Coming back to Pokemon Yellow 30 years later is like coming home – and playing it in 2026 is even better than when I was a kid

Official art of Pikachu from Pokemon Yellow in front of a blurred background.

I was eight years old when Pokemon reached American shores, with two years of steadily expanding tie-ins in Japan getting exported all at once to an eager audience of millennial kids worldwide. I loved it all. The trading cards. The cartoon – which would soon introduce me to the broader world of something called "anime." And most of all, the games.

My steady Nintendo obsession built from a used NES, which grew as further Christmas begging brought me a Super NES and Nintendo 64. But despite my love of video games, I'd never touched an RPG. Maybe I'd been a little young for a genre so dedicated to reading and number-crunching, or maybe my choice of the N64 meant I resented all those fancy-looking Final Fantasy games on the distant PS1.