>>55284446utterly unmemorable, barren and empty; the fatal pitfall of open world games
removal of most interiors was a disastrous choice.
insistence on maintaining the scale of the towns on par with the older games while making an open world game means all of the towns barring mesagoza are comically tiny and not worth exploring outside of a quick check across the rooftops for the odd TM.
in fact, i think that it would've been an infinitely better choice to have all of the towns instanced like mesagoza, with the catch that they were made larger and more fleshed out; i think one of the reasons why people have the complaint that paldea's towns seem randomly placed and scattered is because by allowing the player to approach a town from any angle, it means one's first impressions can be wildly all over the place, often times in some random NPC's backyard.
the towns all blend together. only a small handful of towns have some kind of notable thing to them (mesagoza's school, desert town's marketplace, larry town's restaurant), the rest are filler, which is something that the series should really move forward from now that it's open world
a lot of lost potential in basing a region on a location as ecologically diverse as iberia but then not doing anything with it and instead just following the theme park design ethos of every single possible biome sprinkled across the region, but that's an issue with pokemon as a whole, not just paldea.
