>>40354853Retard, Hoenn's route 119 is full of a ton of optional areas which reward you with either nice berries, secret bases or evolution items. It's a complete far cry from the routes found in gens 6 and 7 which where nothing but straight hallways and no diverging paths.
Here's another example, a completely optional area you needed to go well out of your way to find, but in the grass you could find fully evolved Pokemon which weren't available anywhere else.
The idea of a route being "linear" isn't necessarily talking about the shape of it, but rather how you're supposed to explore it. Older games had multiple examples of the game letting the player poke around and access extra content, or encourage you to return when you have more HMs, while the newer games only let you go a single direction and literally nothing else.
