>>12921230As someone who enjoyed Hoenn's sense of exploration and adventure but hated the water routes:
>Wild encountersThere's no tall grass or extra-deserty sand that confines wild Pokemon encounters, so after a while it's easy to just straight up get bored of encountering a bunch of Tentacool and Wingull over and over and over. Not to mention the levels could get pretty inconsistent, so there was no guarantee you wouldn't be encountering anything excessively underlevelled. Repels are an option, but pausing every 250 steps on routes that massive to re-repel breaks the gameplay up and slows things down.
>SizeMost caves are (relatively) small to keep you from getting bored and frustrated when you're stuck in the route that never ends, and with most well-designed routes you have a good idea where you're going.
The dive sections helped break up the linearity, which is neat when all routes in the games are essentially straight lines from Point A to Point B, but the sheer massiveness of the water routes meant that you'd spend a lot of time with nothing but water on your screen, meaning it's easy to drift toward just wandering aimlessly in one direction. Even if you have a general idea where you're going ("oh I hit the rocks guess I'd better surf down"), you can "feel" lost.
Basically, my beef with the water routes was just that they were laid on too thick. Something more like an archipelago where you traversed islands broken up by stretches of Surfing would have been more fun, less empty-feeling, and conveyed a clearer sense of "this way to your destination" than infinite blue tiles.
