I compared one of the best Nintendo fan-made PC ports with its official release, and found out what the original was missing

Published Nov 11, 2026, 3:00 PM EST Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies. If there's one thing I've learned from my many years of owning consoles, it's that the hardware doesn't age all that gracefully. When my Switch OLED's left Joy-Con finally stopped working, the only way to keep playing Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu was to keep buying more Nintendo hardware. Contrary to what many believe, emulation isn't a clean escape either. When I tried to play the same game on Ryujinx, I couldn't get the functional Joy-Con to work with the motion controls that the game's entire catching mechanic are built around. Fan-made recompilations, however, have emerged as a popular third option. I've always known this was an arena developing fast thanks to AI tools that have greatly accelerated what used to be a multi-year effort. Pokémon LGPE's recomp by raulzrrs caught me by surprise in how much it improves on the base game, and how easy it is for anyone with a legally obtained dumped copy like mine to get started. This fan-made recomp makes Pokémon Let's Go a better game than the original It has the graphics, battles, and controls that fans asked for in 2018 I've been a Pokémon fan for as long as I can remember. I started with Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald when I was 4, was in middle school when Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire came out, and was 21 by the time I got to play Let's Go, Pikachu on my Switch OLED. One thing I silently despised about Pokémon's long-awaited return to the Kanto region was that the fundamental aspect of fighting a Pokémon before catching it was entirely missing from this game. Wild encounters skipped straight to a Pokémon Go-style throwing mini-game, and only a handful of Pokémon gave you an actual battle. Everyone on the internet told me I wasn't a part of their target audience anymore, but then again, this has been a defining aspect of a franchise built around fighting monsters and catching them when they're weak enough. One of the major reasons I believe raulzrr's Let's Go Recomp makes the games better is that it brings the battles back with one toggle you set before you launch the game. With its experimental wild battles option switched on, making contact with any wild Pokemon starts the old and familiar turn-based battle, and an option to CATCH is right there next to FIGHT for when you're ready to throw. Kanto is more of a visual delight in the recomp than it ever was on the Switch This finally looks like a game that belongs on my 240Hz OLED On the Nintendo Switch OLED that I own the base game on, Let's Go runs at 30fps, and as with other Nintendo games, there isn't a single graphics setting to change. The recomp's launcher dedicates a full page to graphics presets, and pressing F12 in the game brings up the same settings with changes applied instantly. Ambient occlusion and indirect lighting each have quality levels, and together they add the kind of depth the original never had by darkening the spots where objects meet and letting light bounce between surfaces. Additionally, anti-aliasing comes as SMAA, TAA, and, to my absolute surprise, AMD's FSR 3.1, which can upscale in modes such as Quality (1.5x) or clean up edges at full resolution in Native AA, with an RCAS sharpening slider on top. The recomp also lets you turn on frame generation at 2x, 3x, or 4x, while the overworld can run at 60fps or 120fps. I also ran its "sharper interface" option once, which redrew 3,081 of the game's menu and interface images at twice their resolution on my PC. I can catch Pokémon with any controller I want The recomp solved a problem I never expected it to Consoles aren't as modular as a PC. Most parts they come with can't be swapped out, the warranty eventually runs out, the controllers develop stick drift, and the games you paid for stay tied to a device that can, one day, not game at all. My copy of Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu made that problem even worse, because the central catching mechanic is built around the Joy-Con itself. When you're docked, you have to flick a single Joy-Con to throw a Poké Ball. In handheld mode, you've got to tilt the whole console to aim. Emulation via Ryujinx did not solve that problem for me, despite having a functional Joy-Con from a Switch OLED and a legally obtained ROM dump of the game. I scoured numerous forums for a potential fix on Reddit, where one post highlighted that a single Joy-Con's motion controls don't come through in Ryujinx. The workarounds users suggested ranged from a tediously lengthy DS4Windows setup that barely works to motion controls that only line up if you tilt the controller a certain way. That's when I decided to abandon this approach altogether and take a look at the Let's Go Recomp from raulzrrs in the first place. This particular recomp cut that dependency entirely. On a keyboard and mouse, the mouse can aim your Poké Balls and double as a touch screen, so you aim a throw with your hand on the desk instead of finding a potential workaround to the Joy-Con issue. Any controller you own works too, since it reads input through SDL 3, which is a library that supports Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch Pro controllers out of the box. During my own testing, the recomp detected and auto-assigned keybinds to the right keys on the Joy-Con I had connected to my PC via Bluetooth, with zero visits to the settings required. The best version of the game I've ever played is a recomp If you have a copy of Pokemon: Let's Go, Pikachu or Let's Go, Eevee, getting the recomp to run is simpler than it may seem. All I had to do was point the launcher at the ExeFS and RomFS from my own legally owned copy, let my Ryzen 5 7600X compile it for about thirty minutes, and that was it. It let me revisit this 2018 title with the aspects the original lacked, and I'm fairly certain that this is the version of Let's Go that I would want to keep coming back to.