves that work together — Brock opens with Stealth Rock, Misty's Goldeen sets up with Swords Dance. Each trainer's page here lists all of it, and the spread and nature are shown under the Pokémon they belong to.
From the game's own code and configuration files.
The main changes
- The Kanto Pokédex, with the baby Pokémon and the later evolutions that belong to Kanto's own families placed in the wild alongside them
- The physical/special split, so a move's category is its own rather than its type's
- The Fairy type, and present-day base stats, abilities and level-up movesets
- A day and night cycle, which changes the world's light and the Pokémon that evolve by it
- A level cap that rises with each badge — 14 at the start, 80 at the very end — with experience cut off entirely at the cap, and a switch in the overworld to turn the whole system off
- Gym leaders, the Elite Four and ordinary trainers rebuilt with held items, abilities, natures, EV spreads and hand-picked movesets
- 165 TMs instead of the original fifty, plus the eight HMs, and move tutors spread around Kanto and the Sevii Islands
- 132 wild areas and 489 trainer fights (59 of them bosses), read from the creator's own source
How the Pokémon change
Measured from the guide's own data, so it can't drift from the pages it links to.
Compared against present-day official data. The Fairy type and hidden abilities arrived after Pokémon FireRed, so a difference here can belong to the series rather than to this hack.
Evolution methods for all 149 species →
