# Pokémon Lazarus, the Anbernic RG34XXSP, and Some Thoughts on Retro Handhelds
Table of Contents
Pokémon Lazarus
Something about last month’s several Pokémon announcements filled me with The Pokémon Spirit, so I busted out the ol’ retro handheld to try out last year’s big ROM hack: Pokémon Lazarus. It’s good, folks.
Pokémon Lazarus is available at nemo662’s (the creator’s) Kofi page, here. They’re the same person/team that made Pokémon Emerald Seaglass (available at the same Kofi page), which was a very sleek de-make of Pokémon Emerald — fully replaced Game Boy Color-style graphics, back-ported/re-implemented modern Pokémon features, and various mechanical tweaks (Meganium is part Fairy-type, for example.) Lazarus kicks things up a notch, re-using all of Seaglass’s mechanical and graphical changes but introducing a completely new game world and story.
Pokémon Lazarus’s ambition is really impressive. They implemented DexNav! They implemented an entire fishing minigame! There are multiple unique arcade games in the obligatory casino! There’s the DPPt mining minigame! A non-flying fast travel system! A day-night cycle! Custom music! Okay, the music isn’t very good, but I do admire the gumption of even bothering to compose new music for a ROM hack. And this is a proper ROM hack that can run on an actual GBA too, not a Game Maker fangame where you can just script whatever without worrying about hardware constraints.
All these features and systems serve to give the player ways to reliably access stuff that’s usually very limited, like evolution and competitive items, in a way that’s reasonably deterministic and without Game Freak’s love of making you grind until you proc some random outcome. It seemed like they made the difficulty level a bit higher than an official Pokémon game to compensate for all these goodies, but that could have also just been me playing kind of un-optimally. All around, this is a self-contained, single-player experience, which is what you want in a good ROM hack. I think it all really speaks to the maturity of the Pokémon ROM hacking community and ecosystem, because all this wasn’t a one-person job. It’s certainly the longest list of credits I’ve ever seen on a ROM hack!
With both of this team’s hacks, I really appreciate the restraint in a lot of areas. Or, maybe you could call it “alignment with the Game Freak Style Guide”. In my day I’ve seen ROM hack devs go nuts with over the top plot lines, broken Pokémon stat and moveset upgrades, and an overwhelming amount of wild Pokémon choice. Here, they’ve done a great job with the wild Pokémon variety while not dumping everything on you at once or giving you access to like, Groudon, immediately. I had such a hard time choosing what was going to be on my end-game team that I completely re-designed it twice over.
I’d describe the plot as formulaic in the way that Dragon Quest games often are for fantasy. Which isn’t to say bad, just very by-the-book. It’s legibly a “Pokémon plot”, with gyms, rivals, and an “Evil Team”1 that all keep within the level of stakes typical for a first-party Pokémon game. I really enjoyed that the main character is a university research assisstant, I think that kind of grounded framing lends itself well to making you want to actually go and catch a lot of guys. I also really enjoyed that they based the region off of Greece because I’m a slut for a nautical game world. Also also, I have to shout out the choice to have a Black main character and little LBGTQ+ pride flags in the homes of gay NPCs, because the devs got yelled by online chuds for that and they rightfully told those people to pound sand.
Lazarus was good enough that I actually bothered to beat it. I can’t remember the last time I actually bothered to play to the end of a Pokémon ROM hack, so, there’s my endorsement. It’s really solid stuff.
The Anbernic RG34XXSP
I started playing Pokémon Lazarus on my Miyoo Flip, which I’ve had for about a year now. It’s served me well, but it has a major shortcoming: the screen resolution. I use the thing thing mainly to play GameBoy Advance games, but since the GBA’s screen is 240x160 and the Miyoo Flip’s is 640x480, there’s no clean linear upscale. The options are to either let GBA games fill most of the screen (still not all!!) and be blurry, stretch them to fill the screen, or have them be tiny at the native resolution in the center of the screen. This drove me absolutely insane, and combined with the ever-escalating FOMO around international shipping I ordered the Flip’s 720x480 competitor: The Anbernic RG34XXSP. Thus I became a Guy Who Owns Multiple Nearly Identical Retro Handhelds.
As a quick aside, “The Anbernic RG34XXSP” is an aggravating product name to say out loud with your mouth. I feel like an absolute loser every time I need to refer to it verbally. I’ve been workshopping other names for the thing — my current preference is “the klondike” because its shape and size reminds me of a klondike bar.
Right off the bat, what struck me about The Klondike is how much better the build quality is than the Miyoo Flip. Plenty of other people have said this, and I’ve read it in plenty of reviews, but I should have listened — they weren’t kidding about how comparitively cheap the Flip feels and you need to take this seriously if you’re trying to decide between one of these products. My Miyoo Flip’s screen never went totally limp like some peoples’, but the thing just feels fragile, like you need to be careful with it at every turn. When you open the screen, it snaps into place with a sickening plastic crack. The klondike, meanwhile, feels like an actual consumer electronics product. It feels sturdy, the clamshell movement is smooth, and the buttons have some click to them. Even the plastic texture feels better on your fingers.
The other shortcoming of the Flip is its shortage of supported custom firmware. I had installed MinUI on mine for a streamlined experience, but when setting up the klondike I decided I wanted to try something more feature complete for novelty’s sake. I installed MustardOS and have really been enjoying it.
That being said, at the end of the day I don’t think I’m getting much more out of the OS. Everything I need it to do, MinUI already did. Things I couldn’t do before - Portmaster, Moonlight, RetroArch shaders - none of them work that well because the device just isn’t that powerful and the screen is very tiny. I was most excited about the shaders, but in practice, they make the klondike get really hot in my hands, and I ended up disabling them because the thing doesn’t have that long of a battery life in good conditions. Hardware-wise, the battery is the biggest annoyance. It doesn’t seem like the OS is very good at figuring out how much battery life there is, and I’ve read this is an issue with custom firmware on this device generally. Granted, back on MinUI the power LEDs didn’t work at all while you had a game open, so at least now I have some suggestion that the thing is about to run out of power.
Overall, though, I’m super pleased with this upgrade, because the pixel-perfect 3x multiplier of the GBA screen makes its games look so, so much better than it did on the Flip, and for 4:3 games I have much less of an issue with the unused screen space. You can even add cute borders to fill in the pillarboxing!
Both the Miyoo Flip and the RG34XXSP are currently around $70 MSRP, plus shipping and tariff costs from whatever online vendor you can get them from, which adds another $20 or so as both companies are based in China. I would absolutely reccommend the Anbernic of the two, no question. If you wanted to save $20, the Miyoo Mini Flip is also available, and from what I’ve heard, better constructed.
Retro handhelds: stuck in the past, or a vision of the future?
Retro handhelds are having a bit of a moment right now. I’ve actually had multiple friends mention to me, independently of each other, that they were buying the AYN Thor, which I guess is the new hotness at the moment. There have been a couple of thinkpieces written about this, which I swear I read but cannot find the links for2. People seem to agree that there’s a trend among people under thirty of getting interested in more single-purpose tech — walkmans, CD players, even word processors. This is distinct from an impulse towards nostalgia, its more of a fascination with media and hardware that you weren’t around for. I believe millennials did this with vinyl. And there really are decades of excellent old video games that hold up great in 2026, if you can find a way to play them. I was around for the first PlayStation, but I was a bit young for it and my family didn’t own one, so it’s neat to be able to dip into stuff like Final Fantasy VII or the original Metal Gear Solid on the klondike to see what all the fuss is about.
There’s also been a lot of discussion about people beginning to reject The Phone. I definitely feel this impulse. I used to emulate games on my phone, but when I’m trying to relax after a whole day of looking at my phone I just want the thing away from me. Today’s software design trends makes it easy to slip into mentally harmful, or just unenriching, patterns of behavior, that lead you to waste a whole evening in a spiral of distraction that just leaves you feeling bad. Getting barraged with notifications that cover your screen or giving into the urge to check your socials while you play can ruin the zen of simply focusing on one single activity for a while. Not to mention, if you do check social media, every current event these days is a vision into hell.
Now, obviously, the twenty year nostalgia cycle is also a major factor here. When people become independent adults with disposable incomes they often use their free will to buy the products they wanted as kids but couldn’t have. That’s definitely part of it for me, as someone who really really wanted a GBA SP as a kid. Like, I also have a Steam Deck, which is a wonderful machine, but emulating games meant to run on a 240x160 pixel screen on that thing just feels wrong. Something about running GBA games on the klondike makes it feel like I remember the real old tech feeling, even though I know, intellectually, the screen is 3x as big and the LCD quality looks totally different.
Part of this nostalgia factor also makes me uneasy. The elderly men in charge today are doing their best to revert the world to the one of their imagined childhoods. The idea seems to be that if you can just force everyone to behave like (you assume) people did when you were a kid — hitting metal with hammers for money in a white, straight, and cis fashion — the economic and social conditions of seventy years ago will just click back into place. State propaganda, meanwhile, is controlled by freaks my own age, daily pumping out compillations of snuff footage spliced together with Wii Sports clips. It’s revolting. And part of this dovetails with the retro handheld market — look no further than Palmer Luckey, millennial facist and founder of both the arms dealer Anduril and the retro handheld company ModRetro, a company premised around “reliving your childhood” with their replica GameBoys. I hate that these devices are another front in the culture war because the nostalgia of their form factor is part of why I like them, too.
That all being said, and leaving aside the retro handhelds that emulate systems at the hardware level, the form factor is kind of just a marketing decision. Internally, retro handhelds are really just small, portable, and (relatively) cheap computers, that can run arbitrary software that isn’t mediated by a third party. Like, the AYN Thor my friends bought looks like a Nintendo 3DS from 2011, but it runs Android like a phone and has a processor powerful enough to run many popular modern games. Replica products like Anbernic makes are at the cheap end of a continuum that extends up to the higher-powered Steam Deck and beyond to stuff like the Asus ROG Ally X.
As every major (non-Nintendo) console manufacturer performs seppuku for no reason, I think we’re headed towards a post-AAA future where these smaller console manufacturers are how dedicated video game playing devices persist. A world where the selling point of each machine isn’t the set of software you’re allowed to run on it, or even the raw power of the hardware necessarily, but the form factor, interface, and price-to-build-quality ratio. And, to go FOSS-mode for a second, because you can modify the software on these things however you want, you truly own them in a way that you don’t really own a Nintendo Switch 2. That seems like proof enough that diversifying beyond three(!) manufacturers is a good thing. So, assuming The Phone doesn’t just win out, I’m optimistic about the future of gaming hardware.
