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It's like they made a region, but halfway through someone decided a heavy story focus was the way to go. You can somewhat see this past the first island. There's a couple explorable locations on the first island. (barely, but there's the beach and sea, and that one place at the bottom of a cliff.) It's a circle, yes, but there's some semblance of exploration at some point. Then the second island's basically an even more closed circle, you have brooklet hill with visible caves you can't get to, the volcano that warps you to the top, then there's the golf course, which looks like someone planned some sort of minigame to go along with it? But it never got past the point of modeling the place.
The third island is where it really takes a downturn. You're forced to ride a bus, the magnetic location isn't the power plant (fixed in usm, too little too late), and overall the whole island's one straight hall to Po Town. You have the Desert, which feels more tacked on than the desert from XY, it's right next to a snowy mountain here, and it's even arbitrarily walled off until you do the trial. To me the third island signifies that this is where the game went from ""normal" pokemon story focus" to "massive story focus." No exploring, we want you to spend time with lillie. Not-Victory Road there is also a huge sign of "we ran out of time"
Poni Island, just forget about it. You're instantly led through the canyon, which is the closest thing to a dungeon the game has. But of course lillie's there to heal your team. The rest of the island is postgame, but it's just another hallway with small branches. Closest you have is resolution cave, but that's just another hallway with a few branches. And that's it, that's the game
My opinion is somewhere around finishing the first island and partway through making the second island is where the troubles started, assuming they made them in that order. Either way, the focus of the game absolutely changed partway through development.
