>>15813276There's a difference between variety and just shoving in every obligatory stop to the point that all the regions start blurring together. It's not variety if all the regions end up with the same places and have essentially nothing unique about them.
Hoenn is a tropical island and Sinnoh is a bunch of mountains and shit.
Unova and Kalos are essentially a bunch of cities slapped together with a bunch of unrealistic areas with no thought put into their placement or being there beyond filling out the "necessary" places for the player to go on their checklist of obligatory places to put into the game.
Hoenn had a desert and a volcano, but they weren't just shoehorned in on a random spot on the map - they made them fit with the climate and area of the region. The surrounding towns fit with the places that they were near.
On the other hand, in Unova and Kalos, there are giant cities smack right next to huge deserts. While that's certainly possible, sure, it gives less a feeling of variety and more a feeling of GF just wanted to stuff in a desert and that just happened to be where it got put.
It's not an issue of there being "sameness" - there can be variety in a region - but it needs to actually feel natural, there needs to be a flow and a progression to the areas. There can't just be different things slapped onto the map for the sole purpose of them being there but at the cost of a region being good.
The regions don't become memorable that way, they become cookie cutter "regions" that aren't memorable at all.
