>>56259578>>56259583Unova routes legitimately do have a lot going on. you'd be hard pressed to find routes from earlier games with as much content squeezed into them. even the shorter routes generally have a bunch of optional side areas. people make two major mistakes. one, they only consider the shortest path possible through the route. a lot of Unova routes are designed to have a short & compacted main path, but reward you for going off that path.
second, people get hung up on the shape of the region and the fact that you progress through it linearly, and conflate that with exploration. however, region layouts like in Hoenn and Sinnoh only really gave the illusion of exploration. I'll admit I do prefer that region design that has backtracking and loops etc, but the reality is you still progress through those regions in an almost completely linear fashion. the real exploration in 2D style Pokemon has always been at the route level, and again, Unova has really well designed routes. they easily have more content in them than any routes in Kanto or Johto, and are at least on par if not more content packed than Hoenn and Sinnoh routes if you account for optional areas.
