Sometimes the best discoveries in speedrunning come from the last place you'd expect. Not from obsessive frame-by-frame analysis or years of technical research, but from someone frantically soft-resetting for a shiny Charmander and accidentally pressing the wrong button. That's exactly how the Pokemon FireRed speedrunning community just got its biggest shake-up in nearly ten years.
The Switch ports of Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen landed earlier this year, as confirmed by The Pokémon Company, and the re-releases brought a massive wave of new players back to Pallet Town. That surge in attention turned out to be surprisingly valuable for the speedrunning scene , because more eyes on the game means more chances for something unexpected to surface.
What iamClemi Found While Hunting a Perfect Charmander
Speedrunner iamClemi was deep in the grind that's consumed countless players since the Switch release: soft-resetting over and over at the start of the game, hoping to land the perfect starter. During one of those resets, he accidentally hit the L button on his Switch, which popped open the in-game help menu. That menu interrupted the celebratory jingle that plays every time you receive or catch a Pokemon.
At first, he figured it was just some weird audio hiccup. Then it happened again while catching a Mankey later in the game. That's when the pattern clicked.
By opening and quickly closing the help menu at precisely the right moment, you can cut off the Pokemon acquisition fanfare entirely. The result? A 2.68-second save every single time you catch a Pokemon. Doesn't sound massive on its own, but across a full FireRed speedrun, Gunnermaniac (the current Elite 4 Round 2 record holder) estimates the trick stacks up to roughly 1.5 minutes of total time saved per playthrough.
danger
This skip is specific to the Switch version of Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen. The help menu mechanic doesn't exist in the original GBA releases, meaning this trick cannot be replicated on original hardware or emulators running the GBA ROM.Before and After: What This Means for FireRed Round 2 Runs
To understand why this matters, you need to know how many Pokemon you actually catch during a full FireRed Round 2 speedrun. You're not just grabbing one or two , you're building a team, catching specific 'mons for strategic purposes, and every one of those catches previously came with an unavoidable fanfare animation eating into your clock.
Here's what the discovery changes:
- Before Clemi's Skip: Every Pokemon catch triggers the full acquisition jingle with no way to interrupt it on Switch
- After Clemi's Skip: Opening the help menu at the right moment cuts the jingle short, saving 2.68 seconds per catch
- Cumulative impact: Gunnermaniac estimates approximately 1.5 minutes saved across a complete run
- Scope: Applies to every Pokemon caught during the run, not just specific encounters
1.5 minutes is an enormous margin in speedrunning terms. For context, Gunnermaniac himself called it "the biggest time save in nearly a decade of Pokemon speedrunning" and said the trick "will change Pokemon FireRed speedrunning forever."
The L button skip in action
Why the Switch Port Made This Possible
The key here is that the help menu is a feature exclusive to the Switch re-release. The original 2004 GBA cartridges don't have it. For nearly 22 years, players were running FireRed on hardware that simply didn't have this button mapped to anything during a catch sequence.
The Switch port, detailed in coverage of its release features, added the L button shortcut as a quality-of-life feature for new players. Nobody expected it to become a speedrunning tool. That's the beauty of it.
Gunnermaniac put it plainly: "Without the new Switch release, this discovery probably never would've been found." The influx of casual players hunting shiny starters essentially crowdsourced a discovery that dedicated speedrunners had missed for years.
"Clemi's Skip" and What Comes Next
Gunnermaniac has already dubbed the trick "Clemi's Skip" in honor of its discoverer, which feels right. Finding something this significant by accident, and then immediately recognizing its potential, takes a sharp eye. Most players would've dismissed that interrupted jingle as a minor glitch and moved on.
The speedrunning community is now in the process of integrating the skip into optimized routes. World record attempts on the Switch version of FireRed are going to look very different going forward, and runners who've been chasing records on the GBA version will need to decide whether to make the platform switch. What most players miss is that this kind of discovery isn't just a footnote , it's a reminder that even games that have been picked apart for two decades can still surprise you. Make sure to check out more:
