>>55181334What reason did you have to go back to Castelia? Lumiose at least acted as a central hub that you had to physically come back to during the game due to the layout of the region, plus it had a lot more side streets that you could just get lost in (as well as the Looker/Emma quest). Castelia used some visual tricks to make it seem busier than it actually was, but in terms of function it wasn't really any different to previous big city that you just pass through as part of the game (Saffron, Goldenrod, Lilycove, Jubilife).
Also just out of interest, I quickly loaded up some old save files and counted the number of accessible buildings in some major cities in each region:
Saffron - 8
Goldenrod - 15
Lilycove - 13
Jubilife - 9
Veilstone - 11
Castelia - 13
Lumiose - 47 (I lost track when I tried to navigate Lumiose in-game, so I just looked at this map instead)
Hau'oli - 10 (+3 if you include the outskirts)
Hammerlocke - 14
Wyndon - 9
Mezagoza - Can't really compare this to the others since it doesn't have buildings and replaces all the shops with simple menus, but there's about 40 of them
Other than Lumiose, which mogs the others so badly that it's not even funny, most of the cities are actually comparable to Castelia. In fact, going back through each one again, I'd say Castelia is quite similar to Wyndon in that it's size is almost entirely an illusion and it only seems big because there are a bunch of inaccessible buildings in the background. Plus gen 7 and later are at a disadvantage because they're rendered with realistic proportions (which is far more taxing graphically), compared to the previous generations where you were a chibi sprite/model. Plus the 2D perspective made it much harder to realise that you were effectively being railroaded down a very narrow path. For instance, Hammerlocke has more accessible buildings than most cities in the series, but it feels small because it's literally just a single curved path connecting them all.
