Generation 5 started the linear story Pokemon game.
While there are some side routes, the region has significantly more in common with a region like Galar than it does Sinnoh, Hoenn, Kanto or Johto. It's essentially a circle with a line underneath that is used as the tutorial, and you walk around that circle until hitting the top.
This reflects in how the locations are not very interconnected, as became the case with almost every Pokemon game since this region.
In a game like Hoenn or Sinnoh, most towns will have several routes. An example is Mauville, you can go West and it connects to Rustboro, East which is where you go when you get Surf. South is Lilycove, and North is the main story progression.
While some towns aren't this dense, most of them are, with several ways to get in and out from many directions. Unova and future regions instead take a very linear structure of Town -> Route -> Town with them not connecting very much. Where Unova does do this, is usually reserved for connections to the post-game areas.
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This is because, before the Unova games, the regions had a Metroidvania-esque progression where they gave more paths to backtrack as you got more exploration tools, and because they *wanted* you to see obstacles and go back, open up new paths.
While a lot of these are optional, the fact is that Unova and most subsequent games have few connections because the towns are less meant to be hub stops between routes, and more window dressing with core necessary parts on the way to the next story event, or places just to have a Gym Badge.
Because Unova is a story-game first where they want high pacing and to push you down further with repeated boss battles and constantly seeing new places. From Unova and onward, there's an increased focus on having several Rivals because they want to give players many boss battles as a finger snap to pay attention.
Let's compare Unova's first Gym and Melemele Island versus the beginning moments (up to the first gym) of Sinnoh games.
Unova: You start off with the two rival fights, standard fair, of course. But then you get to Accumula Town and have a Rival fight against N. Then you get to the end of the second route and you fight Bianca again. Now you fight Cheren again. Then you fight the Gym.
That's 6 total Major Story Battles.
Melemele Island has your opening fight with Hau of course, then you fight him again, then you fight Trial Captain as a fairly tough fight, then you fight the Trial Captain. That's 5 total Major Story Battles.
In Sinnoh, you fight Barry, then you get to do an entire route. Then you fight Barry one more time, then you take another route and after exploring the cave you fight the Gym.
3 Total Major Story Battles.
But that's not all. Because what's also extremely noticeable is how this pacing continues throughout the games. Alola and Unova are especially guilty of constant boss battles or Team Encounters. In Unova, I've talked several times before about how every single time you leave a town in this game you get stopped for a Team Plasma / Rival encounter, and that should be very clear from just memory. Striation City -> Nimbasa City is an obvious one.
First, you fight Bug Man. Then you get stopped by Bianca at the gate for a battle. Then you get stopped by Cheren in the Desert. Then you have to fight N at Nimbasa City. Then you fight the Gym leader.
Alola and Galar have similar parallels.
I didn't mention it before, but here's Galar's First Gym Run:
Fight Hop.
Fight Hop again.
Fight Hop a Third Time.
Fight Bede in the Cave.
Fight the first Gym Leader.
5
Now, I will say that Galar is not nearly as guilty as Alola/Unova for spamming bossfights, but that's also honestly probably because the game is unfinished lol. The game in general is devoid of many moments At All and we have clear evidence in datamines of cut content. That being said, the game is not really devoid of this practice, as they made three rivals for a reason.
Between the second and third gyms, for instance, you fight Bede and Marnie, then afterwards you fight Hop again. These games are constantly cycling encounters.
Just on a numerical count, I'm lazy so I'm using Nuzlocke Tracker but let's graph out the boss fight total number count by game:
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I used Firered/Heartgold as the remakes because I thought that just made sense.
Asterisks:
Heartgold* I removed the Kanto Gym Leaders, Red and the encounter with your rival at Mt. Moon. I consider this post-game material, but if you do count that as the main game, it's 38.
Ultra Sun* The original number was 54 including the Team Rainbow Rocket storyline, which has like 8 boss fights on its own. I don't consider that the main storyline.
As you can see, on average there is a massive jump from Sinnoh to Unova that stays strong, and even increases from there. Scarlet and Sword are at a decline, but still above Sinnoh by a decent amount. Except Black 2 and White 2. Now, let me talk about that real quick:
EDIT: I fucked up the graph. See, Idk why but when I made the first iteration of it I didn't include B2W2, and then when editing it back in I messed up the order. Swap Pokemon X and Black 2 on the graph for it to be accurate, and that is why I talk about how B2W2 is a low point directly after.
Black 2 and White 2 could be seen as a counter-argument to this graph and my point about bossfights I'm about to get into, but I don't think it goes against my overall point.
Now, why do I focus on bossfights so hard? Because IMO this is a great representation of the shift between Gen 1-4 and Gen 5-8: Gens 1-4 are primarily routes with bossfights as little treats, towns as rewards for making it through a long bit of gameplay without heals. Gen 5 and onward, bossfights are very frequent and the focus on routes is much smaller. The game is mostly about getting through story moments and the routes are just ways to get between Point A and B.
Black 2 and White 2 is still like this, which is really the overall point- I just like how bossfights *generally* show this shift in trend for plot and focus in the games' designs, but I am not going to argue it is a cause-and-effect necessarily. I believe it to be generally true, but I do understand it's not simply cause and effect in of itself.
Anywho, the point on map design. Here is how you move through B2W2:
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Now this is, like Kalos, still basically just a loop where sometimes you go to a side dungeon and then go back to the town there. The only thing that really is a connector in the main storyline is Undella Town, where you back track through, with several towns it actually connects to, which is rare from here on out.
But overall I still think this is 100% a loop. It's also just a very linear map in general. It's something you can't get around in a Unova game- because literally it's a oval.
I touched on BW1's map design earlier, and I wanna note that Galar is very similar it's kinda just two smaller Unovas stacked onto each other. A few side routes not there, sure, but also the Wild Area frankly evens it out in my opinion:
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Alola is similar in that you're mainly going in circles around Islands before finishing a loop and that's the end of the island. Poni Poni is the only one that isn't really like this.
A common critique of a lot of this era of games is that these games feel like Disney parks rather than open adventures, and that started with Unova, frankly.
Kalos may look a bit more complicated, but it's really just still a loop around the region with little interconnectivity outside of Lumiose City; like, the bare minimum.
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It's a more windy loop where sometimes you go to a side area before going back to the main route, but like the only interconnectivity is really Santalune (which doesn't matter until you beat the game) and Lumiose, where you go back several times to fight Lysandre/Get the badge and go to Route 14.
You can use Route 16 to Dendemille but wow, like one option? Crazy. I guess my point is dismantled.
The only map you can argue is semi-similar to this sort of trend is the Johto map because it's small and has a loop in the middle with two outside lines.
But what it lacks for in map connectivity it makes up for how the second half of the region is essentially a neat CYOA as we all know, where you can do gyms out of order to an extent.
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This is another point in this argument where you can use this one example where my point isn't extremely obviously true and go "well guess I'm throwing the entire thing out", but I think we can all implicitly understand that Kanto, Hoenn and Sinnoh have extremely similar map design sensibilities and Unova, Kalos, Alola and Galar all pretty much do as well.
Johto itself is a weird case because of how it's a Kanto DLC and I still think it has more freedom than any game past Sinnoh. Shit, even the fact that the loop connects back so nicely without it taking the *full region* is part of why Crystal Clear works so well.
Now let's look at some other points of Sinnoh's design and specifically presentation:
Pokemon Black and White already essentially had the essentials of how 3D Pokemon would work, compared to Sinnoh which is still basically PNGs with a song in the background.
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Here's some things that both Pokemon Black and Pokemon X's battle scenes have in common:
-The camera moves. It tries to be more dynamic by moving about while waiting to select your move.
-The Pokemon are constantly animated, giving more energy to the scene.
-The camera zooms in on certain attacks, giving more depth to the animation.
Notice how none of that shit is in common with Platinum? Because Platinum was very behind its time and basically felt like a ported up GBA battle system graphically.
Now, I know this may seem "petty" kind of, but this is the kind of thing that to me makes Gen 5 such a 3D Pokemon coded game: Because frankly it basically is one, it's just on the DS.
The Era of Shitting Out Battle Gimmicks:
Pokemon Black and White started a trend in the series where games kept adding random whacky ways to battle, which hadn't been the case since Emerald, essentially.
Here's the new Battle Formats by game. I am not counting Contests, I consider those minigames. Bulbapedia Source:
Full Battle: Gen 1
Double Battle: Gen 3
Multi Battle: Gen 3
Triple Battle: Gen 5
Rotation Battle: Gen 5
Launcher Battle: Gen 5
Horde Battle: Gen 6
Sky Battle: Gen 6
Inverse Battle: Gen 6
Battle Royale: Gen 7
SOS Battle: Gen 7
Max Raid Battle: Gen 8
Tera Raid Battle: Gen 9
Outside of Double Battles and basically just that with 1 player per Pokemon on the field in Gen 3, almost every single new type of battle in the series comes from Gen 5+.
Now I want to get into like, actually Sinnoh and its design philosophy.
Sinnoh is, in my opinion, actually a pretty unintuitive region to navigate, especially as a kid. I know this because when I was a kid I was one of those people that accidentally went out of order in gyms, and spent a lot longer going through side routes because I didn't know what I was doing. We also know the developers between DP and Plat took this into heart because they changed the official Badge order lol.
It doesn't help that, another minor change between games, remember that after Generation 1 all of Johto, Hoenn and Sinnoh get funky with the Route numbers while Unova and beyond restart with Route 1 or have other names.
Sinnoh is a region that has towns connecting into each other and routes splitting off a decent amount. It's very much a part of the game that you are going to be going back to places and going off new splintered areas, backtracking through the region with new tools or just newly available parts of the storyline.
There's only really two times during a Unova playthrough where using Fly is your only way out of a big backtracking segment, which is the way to Relic Castle and back. (btw just realized I forgor to put this on the map thing, apologies! That isn't me trying to be dishonest, I just forgot!)
Meanwhile Sinnoh is gonna take you for a ride all over the fucking place.
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Now, I want to be clear, this is not me necessarily criticizing Sinnoh's region being like this, my issues aren't interconnectivity. But that I think it's very immediately clear that this is absolutely not how Unova+ games are designed.
And it's not just a Sinnoh thing, Hoenn and Kanto similarly take you for a ride:
For the sake of example, I'm gonna have this Kanto route go in dev-order of badges. I'm also gonna use Bulbapedia's guide of getting to Fuschia but you can do whatevs you like ofc. Personally I am Cycling Road pilled:
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And Hoenn:
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Less complex than Kanto and Sinnoh IMO, but overall much more interconnectivity and backtracking through the plot. There's also a lot of optional routes that head back to other places that you can take, but I'm mapping out the main story route. evil tea
In terms of pacing, Gens 1-4 generally focus on having many side routes and core routes that are relatively calm, and usually demanding to get through without expending a lot of heals or backtracking to a Pokemon Center. There's usually less encounters with story relevant characters, but usually with Evil Teams they're much larger segments.
In Gens 5-8, the side characters, plot and evil team is much more directly interwoven to the plot and core design of the region, the region feeling more like straight lines in order to make good setpieces to feed all of this to you. Routes tend to be shorter with more rest stops and HMs are de-emphasized, until they're streamlined as hell.
Most things Unova introduces are true for Gens 5-8, big or small. Hidden Abilities. Permanent TMs. Even stuff like the quick select that was reused in Gen 6, there's way more cohesion. Gen 4 and 5 are not actually very similar of games, anymore than Alola and Sinnoh are!
People group them together because they're both on the same system and we're in the nostalgia cycle where both of these games are supposed to share the crowned spot as "the peak", but in truth Unova starts so much of modern series design philosophy. I feel like the only things people really have is "they both have a lot of post game content" which like, sure I guess? I think the main campaigns matter a lot more to the game design of the series, though. There's just so much that Unova does that is more in line with modern games: B2W2 really is the start of The Giant Fucking Regional Dex.
Stolen from
R_N 's old ass post:
Emerald: 202
DP: 151
Platinum: 210
BW: 156
B2W2: 301!!!
Kalos: 457
SM: 302
USUM: 403
Galar: 400
B2W2 really started the Expansion of the dex, adding around 100 before XY crushed that record (becoming the largest). Clearly that was too much so since then we've settled from 300 -> 400, which in my opinion is honestly a pretty good number.
Overall, I think that Unova sparks a change in priority in the design of the series, how the series will go aesthetically (even musically, but I don't have the music brain to dissect that, IMO music Gen 5 and up sounds pretty different than Gen 1 to 4) and that it feels like the devs in this soft-reboot. I dunno. Soft-rebooted the series.
Which means that a lot of the design of old, of which Sinnoh was a part of, was kinda pushed aside. A lot of Sinnoh's legacy is as I said initially, nostalgia, Cynthia memes and some of the Pokemon designs, many of the most popular being evolutions of old Pokemon. It's not that Sinnoh has nothing going for it, but it is
not a game that set the stage for what the series would become. It is not an Ocarina of Time at all.
Anywho I could talk a lot about how Generation 5 was the actual spark of shift in the series design, but like I've already spent way too fucking long on this. I'm tired lol
