I miss the sense of adventure. I honestly think pokemon is better as an adventure game when it's top view instead of rotating camera because it creates a sense of mystery regarding what's beyond the edge of your screen, whereas in sword and shield you can see everything from far away before you even walk up to it
Agree with you on this one. I think a very underrated aspect of the games has always been the stuff you can't see, just as much as the things you can see. It gives the world a sense of scale despite actually being very small. Take SS. Anne, for instance. Walking around on it, it feels huge. But it's really just three corridors and a bunch of cabins. The fact that you can't see all of it at the same time masks how small it really is. Or take the feeling of being really far from home when you reach Celadon City. Fact is that when you stand at the top of Cycling Road, you are closer to Viridian City than to Celadon City, there's just no connecting path. Many of the old regions were like that, smaller than they appeared on screen. Now it's almost the opposite. Heck, even the road from Castelia to Nimbasa appeared fairly long in the Gen V games, and Unova's Route 4 is tiny.
I think this issue started with Sun and Moon. Thanks to the map on the lower screen, you could always see how big the route you were on was compared to the size of the island. And the fact that you could go "this tree is next to that tree, which is next to that building, which is next to the road" and so on from one side of the island to another, made the islands feel small and cramped. What you saw was all there was, in a sense.
Sword and Shield commits the same mistake, with each Route taking you directly from one city to the next, and there isn't enough wilderness between them to sell a sense of scale. This city gate stands next to that rock, which lies next to that fence, which is next to that tree, and so on until the gates of the next city. When the region is continuous, it needs to be big to be perceived as big, and it isn't.
Breath of the Wild once again serves as a great example here. Of course Hyrule is big, but it also employs some tricks to appear even bigger. No settlement has a view of another settlement, meaning it's hard to judge distances between them. There's usually a mountain in the way with a windy road around it. The two towns in the desert form the exception, but travel between them is dangerous due to the temperature and monsters, and combined with the haze of the desert it makes the distance feel longer than it really is. The time also passes quickly in BotW, and you generally won't leave a settlement on foot one day and enter another before the sun sets again. You really have to spend all day travelling, maybe even stay overnight in a place before continuing the next day, and that illusion of time passing helps sell the scale of the world.
I think that for a Pokémon region to be "believably big", it either must not show you the actual distance traveled between places of interest, or it has to
be big. The limitations of the Game Boy and DS achieved the former, all the way up to ORAS I'd say, but recent games aren't employing either of the tricks, and that makes the regions feel small.
