>>53928640Gen 5 started this though. Every town and route in BW has either the two shitty rivals, Juniper, or N pretty much directly leading you to where you *should* be with unnecessary repetition and exposition. Hell the entire region is a straight line in contrast to how interconnected Hoenn and Sinnoh were.
The only things XY really did to casualize the main campaign were adding the exp share and those amie boosts if you put time into those minigames. Most of the actual progression issues in Kalos started in Unova, and were arguably even worse there. If you want to be pedantic this kind of started with HGSS’s awkward and tacked on Ethan/Lyra moments, but BW is when it became egregious.
