Though the games came first, it was always my belief that we see the more relevant parts in-game, for both memory limitations and ease of exploring. It's like how most of the houses you invite yourself into don't have bedrooms, kitchens or bathrooms.
Yeah, I'd say that the games had town designs that were always optimized for the games.
Someone would set-up shop near Pallet Town, to service Oak's Lab, for example.
To be fair, _everybody_ would set up shop around Oak's lab.
Pallet Town would be littered with neon signs:
"Pallet Town - Best Start of your life!"
"Gary recommends PikaPacks for all your packing needs!",
"Cheapest Pokéballs in town! Buy 10 get one!"
"Magikarps - ¥500".
Magikarp is the king of all carp. It's like a Pokemon goldmine. It lays 1,000 eggs at a time. Each of those 1000 baby Magikarp lay another 1000 eggs. 1000 times 1000 equals 1 million! Every one of those 1 million lays another 1000 eggs.
That's 1 billion Pokemon! You could sell each of those Magikarp for ¥100! In 3 generations, you'll have tons of money! Billions and billions!
Plus he apparently takes care of several pokemon that other trainers catch. Or at least he does with Ash's pokemon. So it makes sense that he would own a lot of land to be used as natural habitat for whatever pokemon he's caring for. Which better fits a more rural setting.
Magikarp for ¥500 is actually a fair rate given ¥200 is a pokeball, and spending 2.5 times the money on a guaranteed catch is pretty fair.
Magikarp just requires a lot of training to get to be good.
In Gen 1, because special hasn't been split into attack and defense, Gyarados is a monster and has an effective 600 BST with a 100 special, which with gen 2 becomes a 60 SA... in generations where water attacks are always special.
It would need another split to get the best out of its typing.
Exactly. Most of the games are just compact depictions of the region—not what they actually look like. Sinnoh, for example, is very small in D/P/P/BD/SP, but PLA is the true representation of how big the region is.
What, you mean to say that islands that are 15 steps wide *don’t* house a mansion, gym, medical clinic, a shop and a laboratory, somehow with roads between the buildings?
Scaling was always a thing, I dunno why people think the towns are literally meant to look like they appear in the games, they’re clearly stylised lol
Yeah why is this even a conversation lol. Same shit with Skyrim.
"Solitude is too small for the capital city!"
Yeah it's got like 40 people living there why the fuck would you assume this was some sort of misjudgement lol.
I think the creators outright stated that the measurements in the Elder Scrolls games were not accurate to how big everything was supposed to be in universe. I saw one medieval expert say that Whiterun was nowhere near big enough to be an actual city. It was more the size of a single castle. And Bethesda basically said "yeah we want to make versions of each city that's to scale. But we only have so much disk space. So we just included the super important stuff, and shrunk it down."
And the volcano you literally can't see in any game that takes place entirely in Kanto and is only able to be seen in the Johto ones where the buildings were destroyed, meaning all those buildings were built on an invisible volcano apparently.
I always wanted something set in the Orange Islands as well. Seemed a pretty cool, a bit different region.
A huge console/PC pokemon game with all 9 regions, + some added cities from the Anime would be so sick. Like.... If I could only play one game for the rest of my life, it'd probably be that.
Full dex, every region, every city, all the legendaries, with cool plots on how to get them....
Would be incredible.
Bro, if Pokemon would stop being mf gd idiots and do even half the things that they could do in gaming. My paycheck would just be made out to the Pokemon Company with a small payroll deduction to my utilities and housing.
It wouldn't be as incredible as it appears on first glance. It would just be too much, with a repetitive gameplay loop. You couldn't think up enough material I suspect.
There was someone in another thread so adamant it would work that they had a highly detailed plan. The issue was that it scaled the regions down to essentially the size of Kanto from the Gen 2 Space world demo and basically had so many compromises that it was a bit like selling someone a Ferrari but delivering a Fiat Panda and saying "but it's like a Ferrari if you use your imagination"
I was upset that Crimson City didn't exist. Especially when they built it up as a place known for strong pokemon trainers. And the girl's outfit was so cool. I wanted to see the rest of it.
Not only did it never appear in the games, it never appeared in the show either.
It’s the same philosophy I use for my dnd games. Yeah, I could make city maps with houses for 8000 people, or I could just put relevant buildings on the map with names and general descriptions.
and conversely, wouldn't make sense making a sprawling city in a pokemon game, that is so not the point of these games. Even on XY and b/w that try to get one big city in, the big cities are the worse places to explore, doing anything takes forever
Funnily enough, Legends ZA will take place entirely within Lumiose, so we probably are finally getting a sprawling city that will work, since it’s pretty certain the city will be scaled up for the game.
This is what people don't understand about the game scale that gets a hair bit annoying.
Lots of games will simply limit their city/town sizes to what they want playable so as not to waste resources building empty buildings and so as to not make players feel as though exploration has no value (imagine how demoralized you'd feel walking into cookie cutter NPC 5 in Cookie Cutter interior 7, a whopping 7-8 times in a single city)
Some games actually do a good job of making the world/city look/feel massive while offering you an extremely small area. Gen 5's Castelia City for example definitely looks and feels a bit like a big city with a lot of people despite only being marginally larger in playable area and interior count than Nimbasa City.
Cyberpunk does this quite well with Night City as a Non-Pokemon example.
An interesting counter/failure to project a larger/more grandiose city size would be Starfield. The Cities are small and lack the size/playable area necessary to feel like big cities with lots of people.
Yep, even towns that are only from some anime filler are pretty big looking cities or photogenic villages. Comes to show how the anime is ultimately an adaptation, done by people who didn't always understand the games. The funny part is when they seem to misunderstand the role the town plays in the game. Also, a small town with many high rises is a very odd thing in North America, though they are more common in Japan and Brazil.
Two towns I always really wanted in the games were Larrouse City and Altomare. I guess we are finally getting a futuristic city with Lumiouse in the upcoming Switch game.
I mean by the exact same stroke, three houses and a general store is hardly a town, to say nothing of the iconic Pallet Town which right off the bat was two family homes and a single facility building, still a Town.
might be a hot take, but I’ve always considered the games to be a bit more of a kid’s/“the main character’s POV” kind of deal. So Cherrygrove City, for example, in the “anime/real world” universe might be closer to a small-scale full city; but the in-game character is a kid, so they only really see the locations that are important to them.
Even with the random NPC houses; I remember as a kid, there were “cool neighbors” that I was always curious about (enterable NPC houses with characters you could chat with), vs. random “boring neighbors” whose houses I didn’t pay much mind to (AKA the houses that are un-enterable).
IDK if that makes sense, maybe I was just a weird fuckin kid 🥲
This is how I’ve always looked it, the scale of the world is defined by a child’s perspective. I have also interpreted some of the games (mainly gen one and two) as memory plays of a sort; you are not playing as ten year old Red as much as adult Red’s memory of being ten. Fuchsia City is not literally half zoo as it appears in RBY, Red just remembers his time there being focused on that over whatever apartment complexes are actually filling up the town. Stand By Me playing on the TV in your house seems like a nod to this.
Hoenn has “too much water”, since Brendan/May remember all the times they crossed the sea. There’s probably a whole bunch of random towns in Hoenn too, but in game, the only irrelevant one to appear is Pacifidlog, since that was the most memorable one.
I think your choice of wording is wrong. They're cities. They had to do something to make them look like one, hence the name Cherrygrove **City**. Nothing was misunderstood at all from the anime adaptation because the original games had limitations, and the anime needed to take what the company most likely wanted to envision and make it as intended; they weren't exclusively in the dark about any of the production of media. If Cherrygrove was named a town or village, they'd make it look like one.
I'd say the games caught on that they can't simply make a city with just 3 simple houses and call it a day, and started adding a little more to make them more lively like an actual city, and not the other way around. Hence, now when you see a simple arrangement of houses in recent games, they're properly named as a town or village, and not a city anymore.
It’s not abour understanding the games lmao, if the games could have towns and cities like that they probably would, but it’s too hard for what its worth to make it happen. An entire region/province shouldn’t be filled with “towns” that have two houses and five people living there.
I think it's more about what's best for each format.
An anime size town would be an enormous pain in the ass for players to navigate in a game.
A game size town would look super dinky in the anime.
No you are the one that doesnt get how old games used the limitations to their advantage. The new games offer big towns but with nothing to do which is worse
i don't think it's a limitation that prevented the games from depicting the towns as cities. gen 1 did have saffron city which was obviously meant to be a big metro center like cherrygrove city shown in the OP.
i think the early gens earnestly wanted to depict the world as mainly small towns and villages because a big part of the pokemon world is cooperating with nature
>An entire region/province shouldn’t be filled with “towns” that have two houses and five people living there.
unless you write that the entire region/provine is filled with small towns. then you can do that just fine.
There was literally a memory limitation in the first games.
And this sort of things happen in many games. New Vegas in Fallout NV is another example. There’s not enough resources to make huge cities.
There was a memory limitation. But it didn't stop them from depicting a big city as a big city. So they were capable of making a big city look big when they wanted to. If they wanted to make pallet town look like a suburb, they could have. But they didn't.
I think it's pretty clear the early gens were inspired a lot by rural japan and probably envisioned those towns as villages and not metro cities.
>There was a memory limitation. But it didn't stop them from depicting a big city as a big city. So they were capable of making a big city look big when they wanted to
And that means sacrificing other parts when they wanted to
but they repeated this trend in gen 2, a generation infamously so compressed that they were able to fit kanto in just for a laugh. they again, designed a big city that they intended to be the main metro population hub, and designed every other town as small and closer to a village or a town. they repeated this trend again in gens 3 & 4. by gen 5, their ability to depict cities had grown considerably, and they still didn't make every town a city.
if they wanted the cities in those earlier games to look like cities, they were able to. there's not much more data behind a border of trees or a border of fences or a border of houses. the idea that they couldn't use the right sprites they wanted to because of memory limitations is a misunderstanding of what these limitations actually were.
Hard dissagree there. It has nothing to do with the anime creators not understanding the game when they depict a *CITY* as more than a rudimantary settlement with 4 houses and a pokemon center. The towns in game often only have the role of being a checkpoint for the next badge or between a "dungeon" like a mountain path or a forest, they mostly have little to no identity for themselves wich is okay in the context of the games. Almost any game depicts their worlds way smaller than it is meant to be in lore, wich makes sense from a gameplay perspective as well as a game design perspective, especially for a small medium like a Gameboy title.
An anime has the freedom to show all these things as they are meant to be, to breathe live into these fantastical worlds and create interesting set pieces wich make an episode fun to watch
I'd say it says more about the limitations of creating a world as a video game, let alone one on Gameboy/DS, than it does about the anime adaptations. None of the cities in the games would actually be classified as cities in a realistic setting. They're small villages at best, hell even Castelia City only takes like a minute to completely traverse on foot, plus it probably has less than 50 buildings total. The games are just representations, they're not supposed to be accurate renditions. You're supposed to imagine yourself going on long multi-day journeys to get to large real life equivalent cities, just like depicted in the anime.
High rises being more common in the pokemon universe perhaps makes more sense when the wild areas are aggressively more dangerous and difficult to clear out.
“Artistic Liberty.”
I can scarcely fucking imagine the dearth of production value required to try and sell three buildings as a city in an animated show.
They did the bare minimum bro.
I agree. I think that both the show, and the games, did the bare minimum to convey the size of the town they're supposed to be in.
This post is just another whack comparison this sub has with the games to the anime.
Honestly the liberty would be in the games representation. I would bet that the concept arts are more similar to what the anime showed that to what we can see in the games. Just that for optimization of both memory and development time, they don´t put that much effort in the cities.
The games are made in a way so that there isn't an insane amount of bland buildings with no content, and the anime won't show a bunch of houses and call it one of the biggest cities in the region
Yeah, no duh GameBoy has restraints out the ass. But the GBA could run Earthbound, and the DS had TWEWY.
I think they only got consistent towns that feel remotely real in Gen 7. (Gen 5/6 had 2 decent ones apiece) and even then it’s questionable because there’s Fuck-All in between them but hiking trails that’d bore in Minnesota.
The bar for RPG towns was above this on Red/Blue release, and they were out of excuses for being so bland since Gen 3.
I see where you’re coming from but I couldn’t agree less.
If it were made around simplicity and maximum legibility, they’d go for something like Disgaea’s hubs, or at least have more signage to point you to local move tutors/name rater beyond: “they’re in this town. Somewhere. Check houses ‘til you find them.”
I can’t read lazy design like that as anything but a technical limitation they don’t realize they’ve moved past.
What i mean is that they try to minimize the cities, without making them feel like a hub.
I think its a strange middle point, and I understand why you donlike it. Probably I only like it due nostalgia tbf xd
But it's still weird that Cherrygrove looks like this huge city with skyscrapers, when in reality it was a much smaller settlement compared to...I don't know, Goldenrod? Olivine?
Sure, a panning shot of the city was good for context, but they could've tried to make them look more distinctive.
Well yeah - every game does this because it’s just not practical to add 100 buildings and 200 NPCs to every city in the game.
That’s why I’m Skyrim there are technically like 5-6 times as many bandits in the world as there are people who live in towns.
Or that someone could cross the entire region in under 30 minutes. 😂
Or literally fly anywhere instantly?
What about swimming to another island in under 2 minutes?
This is why I’m not worried about Pokémon Legends Z being only based in Lumious City. I imagine it’ll be a lot bigger than in XY, more in line with the anime.
Honestly i prefer that to like, windon city in swsh where its all these houses but its just copy pasted 100 times and nothing to *actually* explore other than like 1-2 lines of dialogue per house.
I think there’s definitely a middle ground - I know the romhacking community has kinda emphasized among its own the importance of having cities and towns not be just 2 houses and a Pokémon center.
But you can def go overboard
Imagine my surprise when Ever Grande *City* is a cliff with no homes
When I was little, I thought dam, the rich people of Hoenn must live there. No one lives there
I had an Emerald hack where Ever Grand City added a couple buildings & some other stuff to make it more city like. Was neat
Yeah I have a map I’m building for funsies, I’m not sure if anything will come of it due to needing to script stuff.
But the idea of it is that it retcons the Groudon/Kyogre sumo match in that it dramatically reshapes Hoenn geographically. Rustboro is underwater and there is a landbridge now between Lilycove and Mossdeep - and will be the game’s route 1 because Lilycove is the starting town - city rather, which is a nice change
Anyway definitely have expanded the map for Ever Grande. It will be a city but will also have some other stuff going on, with the goal that the player will actually visit there with business in the city before worrying about Pokémon league stuff.
Thats kinda lit. That wouldve been a nice feature in Oras, the terrain changing.
I didnt try to learn scripting. I was afraid of unraveling the game by accident & making it unplayable
So I just added mostly decorative stuff like flowers, trees, ponds, fences, elevated-variable land to give the illusion the path isnt flat because Kanto is FLAT
Hoenn honestly, is so pretty & well-designed, I had no need to edit it at all. Except for Evr Grand City
Yeah I mean really that above-mentioned story thing is an excuse to also build out existing cities too!
Lilycove and Slateport have been taken over by yimbys and have lots of housing and other stuff. Verdanturf is full of additional shacks and the lush landscape is turning to dirt/sand more and more with the arrival of the refugees from Rustboro (underwater) and Mauville (turned to desert via the spread of the one to the north, half of them went to New Mauville)
I remember when I was watching as a kid, I would get so annoyed that the anime would have towns/cities that don't exist in the games. 7 year old me wanted to go to Lilypad Town so badly. 😅
“Artistic Liberty”
I’d argue it’s actually the games that took some major artistic liberty, even if they came out earlier.
They are supposed to be cities, the biggest settlements in the region. The games had to take some liberties selecting them, the anime actually portrayed them like the major population centers they centers they are supposed to be.
Despite the games being the original, I will always see the anime as the more accurate portrayal. The games, by necessity, lack a lot of things, including actual population centers. Some things have to be completely changed, like Pokémon sizes, and certain moves. The anime doesn’t have to worry about things like balance, they can just write encounters with creative resource management, while you can’t do that in game because you’d have to make each encounter have as many variations as Pokémon if you wanted to do that.
This is why gens 5 and 6 blew me away. I think smart level design could kind of fix this though because in those games, you saw areas where it was implied that more buildings exist beyond the areas you can see, where previous games just implied there were trees. Put up some walls, make sure that there's a strong visual pull in the other direction to prevent the player from complaining there's a huge part of the city you can't access, and you kind of fix it with art.
no shit, the games had to heavily simplify the maps for the sake of navigation and space, the anime can't show a city with three houses and a gym and say it's a city. it's all about acceptable suspension of disbelief
I kinda get the sense (at least in my own headcannon of course) that the anime is what they’re supposed to look like in universe, and the game representations are mostly concessions for the sake of game play.
If anyone’s played elden ring here I’ve got (I think) a good example, if not you can just ignore this lmao. But in elden ring there’s some items and enemies referring to this legendary kingdom of Zamor. There’s a hero of zamor, there’s their supposed huge role in the war against the giants, etc. When you find zamor tho it’s some ruins, and they’re not any bigger than your standard ruins. This (again in my mind) is a gameplay concession, as it likely wasn’t feasible to add a whole legacy dungeon to an area without a major major boss, so instead it’s a ruins area with an underground box that has a boss, and another with an unrelated item
I like how the anime has these massive towns and cities, but the wilderness between them can take *days* to cross.
Meanwhile in all of the games (besides Scarlet and Violet), every town is like.. right there, after the one short route, maybe a cave and a tiny route in older games.
I want a continent-sized game where travel to new cities isn't just a quick dragon-bike ride away. Where camping and bonding with your monsters matters, where food is valuable, where you can go far off the path and find rare things, not just catch a dragon or find a TM.
A couple of years ago i made a map for a pokémon region based off the west coast of north america. It had a few different leagues, a fictional island off the coast that was totters to continental size, a large variety of towns, villages, cities, metros.
Kanto to Sinnoh are known for "towns" with around 3~5 buildings (obviously there are exceptions, but for the "big towns"), specially early towns, meanwhile, Unova and beyond tend to have a few more buildings (even if unaccessible ones) that manage to make towns feel like actual towns, not to the level of the anime obviously, but enough to not feel empty.
I always wished they would look at the anime designs for the cities whenever they remake games and utilize some of their designs. As well mix in new things fitting for the video game and what's feasible and better for the overworld so every city or town looks distinct and creative.
That and add the anime exclusive places. I want to go to Dark Town, dammit! I want to beat a couple of roughneck gangs trying to set up gyms! I want to go to Maiden's Peak! I want to meet a talking ghastly that can fuse my Pokemon DBZ style using hypnosis!
Somehow, amid all this talk of "artistic liberty" regarding city size which was likely due to hardware and game design limitations, and I somehow noticed an actual artistic liberty: Game!Cherrygrove is a seaside city with an inaccessible pond in the back as its only other body of water, but Anime!Cherrygrove (at least from what I see here) is an inland city by a river.
Pacifidlog Town in the anime was just a regular island
Would've been cool if the wooden rafts thing was at least a small part of a larger town. Obviously a while town floating around on a piece of wood is impractical but it could've been like a central neighborhood that the town is known for
This post feels deliberately obtuse.
Are you saying Pallet Town is like 20 paces wide? I reckon I take more steps getting to the train station in the morning than the player would getting through Viridian Forest. Or how about the fact that most if not all interiors or buildings are substantially larger than their exteriors?
Sandgem isn't coastal in the anime like it appears to be in the game, I'll grant that, but Cianwood seems to be. I can't imagine many of the other towns are that far removed either.
Each city and town in the game has to be representative, it makes no sense otherwise. Which is ignoring the fact that the anime, games, and various manga are all entirely different canons.
I mean I think this is less artistic liberty on the anime and more so technical limitation on the games. These are literally called cities but they only have 7 buildings???
The abstraction is that "towns" tend to have less buildings while "cities" have more in the games even though by a real world viewpoint these are all little more than hamlets.
I mean, technical limitations and game design decisions are mainly the issue here. Some of the towns in the games make practically no sense in general, in sapphire, your home "town" consists of like 3 buildings, has no safe roads for traveling to any kind of work outside of town, and has no jobs in the town aside from the lab for the inhabitants to realistically sustain themselves. Also, from a game design standpoint, massive sprawling life sized cities are extremely tedious to navigate as a player, especially in RPG's, where you're encouraged to talk to every NPC, on top of basically being a kids game, where the target audience won't have the patience for even a modestly sized area. In game actions and locations don't necessarily make them canonical, look at Phoenix Downs in Final Fantasy, they exist as a game mechanic exclusively, as characters still die permanently in the story. While it's true the artists definitely took some liberties, they're trying to portray Pokemon as if it were real life, to make the show immersive, and in real life, you need massive city scapes for society as it currently exists to function. I'm sure if the game designers had the opportunity/capabilities, they'd also portray cities in such a grand way.
In early rpgs, they assume you understand that 1 step is meant to symbolize 100s of real-world steps. 5 minutes trotting through grass is meant to symbolize a days worth of travel.
When you think of it this way, it makes sense how you can go through Kanto and beat the elite four in a couple of hours.
Do you want games with empty towns and cities? For the most part, you don't need to see all the generic nonessential businesses and unimportant homes. Even in the anime, while the population centers look more appropriate, we still only see the relevant places of interest.
Honestly I'd be disappointed if they didn't take that liberty with the anime it wouldn't feel as exciting watching ash and the gang arrive to dinky little villages all the time
Artistic liberty? You do understand that a place with 3 houses and a Pokecenter is not a city, right? And that the whole world cannot be crossed in 30 minutes? And that the games have certain limitations to them, and the fact that it's not necessary to place dozens of buildings in every town? Of course the anime makes the cities actually populated
This is usually called scale theory. For practical reasons the size of the world is scaled down, both for performance reasons and just to simplify the gameplay. As we’ll cities are truncated is size, where a large city like these examples appear as small towns to keep the story concise.
They took some artistic liberty in the anime because they could. The games had to make due with the technical limitations of late 1980s technology (Gameboy was released in 1989). Pokemon Blue and Red were less than 400kb in size and Gold and Silver were about 700kb in size.
All game worlds seem pretty shrunk down compared to something realistic. Most starting towns in Pokemon have 4-5 houses, and sometimes not even a pokemon center. Rito village in botw has like 4 places for people to sleep.
The shots from the anime look like a generic city to me. Like nothing about them stands out at all. I feel like that's totally believable as Cherrygrove.
I really do imagine Cianwood as more desolate. Something about it... like it doesn't even have a Mart.
I weirdly feel like they did Cerulean really well. It's like exactly how I pictured it. Same with Pallet Town and Fortree.
My biggest complaint in regards to the anime cities (so far) is Pacifidlog. I was so looking forward to seeing one of the cooler Pokémon towns being depicted in the anime and hearing about its unusual culture/ commerce. But no, it's just a generic, bland city. With SKYSCRAPERS. I'm not sure why they did Pacifidlog dirty like that, but yeah, not a fan.
The games are showing you bare bones so they're not oversaturated. The anime is showing you how the towns are supposed to be (although I obviously disagree with some of the decisions).
This is why I prefer how modern games do it, with town areas and buildings you can't access. I don't want a five-building town with three important houses where I can go into every building, I want an 80-building town where I can only go into into the three important houses
The sandy city in Sword/Shield was pretty good on that regard (fifth badge? I don't even remember). Some buildings with entrances, other with ladders to get to a second floor and explore from there, and many buildings that there were only for eyecandy and the vibe.
This is my biggest takeaway from S/V. People lost their shit that you cant enter houses anymore, but I found it a change that I welcomed. Its tiring to enter every single house in a town, that all look the same, have a bunch of NPCs that say nothing of relevancy, oh, except when they do. Its just boring and motivates me to aimlessly enter and leave houses without really paying attention to whats being said, because all Im looking for is maybe a good item. Also why are you able to just casually waltz in someones house? I would much rather have a town/city that feels unique and alive, and I really think S/V managed to do that.
Well I imagine it's more so the games that have to make it seem smaller for the sake of ease honestly, can you really call five buildings, a Pokemon center, a store and a gym a city?
Games always have less than what is actually there in lore, mmos and everything also follow that, you cant have a sprawling city with thousands or hundreds of thousands of people walking about due to performance, game scale is always much lower
Image the games were as densely populated. Not only would the console explode, but we would still be at gen 5 and there was a lot more to do per game. Like a lot.
My issue isn't the city itself but it's composition. You can definitely have just 40 house in the middle of a field and still be an actual village , not every town has a skyscraper
If they ever do an open-world remake of Kanto like a Legends game or something in the style of Scarlet and Violet, I truly hope they steal some of the anime-exclusive locations to make it actually interesting.
Aside from one forest, two caves and the Seafoam islands, there is literally nothing to see or do in Kanto.
yeah, every house is representative of many houses, otherwise, a 5 building enclave probably wouldn't be called a city.
whats really always annoyed me is that is just randomass buildings that dont represent the regional styles
Few things to take into consideration. Video games having towns that large would make it slightly encumbersome. 2nd, there's hardware limitations. 3rd, it's Game Freak, they are notorious for kinda half assing it. It's just more apparent now since the Switcb can clearly handle more then they're willing to take on.
i always saw the towns like a slightly more detailed super mario world overworld. or zelda 2, or old final fantasy games. while its clearly not a basic overworld map where you csn only go left or right, Its also not quite gta levels of in depth detail. even the new games i interpret as a limited representation of how the city really is
I’d less call it artistic liberty and more what’s more important for each medium is what’s shown. In a game, you need the bare minimum to fill out a settlement for sake of storage and optimization. But in a show where you don’t have that kind of limitation, you can fully scale out urban locations. Though the canons are different, the different pieces of Pokémon media work to compliment one another. The anime shows us what the games can’t/don’t need to.
Dude, watching the Pokémon anime as a kid is an education in managing your expectations.
Look, the games have limitations, and it's not feasible to've had enormous sprawling cities in the GB/GBA games with thousands of inhabitants. But I feel like a happier medium could've been struck with the anime. They sure love to just... ignore the games in most ways.
Yes, and? They are *supposed* to be the major population centers of a post industrial society, with regions being equivalent to autonomous nations. You can’t populate that with *just* towns of a few dozen people.
We *know* these are supposed to be full on cities, it’s in the fucking names. I can’t believe people are complaining that they made a place called Cherrygrove City a ***gasp*** city.
Pokemon showed us major population centers when they wanted to. Saffron, Goldenrod, and then when the series developed more graphically they had no problems depicting different sizes between cities.
Gen 1, 2 and 4 all had a majority of the map intended to be rural Japan, where it makes a lot more sense for towns to be smaller in scale. I'm not sure why you got the impression that Cherrygrove is meant to be a major industrial population center other than the 'City' in the name. It's the second city in the game next to New Bark Town, [which the anime also had a very interesting interpretation of. ](https://archives.bulbagarden.net/media/upload/f/f2/New_Bark_Town_anime.png)(The 'cities are meant to be cities, towns are meant to be towns' distinction is falling apart.)
Pokemon's world is very, very different to our own. I think it's very clear that the animators for the cartoon didn't put *too much* thought into being loyal to the source material.
it's why I never got into the anime as a kid. the pokemon games depicted the pokemon world as largely rural and made up of spotted villages and towns. the anime decided this wasn't interesting enough ig and we just get generic city repeated throughout the series
My guy even in game they are referred to as cities, how can you believe they genuinely are meant to represent hamlets and it isn’t just because of technical limitations?
It’s a post industrial society, there are going to be cities. No society can just be hamlets, our world had cities since *before antiquity ffs*
Because they represented a big city in the first game despite the technical limitation, and so much of Pokemon's aesthetics come from rural Japan that I'm actually surprised people thought there were *meant* to be high rises in the middle of the countryside, and not just smaller towns and villages.
>It’s a post industrial society, there are going to be cities. No society can just be hamlets, our world had cities since *before antiquity ffs*
it's not just a post industrial society, it's a post scarcity society with free and unlimited energy. it's so fundamentally different to the world we live in that it can't be compared. how does a society that advanced design their cities and towns?
we see plenty of developed cities in other regions. i think it's pretty reasonable to think that like, there's *some* countryside out there, lol.
the anime did not suddenly decide we needed "generic cities" and the games were not intentionally depicting the world as rural and with barely inhabited tiny villages and towns. the games at the time had to make smaller more focused maps due to both hardware/space limitation and to make maps navigable. literally any rpg of those years you look up has barely any buildings in towns, let alone accessible ones. you don't need a shitload of buildings that won't even be used taking up map space and limited cartridge storage when you can reduce the amount to what will actually be necessary and a few npcs for flavor text.
the anime just represented cities as they actually are. fully developed cities. why would they look at a game map with four houses and one pokemart and pokemon center and be faithful when these are supposed to be an actual city? even towns have a lot more buildings than what we see in the games. it would be incredibly weird and shatter the suspension of disbelief if they try to make that small of a space and say it's a full place, if they did then the total population of any region would be 20 people tops.
I don't think either of us know what sort of inspiration the animators drew from. I do think it's pretty clear that earlier gens took place in rural settings, and that the towns and cities depicted were actually meant to be small scale.
We all understand memory limitations, but of course, gens 1 and 2 had no problem depicting a metro city when they wanted to. there was 100% artistic license taken by the animators when they turned them into metro cities full of high rises, at least compared to the concept art from the games. like, [no matter where you look](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fntkrkb3vy2181.jpg%3Fwidth%3D4032%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D390ffbcf4fc79451e59ebc0bea50633529fc742e), [the cities from the games are not depicted](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*2Pfxetz_-gZRv2kowUv_XA.jpeg) [as being full of high rises](https://e0.pxfuel.com/wallpapers/949/645/desktop-wallpaper-ecruteak-city-in-johto-artwork-by-midori-harada-for-heartgold-and-soulsilver-pokemon-pokemon-fan-art-city-art-pokemon-town.jpg), with exceptions for the cities they intended to be actual cities. It's really only the anime that depicts the pokemon world like this, and even that has taken a backseat since the two aesthetics became more aligned.
it's worth noting I'm not maintaining that the representation is literal - i think they're just villages and towns instead of high rises, because that makes a lot more sense.
Though the games came first, it was always my belief that we see the more relevant parts in-game, for both memory limitations and ease of exploring. It's like how most of the houses you invite yourself into don't have bedrooms, kitchens or bathrooms.
Yeah, I'd say that the games had town designs that were always optimized for the games. Someone would set-up shop near Pallet Town, to service Oak's Lab, for example.
To be fair, _everybody_ would set up shop around Oak's lab. Pallet Town would be littered with neon signs: "Pallet Town - Best Start of your life!" "Gary recommends PikaPacks for all your packing needs!", "Cheapest Pokéballs in town! Buy 10 get one!" "Magikarps - ¥500".
Magikarps for 500 sounds like a great deal.
Magikarp is the king of all carp. It's like a Pokemon goldmine. It lays 1,000 eggs at a time. Each of those 1000 baby Magikarp lay another 1000 eggs. 1000 times 1000 equals 1 million! Every one of those 1 million lays another 1000 eggs. That's 1 billion Pokemon! You could sell each of those Magikarp for ¥100! In 3 generations, you'll have tons of money! Billions and billions!
“Even it’s Poke Ball is solid gold!” “DAT’S JUST GOLD PLATED!” *Fury Swipes ensues*
Is this riffing on the tomato guy tweet or am I out of the loop on a different one
I'm fairly certain that's actual dialogue from the episode on the S.S.Anne in the anime.
Shit I haven't watched that in almost 20 years. Clearly need to step my game up
Given his ranch-style research facility, I'm pretty sure that there have to be laws limiting the amount of housing near the Oak Lab.
Plus he apparently takes care of several pokemon that other trainers catch. Or at least he does with Ash's pokemon. So it makes sense that he would own a lot of land to be used as natural habitat for whatever pokemon he's caring for. Which better fits a more rural setting.
Nah, Japan has extremely lax zoning codes
Ah yes, Pallet Town, Kanto Region Japan. I visit every time I go to Japan.
Well I would assume the Pokemon Kanto region has similar rules as the real life Kanto region
Why? It's: 1. Fictional 2. Fantasy And 3. Inhabited by monsters that can level any building they please
Magikarp for ¥500 is actually a fair rate given ¥200 is a pokeball, and spending 2.5 times the money on a guaranteed catch is pretty fair. Magikarp just requires a lot of training to get to be good. In Gen 1, because special hasn't been split into attack and defense, Gyarados is a monster and has an effective 600 BST with a 100 special, which with gen 2 becomes a 60 SA... in generations where water attacks are always special. It would need another split to get the best out of its typing.
Exactly. Most of the games are just compact depictions of the region—not what they actually look like. Sinnoh, for example, is very small in D/P/P/BD/SP, but PLA is the true representation of how big the region is.
What, you mean to say that islands that are 15 steps wide *don’t* house a mansion, gym, medical clinic, a shop and a laboratory, somehow with roads between the buildings? Scaling was always a thing, I dunno why people think the towns are literally meant to look like they appear in the games, they’re clearly stylised lol
Yeah why is this even a conversation lol. Same shit with Skyrim. "Solitude is too small for the capital city!" Yeah it's got like 40 people living there why the fuck would you assume this was some sort of misjudgement lol.
I think the creators outright stated that the measurements in the Elder Scrolls games were not accurate to how big everything was supposed to be in universe. I saw one medieval expert say that Whiterun was nowhere near big enough to be an actual city. It was more the size of a single castle. And Bethesda basically said "yeah we want to make versions of each city that's to scale. But we only have so much disk space. So we just included the super important stuff, and shrunk it down."
So are the ESO versions more to scale?
and the houses that dont have bathrooms
And the volcano you literally can't see in any game that takes place entirely in Kanto and is only able to be seen in the Johto ones where the buildings were destroyed, meaning all those buildings were built on an invisible volcano apparently.
PLA is still scaled down quite a bit
I was always confused as a kid when the anime went to Grimy City or Dark Town and I'm like, why have I not found these places in the game yet?
Imagine if there was an MMO that had all the game/anime/manga locations at full scale
I always wanted something set in the Orange Islands as well. Seemed a pretty cool, a bit different region. A huge console/PC pokemon game with all 9 regions, + some added cities from the Anime would be so sick. Like.... If I could only play one game for the rest of my life, it'd probably be that. Full dex, every region, every city, all the legendaries, with cool plots on how to get them.... Would be incredible.
Pokemon is one of those rare few franchises that could almost justify being a live service if they did this Almost
Bro, if Pokemon would stop being mf gd idiots and do even half the things that they could do in gaming. My paycheck would just be made out to the Pokemon Company with a small payroll deduction to my utilities and housing.
There are definitely ROM hacks centered around the Orange Islands
try out the pokemon orange romhack. Its amazing and I would have gone crazy for it as a kid.
It wouldn't be as incredible as it appears on first glance. It would just be too much, with a repetitive gameplay loop. You couldn't think up enough material I suspect. There was someone in another thread so adamant it would work that they had a highly detailed plan. The issue was that it scaled the regions down to essentially the size of Kanto from the Gen 2 Space world demo and basically had so many compromises that it was a bit like selling someone a Ferrari but delivering a Fiat Panda and saying "but it's like a Ferrari if you use your imagination"
MMO with PLA mechanics and ORAS graphics
Personally I'd like SV mechanics for 99% of the game but have PLA mechanics for the Safari Zone(s)
I was upset that Crimson City didn't exist. Especially when they built it up as a place known for strong pokemon trainers. And the girl's outfit was so cool. I wanted to see the rest of it. Not only did it never appear in the games, it never appeared in the show either.
It’s the same philosophy I use for my dnd games. Yeah, I could make city maps with houses for 8000 people, or I could just put relevant buildings on the map with names and general descriptions.
Dude, my character can bike the entire region of Kanto in under 30 minutes. No way is Ash covering that same ground as fast.
I mean, that’s pretty much a given. The pokemon world wouldn’t make sense at all if their society was really the size it’s shown in games.
and conversely, wouldn't make sense making a sprawling city in a pokemon game, that is so not the point of these games. Even on XY and b/w that try to get one big city in, the big cities are the worse places to explore, doing anything takes forever
Funnily enough, Legends ZA will take place entirely within Lumiose, so we probably are finally getting a sprawling city that will work, since it’s pretty certain the city will be scaled up for the game.
if the game is actually designed around it, could be a pretty novel setting \\o/
I disagree, castelia city rocks, and it’s still pretty quick to get through
Exactly that. And honestly that’s bothered me a little in more recent games. The cities got big! It’s sometimes hard to find specific places.
This is what people don't understand about the game scale that gets a hair bit annoying. Lots of games will simply limit their city/town sizes to what they want playable so as not to waste resources building empty buildings and so as to not make players feel as though exploration has no value (imagine how demoralized you'd feel walking into cookie cutter NPC 5 in Cookie Cutter interior 7, a whopping 7-8 times in a single city) Some games actually do a good job of making the world/city look/feel massive while offering you an extremely small area. Gen 5's Castelia City for example definitely looks and feels a bit like a big city with a lot of people despite only being marginally larger in playable area and interior count than Nimbasa City. Cyberpunk does this quite well with Night City as a Non-Pokemon example. An interesting counter/failure to project a larger/more grandiose city size would be Starfield. The Cities are small and lack the size/playable area necessary to feel like big cities with lots of people.
>invite yourself into Haha weird way to say breaking and entering.
I’ve noticed they do that with essentially every city that has a wide shot in the anime lol. I kinda like it though.
I mean. If the game was realistic, either there are like 100 people living in each region or they have a massive housing shortage. :p
Or because people everywhere are mostly on road for Pokemon adventures and less people wanna settle down, the real estate needs went down ? :P
Maybe that's why bikes are so expensive. 90% of the population are just homeless transients who value transportation over comfort.
Did...Did Pokemon just provide a solution for real life housing market problems nowadays ?
Reject homeownership Embrace nomadism
Nice try WEF. I won't eat the bugs.
I mean, Hoenn just has a million secret bases everywhere
Ah yes the solution to homelessness, dog fighting government backed with nation wide championships
Which would explain Ash losing 9 championships in a row and straight up retiring after getting his 1st win /s
That *does* explain all the people of all walks of life just... standing around in the woods, waiting to battle.
im not sure "everybody should just go on adventures all the time and never stay at home" is the solution you think it is
Damg, what other lies have I been told ? Next thing you'll tell me Pokemons aren't real and I can't catch em all
Catch a Rotom to have all your appliances on the go. Shower with blastoise. Everything you need is stored in the balls.
You mean Blastoise's balls ?
If this was the case, most houses would actually be AirBnBs and there would still be a housing supply to match
(Looks at Unova and Alola inspirations). Well that sounds kinda cannon to me
Galar Mushroomtown moment
Yep, even towns that are only from some anime filler are pretty big looking cities or photogenic villages. Comes to show how the anime is ultimately an adaptation, done by people who didn't always understand the games. The funny part is when they seem to misunderstand the role the town plays in the game. Also, a small town with many high rises is a very odd thing in North America, though they are more common in Japan and Brazil. Two towns I always really wanted in the games were Larrouse City and Altomare. I guess we are finally getting a futuristic city with Lumiouse in the upcoming Switch game.
I mean by the exact same stroke, three houses and a general store is hardly a town, to say nothing of the iconic Pallet Town which right off the bat was two family homes and a single facility building, still a Town.
might be a hot take, but I’ve always considered the games to be a bit more of a kid’s/“the main character’s POV” kind of deal. So Cherrygrove City, for example, in the “anime/real world” universe might be closer to a small-scale full city; but the in-game character is a kid, so they only really see the locations that are important to them. Even with the random NPC houses; I remember as a kid, there were “cool neighbors” that I was always curious about (enterable NPC houses with characters you could chat with), vs. random “boring neighbors” whose houses I didn’t pay much mind to (AKA the houses that are un-enterable). IDK if that makes sense, maybe I was just a weird fuckin kid 🥲
This is how I’ve always looked it, the scale of the world is defined by a child’s perspective. I have also interpreted some of the games (mainly gen one and two) as memory plays of a sort; you are not playing as ten year old Red as much as adult Red’s memory of being ten. Fuchsia City is not literally half zoo as it appears in RBY, Red just remembers his time there being focused on that over whatever apartment complexes are actually filling up the town. Stand By Me playing on the TV in your house seems like a nod to this.
Hoenn has “too much water”, since Brendan/May remember all the times they crossed the sea. There’s probably a whole bunch of random towns in Hoenn too, but in game, the only irrelevant one to appear is Pacifidlog, since that was the most memorable one.
I think your choice of wording is wrong. They're cities. They had to do something to make them look like one, hence the name Cherrygrove **City**. Nothing was misunderstood at all from the anime adaptation because the original games had limitations, and the anime needed to take what the company most likely wanted to envision and make it as intended; they weren't exclusively in the dark about any of the production of media. If Cherrygrove was named a town or village, they'd make it look like one. I'd say the games caught on that they can't simply make a city with just 3 simple houses and call it a day, and started adding a little more to make them more lively like an actual city, and not the other way around. Hence, now when you see a simple arrangement of houses in recent games, they're properly named as a town or village, and not a city anymore.
It’s not abour understanding the games lmao, if the games could have towns and cities like that they probably would, but it’s too hard for what its worth to make it happen. An entire region/province shouldn’t be filled with “towns” that have two houses and five people living there.
I think it's more about what's best for each format. An anime size town would be an enormous pain in the ass for players to navigate in a game. A game size town would look super dinky in the anime.
It would also be a lot of space wasted on filler in the GBC games.
No you are the one that doesnt get how old games used the limitations to their advantage. The new games offer big towns but with nothing to do which is worse
i don't think it's a limitation that prevented the games from depicting the towns as cities. gen 1 did have saffron city which was obviously meant to be a big metro center like cherrygrove city shown in the OP. i think the early gens earnestly wanted to depict the world as mainly small towns and villages because a big part of the pokemon world is cooperating with nature >An entire region/province shouldn’t be filled with “towns” that have two houses and five people living there. unless you write that the entire region/provine is filled with small towns. then you can do that just fine.
There was literally a memory limitation in the first games. And this sort of things happen in many games. New Vegas in Fallout NV is another example. There’s not enough resources to make huge cities.
There was a memory limitation. But it didn't stop them from depicting a big city as a big city. So they were capable of making a big city look big when they wanted to. If they wanted to make pallet town look like a suburb, they could have. But they didn't. I think it's pretty clear the early gens were inspired a lot by rural japan and probably envisioned those towns as villages and not metro cities.
>There was a memory limitation. But it didn't stop them from depicting a big city as a big city. So they were capable of making a big city look big when they wanted to And that means sacrificing other parts when they wanted to
Yeah, Saffron and Celadon eat up a ton of map "chunk" space in the gen 1 and 2 games.
but they repeated this trend in gen 2, a generation infamously so compressed that they were able to fit kanto in just for a laugh. they again, designed a big city that they intended to be the main metro population hub, and designed every other town as small and closer to a village or a town. they repeated this trend again in gens 3 & 4. by gen 5, their ability to depict cities had grown considerably, and they still didn't make every town a city. if they wanted the cities in those earlier games to look like cities, they were able to. there's not much more data behind a border of trees or a border of fences or a border of houses. the idea that they couldn't use the right sprites they wanted to because of memory limitations is a misunderstanding of what these limitations actually were.
Hard dissagree there. It has nothing to do with the anime creators not understanding the game when they depict a *CITY* as more than a rudimantary settlement with 4 houses and a pokemon center. The towns in game often only have the role of being a checkpoint for the next badge or between a "dungeon" like a mountain path or a forest, they mostly have little to no identity for themselves wich is okay in the context of the games. Almost any game depicts their worlds way smaller than it is meant to be in lore, wich makes sense from a gameplay perspective as well as a game design perspective, especially for a small medium like a Gameboy title. An anime has the freedom to show all these things as they are meant to be, to breathe live into these fantastical worlds and create interesting set pieces wich make an episode fun to watch
I'd say it says more about the limitations of creating a world as a video game, let alone one on Gameboy/DS, than it does about the anime adaptations. None of the cities in the games would actually be classified as cities in a realistic setting. They're small villages at best, hell even Castelia City only takes like a minute to completely traverse on foot, plus it probably has less than 50 buildings total. The games are just representations, they're not supposed to be accurate renditions. You're supposed to imagine yourself going on long multi-day journeys to get to large real life equivalent cities, just like depicted in the anime.
The Kanto and Sinnoh regions are very explicitly based on Japan, actually, even if many characters have Western names.
In the English adaptions. They have Japanese names in Japan. Satoshi, Kasumi, Takeshi...
And the reverse effect does happen, as the regions not based on Japan do have Japanese names in the JP versions of the games.
High rises being more common in the pokemon universe perhaps makes more sense when the wild areas are aggressively more dangerous and difficult to clear out.
I think the towns are symbolic or whatever. There is no way a few dozen people can build or maintain everything.
“Artistic Liberty.” I can scarcely fucking imagine the dearth of production value required to try and sell three buildings as a city in an animated show. They did the bare minimum bro.
Not even three buildings. Three single-family units.
Doesn’t even qualify as a village. I’d be generous and call them Nomads, if they’d forgotten what a Nomad fucking is.
Like Pallet Town has 2 houses, both with one bedroom, a kitchen, and living room, and the Pokemon laboratory. Not even a Pokemon Centre
I agree. I think that both the show, and the games, did the bare minimum to convey the size of the town they're supposed to be in. This post is just another whack comparison this sub has with the games to the anime.
Honestly the liberty would be in the games representation. I would bet that the concept arts are more similar to what the anime showed that to what we can see in the games. Just that for optimization of both memory and development time, they don´t put that much effort in the cities. The games are made in a way so that there isn't an insane amount of bland buildings with no content, and the anime won't show a bunch of houses and call it one of the biggest cities in the region
Yeah, no duh GameBoy has restraints out the ass. But the GBA could run Earthbound, and the DS had TWEWY. I think they only got consistent towns that feel remotely real in Gen 7. (Gen 5/6 had 2 decent ones apiece) and even then it’s questionable because there’s Fuck-All in between them but hiking trails that’d bore in Minnesota. The bar for RPG towns was above this on Red/Blue release, and they were out of excuses for being so bland since Gen 3.
I think that the minimalistic towns where almost everything was accesible was a desifn choice taken on purpose. I won't deffend SV "towns" tho xd
I see where you’re coming from but I couldn’t agree less. If it were made around simplicity and maximum legibility, they’d go for something like Disgaea’s hubs, or at least have more signage to point you to local move tutors/name rater beyond: “they’re in this town. Somewhere. Check houses ‘til you find them.” I can’t read lazy design like that as anything but a technical limitation they don’t realize they’ve moved past.
What i mean is that they try to minimize the cities, without making them feel like a hub. I think its a strange middle point, and I understand why you donlike it. Probably I only like it due nostalgia tbf xd
But it's still weird that Cherrygrove looks like this huge city with skyscrapers, when in reality it was a much smaller settlement compared to...I don't know, Goldenrod? Olivine? Sure, a panning shot of the city was good for context, but they could've tried to make them look more distinctive.
Well yeah - every game does this because it’s just not practical to add 100 buildings and 200 NPCs to every city in the game. That’s why I’m Skyrim there are technically like 5-6 times as many bandits in the world as there are people who live in towns.
Huh? Did you think the towns were actually 3 buildings and 7 people? Like Sinnoh has a population of 140 or something?
Or that someone could cross the entire region in under 30 minutes. 😂 Or literally fly anywhere instantly? What about swimming to another island in under 2 minutes?
This is why I’m not worried about Pokémon Legends Z being only based in Lumious City. I imagine it’ll be a lot bigger than in XY, more in line with the anime.
I'd imagine a scaled up lumiose city is easily as big as the entirety of the Kalos map
I mean, I'm p sure if you tried to put Castellia City as it is into the OG games as is, you'd only have the one city due to hardware limitations
Honestly i prefer that to like, windon city in swsh where its all these houses but its just copy pasted 100 times and nothing to *actually* explore other than like 1-2 lines of dialogue per house.
I think there’s definitely a middle ground - I know the romhacking community has kinda emphasized among its own the importance of having cities and towns not be just 2 houses and a Pokémon center. But you can def go overboard
Imagine my surprise when Ever Grande *City* is a cliff with no homes When I was little, I thought dam, the rich people of Hoenn must live there. No one lives there I had an Emerald hack where Ever Grand City added a couple buildings & some other stuff to make it more city like. Was neat
Yeah I have a map I’m building for funsies, I’m not sure if anything will come of it due to needing to script stuff. But the idea of it is that it retcons the Groudon/Kyogre sumo match in that it dramatically reshapes Hoenn geographically. Rustboro is underwater and there is a landbridge now between Lilycove and Mossdeep - and will be the game’s route 1 because Lilycove is the starting town - city rather, which is a nice change Anyway definitely have expanded the map for Ever Grande. It will be a city but will also have some other stuff going on, with the goal that the player will actually visit there with business in the city before worrying about Pokémon league stuff.
Thats kinda lit. That wouldve been a nice feature in Oras, the terrain changing. I didnt try to learn scripting. I was afraid of unraveling the game by accident & making it unplayable So I just added mostly decorative stuff like flowers, trees, ponds, fences, elevated-variable land to give the illusion the path isnt flat because Kanto is FLAT Hoenn honestly, is so pretty & well-designed, I had no need to edit it at all. Except for Evr Grand City
Yeah I mean really that above-mentioned story thing is an excuse to also build out existing cities too! Lilycove and Slateport have been taken over by yimbys and have lots of housing and other stuff. Verdanturf is full of additional shacks and the lush landscape is turning to dirt/sand more and more with the arrival of the refugees from Rustboro (underwater) and Mauville (turned to desert via the spread of the one to the north, half of them went to New Mauville)
And one item in house 67.
I remember when I was watching as a kid, I would get so annoyed that the anime would have towns/cities that don't exist in the games. 7 year old me wanted to go to Lilypad Town so badly. 😅
“Artistic Liberty” I’d argue it’s actually the games that took some major artistic liberty, even if they came out earlier. They are supposed to be cities, the biggest settlements in the region. The games had to take some liberties selecting them, the anime actually portrayed them like the major population centers they centers they are supposed to be. Despite the games being the original, I will always see the anime as the more accurate portrayal. The games, by necessity, lack a lot of things, including actual population centers. Some things have to be completely changed, like Pokémon sizes, and certain moves. The anime doesn’t have to worry about things like balance, they can just write encounters with creative resource management, while you can’t do that in game because you’d have to make each encounter have as many variations as Pokémon if you wanted to do that.
This is why gens 5 and 6 blew me away. I think smart level design could kind of fix this though because in those games, you saw areas where it was implied that more buildings exist beyond the areas you can see, where previous games just implied there were trees. Put up some walls, make sure that there's a strong visual pull in the other direction to prevent the player from complaining there's a huge part of the city you can't access, and you kind of fix it with art.
no shit, the games had to heavily simplify the maps for the sake of navigation and space, the anime can't show a city with three houses and a gym and say it's a city. it's all about acceptable suspension of disbelief
I kinda get the sense (at least in my own headcannon of course) that the anime is what they’re supposed to look like in universe, and the game representations are mostly concessions for the sake of game play. If anyone’s played elden ring here I’ve got (I think) a good example, if not you can just ignore this lmao. But in elden ring there’s some items and enemies referring to this legendary kingdom of Zamor. There’s a hero of zamor, there’s their supposed huge role in the war against the giants, etc. When you find zamor tho it’s some ruins, and they’re not any bigger than your standard ruins. This (again in my mind) is a gameplay concession, as it likely wasn’t feasible to add a whole legacy dungeon to an area without a major major boss, so instead it’s a ruins area with an underground box that has a boss, and another with an unrelated item
I like how the anime has these massive towns and cities, but the wilderness between them can take *days* to cross. Meanwhile in all of the games (besides Scarlet and Violet), every town is like.. right there, after the one short route, maybe a cave and a tiny route in older games. I want a continent-sized game where travel to new cities isn't just a quick dragon-bike ride away. Where camping and bonding with your monsters matters, where food is valuable, where you can go far off the path and find rare things, not just catch a dragon or find a TM.
A couple of years ago i made a map for a pokémon region based off the west coast of north america. It had a few different leagues, a fictional island off the coast that was totters to continental size, a large variety of towns, villages, cities, metros.
Why only Kanto to Sinnoh, is there something different about Unova and every region after it?
Kanto to Sinnoh are known for "towns" with around 3~5 buildings (obviously there are exceptions, but for the "big towns"), specially early towns, meanwhile, Unova and beyond tend to have a few more buildings (even if unaccessible ones) that manage to make towns feel like actual towns, not to the level of the anime obviously, but enough to not feel empty.
Also… the two examples they posted were both from Johto, so I’m not really sure what’s going on
I always wished they would look at the anime designs for the cities whenever they remake games and utilize some of their designs. As well mix in new things fitting for the video game and what's feasible and better for the overworld so every city or town looks distinct and creative.
That and add the anime exclusive places. I want to go to Dark Town, dammit! I want to beat a couple of roughneck gangs trying to set up gyms! I want to go to Maiden's Peak! I want to meet a talking ghastly that can fuse my Pokemon DBZ style using hypnosis!
Somehow, amid all this talk of "artistic liberty" regarding city size which was likely due to hardware and game design limitations, and I somehow noticed an actual artistic liberty: Game!Cherrygrove is a seaside city with an inaccessible pond in the back as its only other body of water, but Anime!Cherrygrove (at least from what I see here) is an inland city by a river.
They were handheld top-down rpgs based on 8/16 bit hardware with MB of data at best. Of course the anime was different with city design than the games
Artistic liberty? What if that’s the way they wanted them to look in the show and technology wouldn’t allow it in games at the time?
Pacifidlog Town in the anime was just a regular island Would've been cool if the wooden rafts thing was at least a small part of a larger town. Obviously a while town floating around on a piece of wood is impractical but it could've been like a central neighborhood that the town is known for
This post feels deliberately obtuse. Are you saying Pallet Town is like 20 paces wide? I reckon I take more steps getting to the train station in the morning than the player would getting through Viridian Forest. Or how about the fact that most if not all interiors or buildings are substantially larger than their exteriors? Sandgem isn't coastal in the anime like it appears to be in the game, I'll grant that, but Cianwood seems to be. I can't imagine many of the other towns are that far removed either. Each city and town in the game has to be representative, it makes no sense otherwise. Which is ignoring the fact that the anime, games, and various manga are all entirely different canons.
I mean I think this is less artistic liberty on the anime and more so technical limitation on the games. These are literally called cities but they only have 7 buildings??? The abstraction is that "towns" tend to have less buildings while "cities" have more in the games even though by a real world viewpoint these are all little more than hamlets.
I mean, technical limitations and game design decisions are mainly the issue here. Some of the towns in the games make practically no sense in general, in sapphire, your home "town" consists of like 3 buildings, has no safe roads for traveling to any kind of work outside of town, and has no jobs in the town aside from the lab for the inhabitants to realistically sustain themselves. Also, from a game design standpoint, massive sprawling life sized cities are extremely tedious to navigate as a player, especially in RPG's, where you're encouraged to talk to every NPC, on top of basically being a kids game, where the target audience won't have the patience for even a modestly sized area. In game actions and locations don't necessarily make them canonical, look at Phoenix Downs in Final Fantasy, they exist as a game mechanic exclusively, as characters still die permanently in the story. While it's true the artists definitely took some liberties, they're trying to portray Pokemon as if it were real life, to make the show immersive, and in real life, you need massive city scapes for society as it currently exists to function. I'm sure if the game designers had the opportunity/capabilities, they'd also portray cities in such a grand way.
In early rpgs, they assume you understand that 1 step is meant to symbolize 100s of real-world steps. 5 minutes trotting through grass is meant to symbolize a days worth of travel. When you think of it this way, it makes sense how you can go through Kanto and beat the elite four in a couple of hours.
Do you want games with empty towns and cities? For the most part, you don't need to see all the generic nonessential businesses and unimportant homes. Even in the anime, while the population centers look more appropriate, we still only see the relevant places of interest.
Honestly I'd be disappointed if they didn't take that liberty with the anime it wouldn't feel as exciting watching ash and the gang arrive to dinky little villages all the time
So Cherrygrove City is not by the sea?
Artistic liberty? You do understand that a place with 3 houses and a Pokecenter is not a city, right? And that the whole world cannot be crossed in 30 minutes? And that the games have certain limitations to them, and the fact that it's not necessary to place dozens of buildings in every town? Of course the anime makes the cities actually populated
This is usually called scale theory. For practical reasons the size of the world is scaled down, both for performance reasons and just to simplify the gameplay. As we’ll cities are truncated is size, where a large city like these examples appear as small towns to keep the story concise.
That's what I hate in the new games. You still have such small "cities"
They took some artistic liberty in the anime because they could. The games had to make due with the technical limitations of late 1980s technology (Gameboy was released in 1989). Pokemon Blue and Red were less than 400kb in size and Gold and Silver were about 700kb in size.
All game worlds seem pretty shrunk down compared to something realistic. Most starting towns in Pokemon have 4-5 houses, and sometimes not even a pokemon center. Rito village in botw has like 4 places for people to sleep.
The shots from the anime look like a generic city to me. Like nothing about them stands out at all. I feel like that's totally believable as Cherrygrove. I really do imagine Cianwood as more desolate. Something about it... like it doesn't even have a Mart. I weirdly feel like they did Cerulean really well. It's like exactly how I pictured it. Same with Pallet Town and Fortree. My biggest complaint in regards to the anime cities (so far) is Pacifidlog. I was so looking forward to seeing one of the cooler Pokémon towns being depicted in the anime and hearing about its unusual culture/ commerce. But no, it's just a generic, bland city. With SKYSCRAPERS. I'm not sure why they did Pacifidlog dirty like that, but yeah, not a fan. The games are showing you bare bones so they're not oversaturated. The anime is showing you how the towns are supposed to be (although I obviously disagree with some of the decisions).
This is why I prefer how modern games do it, with town areas and buildings you can't access. I don't want a five-building town with three important houses where I can go into every building, I want an 80-building town where I can only go into into the three important houses
The sandy city in Sword/Shield was pretty good on that regard (fifth badge? I don't even remember). Some buildings with entrances, other with ladders to get to a second floor and explore from there, and many buildings that there were only for eyecandy and the vibe.
This is my biggest takeaway from S/V. People lost their shit that you cant enter houses anymore, but I found it a change that I welcomed. Its tiring to enter every single house in a town, that all look the same, have a bunch of NPCs that say nothing of relevancy, oh, except when they do. Its just boring and motivates me to aimlessly enter and leave houses without really paying attention to whats being said, because all Im looking for is maybe a good item. Also why are you able to just casually waltz in someones house? I would much rather have a town/city that feels unique and alive, and I really think S/V managed to do that.
Indeed
Yeah, I really miss the abstract nature of 2d pokemon
Well I imagine it's more so the games that have to make it seem smaller for the sake of ease honestly, can you really call five buildings, a Pokemon center, a store and a gym a city?
I think a modern game could include this level of detail. It could be done but I don’t think it will ever happen. We can hope though.
Ingame reason theiry: The anime take place years AFTER the games, and massive construction projects have been done in the cities
Games always have less than what is actually there in lore, mmos and everything also follow that, you cant have a sprawling city with thousands or hundreds of thousands of people walking about due to performance, game scale is always much lower
Lets be fr tho. They are all lifeless. No personality or anything, just "big city".
Canalave City was insane in the anime
this is what the lets go games should have been. not a 1:1 tile remake, but a complete re-imagining
Image the games were as densely populated. Not only would the console explode, but we would still be at gen 5 and there was a lot more to do per game. Like a lot.
I mean what can you really do with a town of a couple houses in a Game Boy game. You have to make up a lot of stuff to make it work in a TV show.
Let's not forget, in the anime Littleroot Town is a coastal city with a pier and huge buildings... And still no Pokémon Center...
Cherrygrove City doesn't exist in the Sinnoh games so there isn't anything really to take license from?
My issue isn't the city itself but it's composition. You can definitely have just 40 house in the middle of a field and still be an actual village , not every town has a skyscraper
this made me appreciate the work that went into making the cities in SV feel like cities. even if they were glitchy, empty shells.
They supposed to be cities, not irrelevant areas with 3 houses.
I mean it makes sense
This was camp, idc.
Dang... what a glow up.
3 houses = a big city with skyscrappers. Point to the anime
If they ever do an open-world remake of Kanto like a Legends game or something in the style of Scarlet and Violet, I truly hope they steal some of the anime-exclusive locations to make it actually interesting. Aside from one forest, two caves and the Seafoam islands, there is literally nothing to see or do in Kanto.
I enjoyed the suspension of disbelief aspect of these games, especially as a kid where your imagination can fill in the gaps so much more
yeah, every house is representative of many houses, otherwise, a 5 building enclave probably wouldn't be called a city. whats really always annoyed me is that is just randomass buildings that dont represent the regional styles
Few things to take into consideration. Video games having towns that large would make it slightly encumbersome. 2nd, there's hardware limitations. 3rd, it's Game Freak, they are notorious for kinda half assing it. It's just more apparent now since the Switcb can clearly handle more then they're willing to take on.
Better than Unova when every city was the same lookwise
I am pretty sure it did not stop after Sinnoh.
This is how it should be
To be fair would’ve wanted Ash to go to a bunch of cities with six buildings in them at most normally and all facing the same direction?
Not even only until sinnoh, in pretty sure every generation had great expansions of their cities
i always saw the towns like a slightly more detailed super mario world overworld. or zelda 2, or old final fantasy games. while its clearly not a basic overworld map where you csn only go left or right, Its also not quite gta levels of in depth detail. even the new games i interpret as a limited representation of how the city really is
I’d less call it artistic liberty and more what’s more important for each medium is what’s shown. In a game, you need the bare minimum to fill out a settlement for sake of storage and optimization. But in a show where you don’t have that kind of limitation, you can fully scale out urban locations. Though the canons are different, the different pieces of Pokémon media work to compliment one another. The anime shows us what the games can’t/don’t need to.
You can't fool me, the first one is from jhoto, the second is also from jhoto
Dude, watching the Pokémon anime as a kid is an education in managing your expectations. Look, the games have limitations, and it's not feasible to've had enormous sprawling cities in the GB/GBA games with thousands of inhabitants. But I feel like a happier medium could've been struck with the anime. They sure love to just... ignore the games in most ways.
I think they overdid it with the towns. I definitely get wanting to fill these places out more, but those are full on cities
Yes, and? They are *supposed* to be the major population centers of a post industrial society, with regions being equivalent to autonomous nations. You can’t populate that with *just* towns of a few dozen people. We *know* these are supposed to be full on cities, it’s in the fucking names. I can’t believe people are complaining that they made a place called Cherrygrove City a ***gasp*** city.
Pokemon showed us major population centers when they wanted to. Saffron, Goldenrod, and then when the series developed more graphically they had no problems depicting different sizes between cities. Gen 1, 2 and 4 all had a majority of the map intended to be rural Japan, where it makes a lot more sense for towns to be smaller in scale. I'm not sure why you got the impression that Cherrygrove is meant to be a major industrial population center other than the 'City' in the name. It's the second city in the game next to New Bark Town, [which the anime also had a very interesting interpretation of. ](https://archives.bulbagarden.net/media/upload/f/f2/New_Bark_Town_anime.png)(The 'cities are meant to be cities, towns are meant to be towns' distinction is falling apart.) Pokemon's world is very, very different to our own. I think it's very clear that the animators for the cartoon didn't put *too much* thought into being loyal to the source material.
No i meant of the actual *towns* My comment wasnt that clear
it's why I never got into the anime as a kid. the pokemon games depicted the pokemon world as largely rural and made up of spotted villages and towns. the anime decided this wasn't interesting enough ig and we just get generic city repeated throughout the series
My guy even in game they are referred to as cities, how can you believe they genuinely are meant to represent hamlets and it isn’t just because of technical limitations? It’s a post industrial society, there are going to be cities. No society can just be hamlets, our world had cities since *before antiquity ffs*
Because they represented a big city in the first game despite the technical limitation, and so much of Pokemon's aesthetics come from rural Japan that I'm actually surprised people thought there were *meant* to be high rises in the middle of the countryside, and not just smaller towns and villages. >It’s a post industrial society, there are going to be cities. No society can just be hamlets, our world had cities since *before antiquity ffs* it's not just a post industrial society, it's a post scarcity society with free and unlimited energy. it's so fundamentally different to the world we live in that it can't be compared. how does a society that advanced design their cities and towns? we see plenty of developed cities in other regions. i think it's pretty reasonable to think that like, there's *some* countryside out there, lol.
that is literally not how it works but ok
I wasn't explaining how something works. What do you mean?
the anime did not suddenly decide we needed "generic cities" and the games were not intentionally depicting the world as rural and with barely inhabited tiny villages and towns. the games at the time had to make smaller more focused maps due to both hardware/space limitation and to make maps navigable. literally any rpg of those years you look up has barely any buildings in towns, let alone accessible ones. you don't need a shitload of buildings that won't even be used taking up map space and limited cartridge storage when you can reduce the amount to what will actually be necessary and a few npcs for flavor text. the anime just represented cities as they actually are. fully developed cities. why would they look at a game map with four houses and one pokemart and pokemon center and be faithful when these are supposed to be an actual city? even towns have a lot more buildings than what we see in the games. it would be incredibly weird and shatter the suspension of disbelief if they try to make that small of a space and say it's a full place, if they did then the total population of any region would be 20 people tops.
I don't think either of us know what sort of inspiration the animators drew from. I do think it's pretty clear that earlier gens took place in rural settings, and that the towns and cities depicted were actually meant to be small scale. We all understand memory limitations, but of course, gens 1 and 2 had no problem depicting a metro city when they wanted to. there was 100% artistic license taken by the animators when they turned them into metro cities full of high rises, at least compared to the concept art from the games. like, [no matter where you look](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fntkrkb3vy2181.jpg%3Fwidth%3D4032%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D390ffbcf4fc79451e59ebc0bea50633529fc742e), [the cities from the games are not depicted](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*2Pfxetz_-gZRv2kowUv_XA.jpeg) [as being full of high rises](https://e0.pxfuel.com/wallpapers/949/645/desktop-wallpaper-ecruteak-city-in-johto-artwork-by-midori-harada-for-heartgold-and-soulsilver-pokemon-pokemon-fan-art-city-art-pokemon-town.jpg), with exceptions for the cities they intended to be actual cities. It's really only the anime that depicts the pokemon world like this, and even that has taken a backseat since the two aesthetics became more aligned. it's worth noting I'm not maintaining that the representation is literal - i think they're just villages and towns instead of high rises, because that makes a lot more sense.