>>38665393I'm curious—could you sum up what made Gen I uniquely nonlinear in your eyes? I feel like it didn't do all that much... but that also means that what it did to that end would be fairly easy to replicate in later Gens and might as well be standard.
As far as I know, it basically just made every Gym from Surge and on optional (you can do the mandatory part of each town without facing them), b) let you put off Saffron City as long as you wanted and c) gave more than one route to get to Fuchsia and Cinnabar, right?
The chain of events was still always pretty linear: you always go Pallet -> Viridian -> Pewter -> Cerulean -> Vermilion for Cut -> Cerulean again -> Lavender -> Celadon for the Silph Scope and a drink -> Lavender again for Poké Flute -> Fuchsia for Surf -> Cinnabar -> Viridian again for Giovanni. But the fact that the last two cities could both be accessed from either side, you could put Saffron wherever you wanted between the Celadon to the second Viridian and six of the Gyms weren't a necessary part of the first visit... That seems to have left a big impression on a lot of players.
I don't think that's all that hard to emulate in a modern game, even a game as linear as the ones as Game Freak has been doing recently, and it seems like it made a pretty big difference for a lot of players.
Am I forgetting something else about Kanto's structure, or is that really all it would take for you to consider a game nonlinear? I feel like—at that point—there's really no reason or excuse not to keep doing it, if only because it's such a minor change to make.
Knowing myself, I'd end up doing them all linearly anyway... but why NOT leave that kind of option open? It affects the chain of events so little—Gyms are never part of the plot and major events rarely happen in the middle of Routes, so offering the option to skip a Gym or take another path with the same end goal here and there would rarely hurt the story at all.
