>>37357684The concept for Route 0 would work in theory (altho I imagine it would be hard to make spring and autumn THAT interesting), but it would require an insane amount of work and effort to actually pull it off flawlessly on a decent enough number of routes, especially if you don't want to keep repeating the same "hidden cave" trope. Not to mention that you would turn simple routes into entire dungeons (unless you want the caves to be single rooms where you have to go back and forth for half an hour to make sure you've seen all the available mons, which was beginning to be a trend in Gen III). To make said dungeons interesting, you'd have to fill them with items/interactables/NPCs (that would have to be scaled to the level of the route, I imagine).
So to effectively design an average route that connects village X with city Y, not only do you have to set up interesting landmarks along the route itself to make it feel relatively unique (kinda like how Hoenn had various environments and attractions along its main LAND routes so you wouldn't just run thru it in 2 minutes), but also design 2 (or 4 if you wanna get creative with autumn and spring) separate areas filled with mons that should technically NOT be available on the main route, else the whole thing wouldn't make sense.
And this brings about the problem that you'd have to make these mons available only in postgame/once national dex has been obtained, because no gen could possibly have enough variety (as in, a group of mons that would realistically hybernate/hide) to fill those caves without resorting to the same 4/5 evolutionary lines; sadly doing this would mean that these areas would be empty/brimming with trashy filler before the national dex is obtained, which makes the first exploration as dull and uninspiring as it gets.
I realize I jump to a lot of conclusions, but I imagine that designing these games would require 100x times this amount of brainstorming (more than what GF prolly gets credit for)
