View attachment 572272
I was looking for an excuse to procrastinate, so I put together something quick in MS Paint. Obviously you'd scramble the names, make it more generic etc.
There are 6 biomes - temperate/Mediterranean (light green), rainforest (dark green), steppe (orange), desert (yellow), mountains (brown) and glacial (grey). There are also plenty of other geographical/historical landmarks (a marsh, a woodland, a waterfall, a ruin, a spring, a cave, several mountains and a mountain pass, a salt and a normal lake, a major river and a dam, royal tombs in Amasya, fairy chimneys in Cappadocia, an ancient monastery, rainforest/meadow in Rize for Safari Zone). You could have part of the steppe zone (e.g. Yozgat) be nomadic, with tents as the local architecture. Dubai would be a technofuturistic rich city after crossing the desert and two/three ancient Mesopotamian cities.
You'd start in Antioch, gather 6 badges in Anatolia (maybe Mersin-Antalya-Izmir-Ankara-Trabzon-Erzurum, roughly clockwise). You get the version legendary in Lake Van, probably a dragon of some sort (Lake Van monster is a thing in Turkish/Kurdish/Armenian folklore, like Loch Ness monster). Then go back to your hometown in Antioch, cross the desert and follow the Tigris down to the coast to go to Dubai (maybe a water-related subquest along the river/dam?), getting your 7th badge. Bolu Pass would be a sort of Victory Road, allowing you to come to Istanbul and get your 8th badge, then move on to Elite 4 in Edirne. Troy and Mt Ararat unlock post-game as legendary locations. The orange-dotted Aegean Islands open up as an end-game sidequest a la Sevii Islands, and Cyprus is the Battle Frontier. You could even extend the Aegean to Athens, or add a route south to Egypt as DLC.
