Pokémon Regions: The Complete World Geography

A region is a geographic subdivision of the Pokémon world, at least one per generation, with its own species, its own institutions and its own Pokédex renumbered from 1. Nine have been traveled in the main series, from Kanto in 1996 to Paldea in 2022; a tenth was announced in February 2026, still unnamed. The regional guides already cover their towns, their Gyms and their League. This page takes the other angle: the shape of the maps, their real-world models, and what the terrain forces on the rules of the game.

The geography of this universe is less settled than you would think. No main series game has ever published a map of the whole world, no source gives the surface area of a region, and of the nine real-world models, only five are officially confirmed. What the terrain forces, on the other hand, shows at once: Hoenn drowns half its territory and makes Surf unavoidable, Alola trades its Gyms for an island challenge, Paldea goes open world and loses even its numbered routes.

What a region is in Pokémon

Poképédia defines a region as a geographic subdivision of the Pokémon world, at least one per generation of main series games. Each generation builds a brand-new territory, species and institutions included, then closes it around a template that players recognize from one region to the next.

It comes down to eight points: a hometown with no Gym, a Professor who hands over the Pokédex, a Grass-Fire-Water trio, eight Gyms and as many Badges, a League with an Elite Four then a Champion, a regional Pokédex renumbered from 1, a criminal organization, numbered Routes. Every one of them has been broken at least once ; and the ones that break them tell you the most.

The Professor who hands over the Pokédex belongs to every main region without belonging to the land itself: Samuel Oak, of Kanto, resides in Sinnoh in Diamond and Pearl then Platinum. The starter trio is the most stable item: no main series region has ever broken the trio. The rule applies to regions, not versions — Pikachu in Yellow to Let's Go, Pikachu, Eevee in Let's Go, Eevee. Hisui borrows all three: Rowlet from Alola, Cyndaquil from Johto, Oshawott from Unova.

The regional Pokédex makes a region measurable, alongside the National numbering, which runs to 1,025 species.

The exceptions, and what they teach

Alola does away with Gyms: no Gym Leaders, no Badges. The island challenge that replaces them follows the layout of the archipelago, island by island: authority there becomes island-based. The count wavers: Poképédia lists seven trials, Bulbapedia seven in Sun and Moon, eight in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.

Galar owes its twelve Gym Leaders for eight Badges to two stadiums that each have their own depending on the version, and to two handovers of the post after the main story; its Gym Challenge requires a letter of endorsement. It does away with the Elite Four : the Champion's challenger comes out of the Champion Cup, an annual televised tournament. Its League exists; what it lacks is the four-step staircase that every previous region made you climb.

Hisui ticks not a single institutional box : no Gym, no Badge, no League, since the game is set before Pokémon Leagues were invented. No hometown — Jubilife Village is a recently established settlement — and open areas without a single Route. Hisui is not a tenth region : it is Sinnoh before it was renamed.

Paldea keeps its eight Gyms but reduces them to one quest among three run in parallel — Victory Road, Path of Legends, Starfall Street — before the epilogue The Way Home. And not a single numbered Route, only one named: the one at Cabo Poco. The open world did away with the numbered stretch, the unit of the journey since the first generation.

What the word itself says

Japanese says 地方 (chihō): land, district, territorial division, a suffix systematically attached to the name — カントー地方 Kantō-chihō, ヒスイ地方 Hisui-chihō. In the real world, the regions of Japan, eight in number, are not official administrative divisions but conventional groupings of prefectures. A region is therefore, in the original language, a piece of a country and never a country — and every localization has kept a subnational word, right down to Korean 지방 Jibang.

A single line of in-game dialogue confirms a higher tier: in it, Sinnoh, Kanto and Hoenn all belong toone and the same country, whose name is never given. The scale then blew wide open without the word changing: Kalos traces France, Galar the United Kingdom, Paldea the Iberian Peninsula — territories that remain 地方.

Region, sub-region, land

Poképédia keeps sub-regions apart: the Sevii Islands (Kanto), Blueberry Academy (Unova), the Isle of Armor and the Crown Tundra (Galar). Three have their own Pokédex, the Sevii Islands making do with the National one, and none has an official League — the Academy's Blueberry League is only a student competition. Kitakami is slipperier: its page calls it a land beyond Paldea, and Poképédia's table lists it among the main series games all the same.

The criterion is neither size nor facilities: Kitakami holds 200 species, more than the original Kanto's 151, and its border is as firm as a region's, since Paldean forms are not found there. What separates a region from a sub-region comes down to a declared dependency : it is described as somebody's sub-region and, in Kitakami's case, does not even have a Professor. A nominal criterion, not a structural one.

One planet, and no official atlas

All the regions fit on a single planet. Asked by Game Informer in November 2012, Junichi Masuda said that Game Freak thinks of the Pokémon world not as Earth, but as a place very much like it and yet "another planet", peopled by people who may look like us without valuing the same things; thinking in earthly terms would hold the team back, starting with the way real objects work.

The games do name our world, though: the Amazon, Everest and the Pacific in the Pokédex, Hollywood and Paris in the animated series. No official source reconciles the two accounts.

One and the same country, never named

It all rests on a few lines of dialogue. In Diamond, Pearl to Platinum, Sinnoh, Kanto and Hoenn belong to one and the same larger country, whose name has never been revealed : the idea comes from Professor Oak, at the Pal Park, where Pokémon are brought in from all over the country, Kanto and Hoenn included. Johto, which borders Kanto, is presumably part of it too — a reading from the encyclopedias, not a line from the game.

Japanese confirms the administrative status: the main regions carry the suffix 地方 (chihō), eight of the nine on Poképédia, with only Sinnoh's infobox leaving it out, most likely by oversight. The word separates a region from an annex: no sub-region carries it — Kitakami is キタカミの里, "the village of Kitakami", and the Sevii Islands ナナシマ, "seven islands".

The proof in the route numbers

Kanto and Johto share a single continuous series from 1 to 48, 1 to 28 on the Kanto side, 29 to 48 on the Johto side. Hoenn does not start over at 1: it begins at 101, Sinnoh at 201. The behavior of a single national agency, one that does not renumber at borders. Poképédia sees in this a possible echo of Japan's national highways, numbered 1 to 58 then picking up again at 101: a hypothesis the studio has never confirmed.

Unova, Kalos, Alola and Galar all start over at 1, without proving a border for all that: the National Pokédex, in Unova as in Kalos, already lists the species of the first four regions, and Bulbapedia reads that as either a single nation or cooperation between Professors. Black and White own the distance: Unova is said to be very far from the previous regions, hence its Pokémon and its culture, and its routes 1 to 23 mimic Kanto's numbering instead of continuing it. Paldea no longer numbers anything, its territory being carved into Provinces — North Province (Area Two), East Province (Area One), Area Zero. Not a first: Hisui, opened ten months earlier by Pokémon Legends: Arceus, was already divided into sectors without a single numbered route.

Two time differences, in a single game

Scarlet and Violet put a number on the time difference between two places in the world, the only known case in the series: Kitakami running 18 real minutes ahead of Paldea, the Terarium the same amount behind. The game clock makes a day last 72 real minutes: 18 minutes are worth exactly six in-game hours. Six hours of gap in each direction, the order of magnitude of the real time differences between Spain, Japan and the American East Coast — daytime in one, night in the other, on the same save file.

Two caveats. The cycle has its own internal rhythm, but its starting point is read from the Switch clock at launch: saying thatScarlet and Violet ignore it is wrong. Also the only documented time differences in the series: the twelve hours separating Sun measuring Moon are a version difference, with no justification in the fiction, and no Unova time difference is documented, despite how often the claim is made.

Four playable connections, and nothing else

You do not travel far across this world: the usable interregional connections link four pairs of territories. The Magnet Train crosses the border between Goldenrod City and Saffron City around the clock at 550 km/h — the only interregional transport whose speed Poképédia puts a number on. The S.S. Aqua links Olivine City to Vermilion City, two weekly departures from each end; after the first trip, the crossing ends only once the player sleeps in their cabin — a night at sea between Johto and Kanto, fromGold and Silver to HeartGold and SoulSilver.

The Seagallop, seven ferries governed by a system of passes, serves the Sevii Islands out of Vermilion City; Kitakami sits far enough from Paldea to require a plane, the same game then sending the player on to Blueberry Academy. Everything else is intraregional, or points toward an unreachable elsewhere: the train station in Couriway Town, in Kalos, is said to connect to distant regions and leads nowhere.

The people who make the trip

The most concrete proof: people move house. The hero of Ruby and Sapphire comes from Johto: his father Norman takes over the Petalburg City Gym and the family settles in Littleroot Town. The hero of Sun and Moon arrives from Kanto. Cynthia, Sinnoh's Champion, stays in Undella Town in Black and White, competes in the Pokémon World Tournament, then holds a post at Alola's Battle Tree — three continents of inspiration.

The supporting cast travels just as much. Grimsley, retired from Unova's Elite Four, turns up on Alola's Route 15; Sina and Dexio, Professor Sycamore's assistants, reappear there with Alolan forms. The clearest case of all: Drasna, of the Kalos Elite Four, a dragon woman from a faraway country according to her official tagline — the game names that country, and her grandparents left Celestic Town, in Sinnoh: a migration from Japan to France in two generations.

And still, no world map

None of the main games has ever published a map of the whole world : the world maps in circulation are reconstructions. Serebii's, the most widely reused, warns that the placement of the regions is not official, arranged to fit the page. In March 2023, the Pokémon Center sold one map per region, nine posters from Kanto to Paldea, never a single assembled whole.

The animated series, for its part, has shown the globe: an orbital view in the first Unova episode, a world map on which an almost intact Fennoscandian peninsula can be made out, a holographic globe nearly identical to Earth in an XY season special. And one official map does exist — Kanto, Johto, Hoenn and Sinnoh brought together in the booklet of the tenth movie: a movie bonus, not a game document. In 2026, the geography of the world is still pieced together from whatever each game in the series lets slip.

The regions at a glance

Nine regions in the main series, from Kanto in 1996 to Paldea in 2022; the tenth, announced on February 27, 2026 for Pokémon Winds and Waves, due in 2027, still has no official name. On the routes, rare as that is, Poképédia and Bulbapedia agree down to the last number; the franchise gives no land area at all, and the head counts of inhabitants set the two encyclopedias against each other on almost every total.

Every name in the table leads to its own guide. The cities and towns are the ones Bulbapedia spells out by name, the League excluded everywhere, without which two rows would not be counting the same thing. A sea route is a route crossed by water, a label in use since the third generation; a zero says that no route carries that label, not that no one ever sails there — Alola shows a zero here while Bulbapedia files its Route 15 among the sea routes. In the Pokédex column, the second figure is the size reached by the expanded version, the remake, the third version, the sequel or the expansion; the three numbers for Kalos split a single total across its three dexes.

The model column does not carry the same weight of proof everywhere: five of these matches rest on an official statement, the other four on nothing but their geography and their place names — the sources, case by case, come in the next section. Only Kanto carries the name of its model: Sinnoh, by Masuda's own admission, means "mysterious," and Johto points to a capital, not to a geography.

No two columns rank the regions in the same order. Hoenn, the route record holder, comes in only seventh by population; Kalos, first by Pokédex outside expansions with its 457 species, ranks only fifth by routes; Paldea, the most populous on Bulbapedia — at least 1,523 characters — does not have a single route. A region that is "big" by one measure is almost always small by another : Kanto has been the smallest by population since the second generation, third by routes, and, geography aside, the most replayed region in the franchise.

Two "16"s are not the same 16. Hoenn's, on Bulbapedia, includes Ever Grande City, a city in its own right and the seat of the League, while the Kalos, Sinnoh and Alola Leagues are counted separately — hence the 15 in the table, and a ranking that flips the moment you add up the settlements: Sinnoh 18, Kalos 17, Hoenn 16. Unova's twenty cities, for their part, span two pairs of games, Black and White then Black 2 and White 2 : no single cartridge brings them all together.

Paldea's zero, finally, is not a gap but a change of unit: the column counts numbered routes, while Paldea carves its territory into fifteen areas. An empty cell reflects a naming convention, not missing ground.

Hisui is missing from the table for lack of a row of its own: it is the same territory as Sinnoh, at an earlier time when the Pokémon League does not exist yet. It holds four settlements and eleven base camps, no numbered routes, five open areas around a hub village, one hundred eleven recorded inhabitants and a Pokédex of 242 species. Which one is the biggest? The answer changes with the column — a question taken up again below, measure by measure.

Tracing the real world

Looking for France in Kalos or New York in Unova is an old player's sport: the big English-language encyclopedia tops its page on the subject with a "fan speculation" banner. Three different things travel under the "inspiration" label. "Confirmed": a developer or an official publication from The Pokémon Company puts the model forward as a design choice. "Obvious tracing": no official source, but the terrain or the name leaves no room for doubt. "Assumed resemblance": a connection floated one day by a player that nobody checks anymore — by far the most crowded category.

The scouting trips, what is actually documented

The method is openly claimed: the team goes and sees the country. Masuda and part of the studio leave for France a month after Pokémon Black and White, to prepare Pokémon X and Y — the country most visited by tourists, the country of fashion, of culinary sophistication, of linguistic refinement, according to his public justification. Three places in the game later got their models straight from him, in Paris, in a masterclass at Japan Expo: the best-attested matches in Kalos rest on what a developer felt like saying one afternoon.

Galar is the exception, the only case where the publisher does this work in the players' place: Masuda and Shigeru Ohmori name the United Kingdom there in an official interview, then The Pokémon Company publishes the Galar Expedition Guide, which names the British cities behind a good part of the map inSword and Shield. Ohmori published a scouting sketch dated late September 2016, drawn from Windermere; he also mentions the research trips to Hawaii at E3 2016, backed up by the official Japanese site for Sun and Moon. Masuda, for his part, visited New York around the time of Diamond and Pearl, where he saw communities of very different origins living side by side: what they go looking for is not a landscape, it's an atmosphere.

Hoenn, for its part, is confirmed in writing: Masuda, on the Game Freak blog. Paldea is often placed in the same category, on the strength of a publication from The Pokémon Company released nearly two years after Scarlet and Violet ; but that text, born of a partnership with a Spanish theme park, reports the resemblance spotted by players instead of claiming it: the Iberian tracing is beyond doubt, but its formal confirmation is still missing.

Five of the nine main regions rest on a statement that names their model — Hoenn, Unova, Kalos, Alola, Galar; Kanto, Johto, Sinnoh and Paldea hold up through their geography and their place names. For Sinnoh, Masuda documented the origin of the name and his team's scouting trips in Hokkaidō — Hakodate, Sapporo, Abashiri, Shiretoko, Kushiro — without ever writing that the region was traced from it: a statement about a name or about a trip is not a statement about a geography, and confusing the two manufactures most of the false confirmations.

The tracing is never a carbon copy

Hoenn takes up Kyūshū rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise. Galar turns Great Britain one hundred eighty degrees, as if seen from the north: the countryside moves to the south of the map, the big city to the north. Kalos works by cropping: the encyclopedias frame it on the northern half of France — neither the Midi nor the Mediterranean coast.

Alola subtracts: of the eight main islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, it keeps only four inhabited ones, plus one artificial island, Aether Paradise, with no real-world equivalent; Akala Island is reoriented, its north turned toward the east of Maui. Paldea does the opposite: the whole Iberian Peninsula, pulled back into an ellipse closed around its crater. Unova pushes the reduction furthest: not a country, a metropolitan area, the only case in the main series.

The table of matches, with their status

The status column gives the state of the sources as of September 2026: a statement found later can move a row up a notch.

The matches everyone repeats that don't hold up

The most stubborn one: the Statue of Liberty. Liberty Garden, in Unova, really is modeled on Liberty Island, but the monument standing on it is the Liberty Garden lighthouse, a tower : no statue anywhere in the game, and the sign on site hands the island to a billionaire said to have bought it two centuries earlier to dream up a free world there.

The second one gives Stonehenge to Kalos's Geosenge Town: wrong, Geosenge Town points to the Carnac stones, as its French name, taken from Breton, indicates, and the British megalithic site is Turffield, in Galar. A third of the same kind: Wyndon Castle does not exist — the city is modeled on London, Galar's castle is in Hammerlocke, where it houses the stadium, and the link to Windsor rests on nothing but the name.

A fourth, quieter one: the two statues at the Hulbury lighthouse do not depict the liver bird, the bird emblem of Liverpool. They are two Toxtricity, an Electric- and Poison-type Pokémon of the "Punk" category, and Poképédia sees in them the bronze statues of the Beatles put up in the city.

Two reversals of meaning. The Eiffel Tower "supposedly exists in the Pokémon world": the only known mention is a Pokédex entry for Ponyta in Pokémon Stadium, where the creature is said to clear it in a single bound — and the Japanese version referred to Tokyo Tower. In the same way, French Guiana is given as the place Mew was discovered: the Pokémon Mansion journals do name a country, in English as in Japanese, but it is Guyana, not French Guiana, and the French version wrote "Jungle X". A fact of translation is not a fact of the world.

That leaves the broadest belief of all: that every region must have a real-world model. True of the nine main-series regions; elsewhere it is case by case — Orre has its own, confirmed, while Ferrum's model has never been settled and Poképédia assigns no real-world inspiration to Pasio or Lental. The tenth generation is making the point in real time : as of September 3, 2026, its island region has neither an official name nor an announced model, and the parallels already published in the press are nothing but trailer readings — bound to be quoted as facts within two years.

How a region gets drawn

At GAME FREAK, drawing a map is a credited role: on Pokémon Red, Green, Blue to Yellow, Satoshi Tajiri is credited with "field creation" as much as with direction. Shigeru Ohmori then signs the maps of six games in a row, from Ruby and Sapphire (2002) to Black and White (2010) : the chronology of the games is that of these mapmakers.

The idea for Pokémon came to Tajiri, Poképédia recalls, from his childhood passion, collecting insects, the Game Boy's Link Cable leading him to picture insects crawling between two consoles. Born in Machida, a western suburb of Tokyo, he lent his childhood town to Pallet Town — whose position on the map, for its part, matches Shimoda.

A Route is not a connection, it is a division

A sketch by Ken Sugimori for Capsule Monsters (1990) shows two Trainers interacting on a route, and the file holds an early drawing of the Kanto map: the region existed on paper six years before the cartridge. Tajiri wanted it to be different for every player; unworkable, the idea fell back on two parallel worlds, of which the paired versions are the remnant.

A route links two settlements, split into joined-up stretches when the distance is too great: it is not the connection that sets the rule, it is the division. The trees lining them, on land, are most often impassable even for a Trainer; wild encounters stay confined to tall grass, with a probability of p = x / 187.5 per step, with x ranging from 10 (very common species) to 1.25 (very rare), though Poképédia never dates the generation. A Trainer's class, for its part, is an indicator of the terrain.

The rhythm is town, route, town: from the first generation on, the Pokémon Center closes off most segments, with free healing and storage. A planning rule: a town can hold only one Gym. On top of that comes a sea network, crossed by Surf or by boat, which Bulbapedia records in every region up to but not including Galar — the narrower French label "Chenal" gives none to Kalos or Alola. The Hoenn games push it furthest: 17 sea routes out of 34.

Eight Gyms, and no explanation

The rule is written down: eight Gyms per region, at least eight Badges for the League. No statement from GAME FREAK explains why eight — not Tajiri, not Masuda, not Ohmori, nor the interviews in Iwata Asks ; the origins that circulate are fan hypotheses.

The way that rule bends, on the other hand, can be checked. Neither Alola — where the island challenge takes the place of its Gyms — nor Hisui, for want of a League at that time, has any. Unova totals ten Badges across its four games, Galar eight per playthrough but twelve holders in all, with two pairs of Gym Leaders exclusive to Sword or to Shield, and two more taking over once the main story is finished. Scarlet and Violet keep the eight Gyms, diluted among eighteen free-order objectives in which each of the eighteen types comes up once.

The map encodes the difficulty

The corridor sets the dose. First lever, the surroundings: the area around a Gym supplies what you need to beat it — in HeartGold to SoulSilver, you cross a cave full of Ice-type Pokémon just before the Dragon-type Gym in Blackthorn City. Second lever, the Badge, which authorizes HMs outside battle from the first generation to the fourth, then again in the sixth — the fifth alone breaks that link.

The Badge also caps the obedience of traded Pokémon — and, since Pokémon Legends: Arceus, of caught ones too — then, since the fourth generation, the Poké Mart's stock. In Sword and Shield, it caps catching itself: above the threshold, a wild Pokémon "looks very strong" and refuses the Poké Ball, a safeguard invented specifically for an open space, the Wild Area.

But that system rested on HMs, gone since Sun and Moon : their field uses pass to Poké Ride, the Flying Taxi, the Rotom Bike and the Pokétch, then to Koraidon and Miraidon, unlocked by the Herba Mystica. The lock changes shape with every generation, never function : it says where you are not allowed to go yet.

The machine draws before the author does

Each generation's console imposes its geometry before a single village is placed. The number of Routes is the handiest evidence of it: it can be counted.

The easy reading — regions are shrinking — is wrong. What the drop measures is the disappearance of the "route" as a unit, not of the land itself : the wikis count 1,523 characters in Paldea against 391 in Kanto in the third generation — an unofficial figure. Poképédia makes Galar the region with the fewest routes, Bulbapedia the second fewest: "zero" is not handled the same way twice.

From corridor to open ground

Setting corridor-like Kanto against liberating Paldea is inaccurate: the most openly embraced linearity, that ofUnova, is a claimed choice. Masuda explained in 2010 that he wanted players to be able to "go more or less straight ahead", because children were not managing to finish the previous games ; the design document, two hundred pages and a first for the studio, defined even what crossing a bridge means.

In 2019, the Wild Area embeds a first free-camera space inside a classic structure. In 2022, Hisui replaces routes with five open areas, served by four settlements and eleven base camps; the same year, Paldea makes the world continuous and no longer scales any level to the player's progress : difficulty becomes geographic instead of progressive.

Ohmori has named the downside: past a high degree of freedom, "it becomes difficult to focus on the details". The Pokémon Center nurse guides lost players there. One qualification: free order was not invented in 2022, since Kanto's eight Gyms could already be challenged in whatever order you liked in the second and fourth generations, with the sole exception of Blue, saved for last; the genuine first forScarlet and Violet concerns the main quest of a region in its original generation.

Kanto

Kanto, region of the founding games of 1996, is the only one in the Pokémon world to bear the real name of its model: all the others bear an invented one. Yet the word appears in no Western first-generation game.

The card

A large central bay, mountains to the north and west, forests and plains elsewhere: the journey loops all the way around and closes a few steps from where it started. No route here imposes permanent weather, unlike Hoenn's Route 119 or Sinnoh's Route 217.

French distinguishes two kinds of route: twenty-five land Routes and three sea Channels — 19, 20 and 21 — never called "Route." No single game holds all twenty-eight: the map stops at Route 25 in the first, third and seventh generations, and 26 through 28, toward Johto, exist only in the second and fourth.

The numbering runs straight on: Johto picks up at Route 29. According to Bulbapedia, the crossing is made at Tohjo Falls, on the border between the two regions. Route 28, attached to Kanto, reaches into two regions at once, a unique case in the series.

The real-world model

The resemblance is not a guess: the game's Japanese name is the real place name. Kantō: seven prefectures in eastern Honshū, Tokyo included; the central bay is Tokyo Bay, even if the west spills over into neighboring Chūbu. 関東 means "east of the barrier," the one at Hakone; Kansai, the model for Johto, is "west of the barrier," but the Ōsaka one.

The best-established correspondences are urban and volcanic: Celadon City and Saffron City share Tokyo between them, Setagaya and the new town of Tama for the first, Shinjuku and Chiyoda for the second, whose concentration of corporate headquarters Silph Co. reproduces. Cinnabar Island takes both the position and the nature of Izu-Ōshima, island of the Mihara volcano. Others remain speculative: the Lavender Town cemetery calls to mind the one in Ushiku, reserved for pets, without confirmation.

Mount Fuji is nowhere in Kanto : its equivalent, Mt. Silver, belongs to Johto, and only Route 28 crosses Yamanashi, the prefecture of the real volcano — which straddles two Chūbu prefectures, far from the Kantō-Kansai border. Pewter City, not to be confused with that peak, owes its French name to the Corrèze: translator Julien Bardakoff named it after the road signs pointing to Argentat-sur-Dordogne.

How geography changes the game

Without Surf, whole stretches of Kanto stay out of reach : the Kanto Power Plant, off Route 10, can only be reached by swimming; Cinnabar Island, only by sea; the Seafoam Islands are a passage, their underwater cave linking Channels 19 and 20. Route 17 can only be crossed by bicycle in the first four generations, and two underground paths run beneath the map.

In the second and fourth generations, the eight Gyms can be done in any order, except Viridian City, locked until the very end: what sets Kanto apart is not the freedom, which Paldea offers too, but that lock on a single door. The Magnet Train, Saffron City to Goldenrod City at a top speed of 550 km/h, does not run until the Power Plant is repaired. In Let's Go, Pikachu to Let's Go, Eevee, HMs give way to Secret Techniques: same map, a different way through.

The standout location

Cerulean Cave. Three levels northwest of Cerulean City, with no quest to lead you there: it only opens once the League has been beaten, and Mewtwo waits at the bottom. Two names — "Unknown Dungeon" in Red, Blue to Yellow, Cerulean Cave afterward — and a shifting geology: collapsed in the second generation, three years later in the fiction, re-excavated in the fourth. Presumed model: the underground quarries of Ōya, with their galleries cut into the stone.

The complete guide to the Kanto region details the ten cities, the eight Gyms, Team Rocket and the three legendary birds.

Johto

Johto, region of the second generation replayed in the fourth, fits into five main games. What sets it apart comes down to the map: welded to Kanto, it never appears without its neighbor in any of the five, whereas Kanto has been traveled alone several times.

The card

Poképédia describes it as coastal, ringed by mountains, with an island to the west carrying Cianwood City and, in the remakes, the Safari Zone; the rest, a mainland strip, is closed off by the terrain and, to the east, by Kanto. That makes half a map, with Kanto occupying the other half.

Its routes start at 29 and stop at 48, right where Kanto's had left off, at 28: no other region proceeds this way, Hoenn starting over at 101, Sinnoh at 201, Unova and Kalos at 1. Two of the twenty paths are maritime, Channels 40 and 41.

The border stays blurry. Routes 26, 27 and 28 link the two regions but are administratively attached to Kanto : the eastern exit from New Bark Town, the starting village, already leaves Johto. Bulbapedia adds that Kanto and Johto are the only regions connected by land — a wiki claim, with no official source, and one that depends on what you agree to count as a full region.

The real-world model

Johto is built on Kansai, the only such link supported by a source from the time: a developer interview in Nintendo Online Magazine no. 23, July 2000. Junichi Masuda wrote that the kanji in the name mean "castle capital" (城都) or "grid capital" (条都), a sense that points to Nara. The two regions replay the opposition between the real Kansai and Kantō: the old west against the modern east.

The footprint spills beyond Kansai and the sources disagree: Bulbapedia adds western Chūbu and a piece of Shikoku, Poképédia speaks of "Tokai and Kansai." City by city, you leave the official record for map-reading; the only comparisons that hold are the ones a detail in the game backs up: Ecruteak City for Kyoto, the former imperial capital, with its temples and geisha districts; Goldenrod City for Osaka, whose Tsūtenkaku tower answers the Radio Tower and whose underground answers the Goldenrod Tunnel. Mt. Silver stands in for Mount Fuji.

How geography changes the game

The way through to Kanto runs by way of Tohjo Falls — a portmanteau of the second syllable of Kanto and the first of Johto — and calls for the HM Waterfall, and so for all eight Badges. Two links double it: the S.S. Aqua, from Olivine City to Vermilion City, and the Magnet Train, from Goldenrod City to Saffron City.

The sea reorganizes the progression: with Cianwood City sitting on the western island, you take the Olivine City Gym first, then surf across to Cianwood for the fifth Badge, then double back for the sixth. Farther north, the Lake of Rage only follows the calendar in the remakes: it rains there every day except Wednesday, when its surface shrinks by half, uncovering areas you cannot reach the rest of the week.

The neighbor has shrunk: Poképédia notes that the Kanto of Pokémon Gold and Silver sees its original locations cut or shortened and is no longer scripted. The remakes HeartGold and SoulSilver did the opposite, adding two routes to Johto, a Safari Zone, the Cliff Edge Gate and the Pokéathlon Dome.

The standout location

The Whirl Islands (うずまきじま, "whirlpool islands") are four islets off Channel 41, between the mainland and the western island. Without the HM Whirlpool, their whirlpools keep you from landing. In the deepest part sleeps Lugia, and SoulSilver recounts that the four once formed a single island, torn into four by the Pokémon.

The real-world model is legible here, even if it remains a wiki reading: Awaji-shima and the whirlpools of the Naruto Strait, a very real tidal phenomenon.

The details — its ten cities, its eight Gyms, its Team Rocket left without a leader, its legendary beasts — fill a document of their own: the complete guide to Johto.

Hoenn

Hoenn, region of the third generation, arrives on Game Boy Advance with Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire in 2002 in Japan, 2003 in Europe; a return twelve years later on Nintendo 3DS. Located southwest of Johto and Kanto, it takes its Japanese name, ホウエン Hōen, from 豊縁, "abundant bonds": its theme is not the sea, but connection.

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One main island, a string of islands to the south and east, and between the two a sea that counts as territory in its own right. Hoenn holds the series record for routes, thirty-four, numbered 101 to 134, in two equal halves: seventeen on land, seventeen on water. The latter are called chenaux (channels) in French, a label that appeared in the third generation and has been reused since without ever gathering so many in one place.

Deserts, forests, mountains and plains coexist; Route 111 crosses a desert under a permanent sandstorm. Mt. Chimney, the highest point, a volcano in permanent eruption, still poses no threat to the people living there; the French map calls it "over 1,500 meters high," the English one nearly 5,000 feet, which is slightly less: the two versions disagree. Rusturf Tunnel was left unfinished: the cries of a colony of Whismur were causing cave-ins there.

The real-world model

The model is not a fan theory: Junichi Masuda wrote on the Game Freak blog, on September 9, 2004, that Hoenn is based on Kyūshū, the southern island of Japan, whose childhood summers he wanted to recapture. The same entry gives the concept — a place where people form bonds, inspired by Kyūshū's hospitality — and the ninety-degree counterclockwise turn, made for comfortable play; the screen being wider than it is tall is the technical reason put forward since.

The location correspondences, for their part, come from the encyclopedia, not from the developer. Bulbapedia links the Mossdeep Space Center to the Tanegashima Space Center, with the caution of a "may correspond to"; the cross-check holds: Tanegashima, south of Kyūshū, ends up east once the map is turned, right where Mossdeep City sits. Mt. Chimney likewise points to Mount Aso, and the Lavaridge Town hot springs to the onsen of Aso and Nagayu. None of it is confirmed: only the region, its orientation, its landscape and its concept are.

How geography changes the game

Dive is born with Hoenn — HM08 in the original games, HM07 in the remakes — and without it an entire floor of the map stays shut. The seafloor mirrors the topography of the channels above it, its seaweed beds replace the tall grass, and some areas will not let you surface. The exclusivity is not total — Unova's Abyssal Ruins can also be visited with Dive; what is unique to Hoenn is the extent: a continuous network beneath its whole sea.

Shoal Cave changes its environment with the tide, keyed to the console's real-world clock in four six-hour windows; its icy floor only opens at low tide. Ever Grande City, home to the League, can only be reached by climbing a waterfall. Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire add Soaring in the Sky, a free-flight mode that makes wild Pokémon appear in flocks and opens up twelve Mirage spots you cannot find any other way.

The standout location

Sootopolis City. A city built inside a water-filled crater, split in two by a lake, made almost entirely of staircases, and reachable at first only by using Dive from Route 126: the only city in the series you enter from below.

Its origin has changed from one game to the next: the crater of an underwater volcano that rose out of the sea and filled with rain in Ruby and Sapphire as in Emerald, a meteorite crater in the remakes, rewritten by the Delta Episode. Two geologies for one city, whose white-and-blue architecture the encyclopedias compare to the village of Oia, on Santorini.

Hoenn's cities, its eight Gyms (one of them run by two Gym Leaders), the Ever Grande City League and the duel between the two organizations, one out to expand the sea, the other the land, are covered in detail in the complete guide to the Hoenn region.

Sinnoh

Sinnoh, the fourth-generation region, opened on the Nintendo DS in September 2006 in Japan and July 2007 in Europe. Its name comes, according to Junichi Masuda, from the Japanese 神奥 shin'ō, "mysterious". The first main-series region with snow-covered routes, it turns its central mountain range into a sanctuary.

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A single landmass north of Kanto, Johto and Hoenn, flanked by a few islands, Sinnoh is cut into two halves by Mt. Coronet, which runs straight up it from south to north: you can only switch sides by going through the inside of the range, and the thirty routes, 201 to 230, are laid out around that spine.

Sinnoh is more continental than maritime : few water routes, plenty of mountain routes, rainy or snowbound — the opposite of Hoenn. Three lakes, one at each end of the main island, form a triangle centered on the summit of Mt. Coronet. Off it sit the League's islet, linked to Sunyshore City by Route 223, and the northeastern island, a sub-region of three "areas" whose residents do not consider themselves part of Sinnoh.

The real-world model

The model is Hokkaidō, Japan's northern island, traced with two caveats: the map lops off the Oshima Peninsula and adds two non-Japanese territories. Masuda, director of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Versions, has described the location scouting in Hakodate, Sapporo, Abashiri, Shiretoko and Kushiro, Abashiri Prison and the coal mines included.

Jubilife City, at the center, is Sapporo; Oreburgh City and its coal seams, the mining town of Yūbari; Pastoria City and its Great Marsh, Kushiro and its peat bog, the largest in Japan. For the three lakes, Poképédia names Tōya, Kussharo and Kutcharo without saying which is which: the one-to-one pairing you often read is inferred from their positions, not sourced.

The tracing is political too: Bulbapedia ties the Battle Zone island to southern Sakhalin, a former Japanese territory, and the League's islet to Kunashir, a Kuril island disputed between Russia and Japan. Poképédia assigns nothing piece by piece: it writes only that Sinnoh is built on Hokkaidō, on Kunashir "to the east" and on Sakhalin "to the north" — two directions that line up with Bulbapedia, since it places the Battle Zone island northeast of the mainland and the League to the east. Sunyshore City is traced from Nemuro, the easternmost point of Hokkaidō, from which you can see the Kurils.

How geography changes the game

The fourth generation introduces only two HMs, and both of them respond to the terrain : Rock Climb for rock faces, Defog for fog. Game Freak has never presented these additions as a consequence of the landscape: that is a reading, not a statement. Their weight is plain to see: Sinnoh's Victory Road demands five of them — Surf, Strength, Rock Smash, Waterfall, Rock Climb — and opens through three entrances instead of two.

In the special magnetic field area of Mt. Coronet, a Magneton that levels up becomes Magnezone, and a Nosepass a Probopass: the evolution comes down to the place, not an item. The east-west divide is written into a species: Shellos is pink, its West Sea form, west of the mountain, and blue, its East Sea form, to the east. Below the surface, a tunnel network covers the whole region, partitioned into sectors you can only connect by coming back up into the open air; the 2021 remakes widened it into the Grand Underground.

The standout location

The Mt. Coronet is, according to Bulbapedia (geography section), the highest known peak in the entire Pokémon world — not just in the region. Its cave network has three parts, the southern one not directly reachable from the northern: you make your way through it over several trips. At the summit stand the Spear Pillar, ruins once called the Temple of Sinnoh, where legend places the birth of Dialga, Palkia and Giratina; the triangle of the three lakes is reproduced there on the ground. That is where Pokémon Platinum Version brings Giratina in and opens the Distortion World, with its frozen time and altered gravity, absent from the original games and from the remakes.

Cities, Gyms, the League and Team Galactic fall outside the geographic scope kept here; see the complete guide to the Sinnoh region.

Unova

Unova is the region of Pokémon Black and White (2010 in Japan, March 4, 2011 in France) and of Black 2 and White 2, which the story sets apart by two years. Its French name condenses "États-Unis" (the United States) and "unité" (unity): the first main-series region built on a model outside Japan.

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Three landmasses carved up by two rivers: one block to the west, two peninsulas in the center and to the east. There is almost nowhere you can swim these rivers: the five bridges are the seams, each one linking the central block to the east or to the west, never east to west. The terrain: a desert, two mountain ranges and a cave born of a meteorite impact, home to the slumbering Kyurem.

The 23 routes start over from 1, like Kanto's, to underline the distance. End to end, they trace a ring: Route 16 leads back to Nimbasa City, already crossed on the way out. No official source uses the word; the shape can be read off the graph of exits.

At the center, no capital: the Entralink, an island said to be unreachable that the map describes only as a "strange place in the center of Unova", which you enter through the C-Gear alone, never on foot.

The real-world model

The model is confirmed by the studio : "We modeled it after New York," says Junichi Masuda (Iwata Asks). He means the whole metropolitan area — New York, northeastern New Jersey, western Long Island — for its Manhattan musical theaters and opera houses and its great bridge.

The details have never been made official. The best-established parallels: Castelia City for Lower Manhattan, Nimbasa City for Midtown, Skyarrow Bridge for the Brooklyn Bridge, the Battle Subway for the New York subway. Elsewhere, the two big encyclopedias contradict each other: Opelucid City stands for Harlem in one, for Mott Haven in the Bronx in the other.

Masuda had first pictured the region as a honeycomb, hexagons lined up around a central Manhattan, an idea born in the courtyard of the MoMA. The map that shipped keeps none of it: Castelia City sits in the south, and a desert stretches just north of Unova's "Manhattan". The resemblance is thematic, not topographic.

How geography changes the game

As for this corridor imposed by the rivers, the regional Pokédex doubles down on it — in Pokémon Black and White, no species from earlier generations can be caught before the League, the region's remoteness justifying in fiction what Game Freak claims as a production decision.

The League stands halfway around the ring : in 2010, the entire eastern half, from Routes 11 through 16 all the way to Black City or White Forest, only exists after a first victory over it.

Climate, finally, is a mechanic: local in the previous regions (this or that route always snowbound), it goes global — all of Unova changes with the seasons. The seasons open passages more than they repaint the scenery: winter opens the roof of the Icirrus City Gym, freezes the puddles on Route 8, and grows the dark grass at Dragonspiral Tower.

The map shifts from one game to the next: Black 2 and White 2 add a brand-new southwest and east, close Skyarrow Bridge for construction — you reach Castelia City by ferry — and push the western block, where the 2010 adventure began, into the post-game. Unova is also the only main-series region with two starting towns.

The standout location

The Village Bridge is more than a crossing: a village is built on its deck, and the game credits the bridge to Unova's first settlers. No Pokémon Center, no landing spot for Fly, and the only place where Unova's rivers let you swim, in the branch running underneath. An inhabited bridge, on the half that Black and White only open after the League.

Unova's cities, its Gyms reshuffled from one era to the next, Team Plasma and the dragon split in two are the subject of the complete guide to the Unova region.

Kalos

Kalos is the region of Pokémon X and Y (3DS, October 12, 2013) and of Pokémon Legends: Z-A (October 16, 2025). Its name comes from the Greek kalos, "beautiful". The first region inspired by a European country — though not the first non-Japanese one: Unova came three years earlier.

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Kalos is officially divided into three sub-regions : Coastal Kalos to the west, Central Kalos, Mountain Kalos to the east, colored blue, white and red — the French flag. The tricolor spills out of the Pokédex: clothing, the Honor of Kalos, road signs. Azure Bay opens onto what Poképédia identifies as the English Channel; the mountains climb to snow-covered routes.

Game Freak has never commented on the overall shape. Bulbapedia describes it as a five-pointed star — northwestern peninsula, coastline, mountains, rivers — then, further on, as a pentagon, a nod to the Hexagon, France's nickname for itself. The two readings agree on the essentials: five of the twenty-two numbered routes lead to Lumiose City. All twenty-two carry a subtitle of their own — Menhir Trail, Miroir Way, Lumiose Badlands — a case Bulbapedia calls unique in the series.

The real-world model

The model is France, as Junichi Masuda said at Japan Expo in 2013. The commonly cited detail — the northern half of mainland France — comes from the wikis, not from him: the map stops in the south around La Rochelle and Lyon, with no counterpart for the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees or the Alps. He has confirmed only a handful of places: Lumiose City for Paris, Parfum Palace for the Palace of Versailles, Glittering Cave for the Paris Catacombs, the Tower of Mastery for Mont-Saint-Michel. He mentioned Carnac without naming the location; the wikis identify it with Menhir Trail and Geosenge Town.

The rest comes from the wikis, to uneven degrees, and the two contradict each other on several cities. Above all, the map borrows France's landmarks, not its distances : Santalune City stands for Fontainebleau, which a forest and several routes set far apart from Lumiose City, when Fontainebleau is less than sixty kilometers from Paris. Inside Lumiose itself, the Parisian inspirations are flipped vertically, the north bank of the Seine ending up south of the canal. Even the bestiary follows suit: the wing pattern of Vivillon depends on the console's real-world geographic region.

How geography changes the game

The split reaches the Pokédex: Kalos is the first region whose regional Pokédex is broken into sub-regional lists, each renumbered from 001 and with no overall list — 153 entries for Central, 153 for Coastal, 151 for Mountain, or 457 in all. The largest total in the series, but a sum: taken on its own, none of them comes close to the 400 species of Galar or Paldea.

Kalos is also the first region to offer Pokémon riding, one mount per type of ground: a Gogoat shuttle in Lumiose City, a retired racing Rhyhorn on Route 9, a Skiddo on Route 12, a Mamoswine in the snow on Route 17. The high-speed TMV train is the only land link between Lumiose City and Kiloude City, far to the south, which no route connects to the rest of Kalos. The sea stays incidental, with a single port linked to the rest of the world.

Five land entrances plus a train station make Lumiose City the most accessible city in the series, against four routes for Saffron City, Mauville City or Jubilife City. So the story feels free to close the place off: on your first visit, a power outage reduces it to one stretch of street and a single avenue.

The standout location

The Prism Tower, at the heart of Lumiose City: over three hundred meters tall, four entrances, the Gym inside its walls, and Centrico Plaza replaying the Place de l'Étoile with its radiating avenues. Its silhouette is the Eiffel Tower's, but Masuda has said he asked his designer to draw on perfume bottles as well.

It is built on the foundations of the Angel, the machine raised by AZ two thousand years before X and Y. It did not survive Pokémon Legends: Z-A, which takes place entirely inside Lumiose City: by the end of the game, Prism Tower is destroyed, is overtaken by vegetation and becomes the twentieth and last wild zone in the city.

The Gyms, the League, Team Flare and the three thousand years separating AZ's war from Lysandre's firing of the weapon are covered separately, in the complete guide to the Kalos region.

Alola

Alola is the region of Pokémon Sun and Moon, released on 3DS in November 2016, then of Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon the following year. The seventh core-series region, it is the first one made entirely of islands : no mainland, no land border. Its name comes from the Hawaiian aloha, "hello"; in the games, "Alola" greets you on arrival and on departure alike.

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Four natural islands: Melemele Island (northwest), Akala Island (northeast), Ula'ula Island (southeast), Poni Island (southwest), plus one artificial island, the Aether Paradise, floating at the center of the archipelago, slightly to the west. Akala has an active volcano, waterfalls and a jungle; Ula'ula, the largest, has beaches, the Haina Desert and a mountain observatory; Poni, the wildest, is more than half swallowed by its great canyon.

It has 9 towns and cities and 17 Routes : 3 on Melemele, 6 on Akala, 8 on Ula'ula, none on Poni. The numbering starts over at 1, as in Unova and Kalos, no doubt to mark how far away Alola is. Hau'oli City, the largest city, has 107 inhabitants; the player's house is on Route 1, not in a town. As for climate, Melemele stays mild and even while Ula'ula runs through blazing sun, sandstorms, rain and snow.

The real-world model

The model is the Hawaiian archipelago, confirmed by the games' Japanese site, by Junichi Masuda on his LINE blog on May 23, 2016 and by Shigeru Ohmori at E3 2016. Each island's name is the Hawaiian color that state law officially assigns to its model.

Melemele (yellow) is Oahu, Akala (pink) Maui, Ula'ula (red) Hawaii — the "Big Island" —, Poni (purple) Kauai. Hau'oli City is Honolulu and its beach Waikiki, Malie City and its Japanese garden Hilo, and Poni Canyon is Waimea Canyon, nicknamed the Grand Canyon of the Pacific. Poképédia's "Alola" page swaps Ula'ula and Poni around; its own island pages, Bulbapedia and the official Hawaiian colors say the opposite, and they win out.

The tracing stays insular, not cartographic: the real chain, running northwest to southeast, becomes a square — Kauai moves from the far northwest to the southwest corner, and the north of Akala matches the east of Maui.

How geography changes the game

Alola does away with HMs and field moves in favor of Poké Ride, but in Sun and Moon, neither the Lapras Paddle nor the Sharpedo Jet takes you from one island to another, and the Charizard Glide only flies to places you have already visited. The boat remains the only way across untilUltra Sun and Ultra Moon add the Mantine Surf, a sea-going mount built to link the islands, and a landing beach on each of the four.

Each island has its guardian Pokémon and its island kahuna, chosen by that guardian: the four grand trials of the island challenge, one per island, where regions with Gyms have eight, a fixed number regardless of their territory. The regional Pokédex is cut into four sub-Pokédex, one per island. Urbanization drops off in visiting order: asphalt and parking lots on Melemele and Akala, a few buses and cable cars on Ula'ula, nothing of the sort on Poni, where mounts become the main way to get around again.

The standout location

The Mount Lanakila, on Ula'ula, is the highest point in Alola: a snow-capped summit above a tropical archipelago, like Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, the only two in Hawaii that are regularly so. Before the games, the closing ceremony of the island challenge was held there; Professor Kukui's Pokémon League also rises there, absent at the start and built over the course of the adventure — you run into its workers in Tapu Village.

Crabrawler evolves there into Crabominable on leveling up, a location requirement that holds only in games set in Alola: since Scarlet and Violet, an Ice Stone does the job anywhere. The Ice Rock there turns Eevee into Glaceon.

The nine settlements, the seven trial captains, Team Skull and the Aether Foundation, the guardian deities and the light stolen by Necrozma are all told in the complete guide to the Alola region.

Galar

The eighth region of the core series, Galar is the setting of Pokémon Sword and Shield (November 15, 2019, Nintendo Switch). Its name is an anagram of "Graal", echoing the Arthurian lore of both titles. A single unbroken continent, stretched from south to north.

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Neither a loop nor an archipelago: an interrupted corridor. Postwick, the starting village, holds the far south; Wyndon, the League city, the far north. Between the two, ten numbered routes only — the lowest total in the series according to Poképédia, the second lowest according to Bulbapedia, which counts Paldea and its zero numbered routes — in four clusters with no continuity, linked by rail alone.

At the center, not a route but the Wild Area, eighteen natural sub-areas cut through by a river. The 2020 Expansion Pass adds the Isle of Armor, an island off the east coast, and the Crown Tundra, a mountain tundra extending the continent south of Postwick — a position that gives the construction away.

The real-world model

The model, Great Britain, is confirmed: Shigeru Ohmori explained in 2019 that he chose the United Kingdom because it served the strength theme ofSword and Shield. England dominates the setting, Wales less so. The official Galar Expedition Guide gives several city models: Wyndon is London, Motostoke Manchester, Circhester the spa town of Bath.

The method: the real map turned 180 degrees. No developer statement says so, but both encyclopedias describe it that way, and the game bears it out twice. The Crown Tundra, inspired by Scotland — an official attribution — sits in the south of the map; the Isle of Armor, inspired by the Isle of Man, hugs the east coast, when the Isle of Man lies west of Great Britain. So the rural south and the industrial north are not an inversion of the real country: turn the map right way up and the megacity lands back in the southeast, where London is, and the starting farms in the north, on the Lake District side.

How geography changes the game

The upshot: you cannot cross Galar on the routes alone. The train is a piece of the map, not a convenience — a relative peculiarity, Bulbapedia notes, not a one-off. Fast travel goes through the Flying Taxi pulled by Corviknight, a job it cannot hold in Paldea, where Tinkaton greet it with hurled rocks.

The terrain also shapes encounters: in the Wild Area, the weather is drawn for each sub-area and drawn again every day at midnight, deciding which species show up. Badges there raise the level cap on catchable wild Pokémon. And Dynamax can only be used where it is allowed — Gym stadiums, developed by Macro Cosmos thanks to Power Spots, and the dens of the Wild Area: Spikemuth, a town cut off from power, is the only stop on the Gym Challenge with neither a stadium nor a Power Spot, and therefore nothing gigantic.

The standout location

Turffield, a small farming town terraced on a round hill that slopes down to its stadium. To the west stands a second hill, whose summit looks out over a geoglyph carved into the grass, said to depict the Darkest Day, the cataclysm that struck three thousand years before the games; its outline strongly resembles Gigantamax Toxtricity — a Pokémon whose two statues also guard the lighthouse of Hulbury, the neighboring port.

How it was made is a textbook case of sources disagreeing. The official Galar Expedition Guide bases the town on Stonehenge ; Poképédia writes that it stands for York and that the geoglyph takes up the Kilburn White Horse, before elsewhere likening the same geoglyph to the Cerne Abbas Giant. The official source is the one that counts. A detail often misread: the stone structures scattered between the terraces look like Stonjourner, which is not a dolmen but Pokémon No. 0874, of the "Big Rock" category.

The cities, the eight Gyms turned into stadiums and the League with no Elite Four are all detailed in the complete guide to the Galar region, along with the Darkest Day and the 400-species regional Pokédex.

Paldea

Paldea is the region of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, released worldwide on November 18, 2022. Its name blends paideia, the education of the citizen in ancient Greece, and aldea, the Spanish village. It is the first main-series region built in one continuous piece, with no loading screens.

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Paldea forms an ellipse with a hole in its middle. Poképédia calls it "surrounded by an immense ocean" without making it an island: for Bulbapedia it is a vast peninsula, bordered by four Paldean seas and extended, beyond its mountains, by Kalos — the only region Paldea is said to border. Terrain: rocky plains, lakes, mountain ranges, arid land to the east and south, one peak, the Glaseado Mountain.

No numbered route — a first in the main series, with one caveat: Hisui has none either, but Hisui is the past of Sinnoh, which does have them. Instead, fifteen areas across the four cardinal directions — six in the south, three each in the north, the east and the west — and twelve cities and towns. Pokémon Centers spring up out in the wild, since crossing the region is known to be hard on the uninitiated.

The outline can be read two ways, and Poképédia keeps both: a Poké Ball, and the world turtle put forward by Bulbapedia, with the central crater standing in for the hexagons on the shell of Terapagos.

The real-world model

The model is the Iberian Peninsula, an obvious copy that no design statement has ever made official. The only official piece: a press release from The Pokémon Company dated September 25, 2024, for a partnership with a Japanese park on the theme of Spain — it reports the connection players had made, it does not decree it. Extending the model to all of Iberia is a reading both wikis agree on, based on Portuguese markers concentrated in the west.

Three matches hold up better. Mesagoza, the central and most populous city, occupies the position of Madrid; its French name, Mesaledo, combines mesa and Toledo. The Glaseado Mountain, Sierra Napada in Spanish, traces the Sierra Nevada, home to the Mulhacén, the highest peak on the peninsula. The Tagtree Thicket reproduces the Oma forest in Biscay, with its trunks painted by Agustín Ibarrola. The rest — the Sagrada Família behind the Academy — is no more than a converging hypothesis; the Alhambra, often cited, appears in neither source.

The constant is not the real-world city but the cuisine : every settlement carries a culinary name, and the French localization is the one that most systematically grafts an Iberian city onto it — its name for Levincia blends levadura and Valencia, its name for Cascarrafa blends jarra and Salamanca.

How geography changes the game

A map with no corridor, progress with no set order. For the first time in a region's home generation, the eight Gyms can be challenged in any order you like : the Gym Leaders' level curve suggests a route without imposing one. Hence the friction point ofScarlet and Violet : levels do not scale to the player's progress, and total freedom produces a jagged difficulty curve. Same logic for the three storylines, which run in parallel.

The terrain gave rise to a mechanic: the region's soil, rich in Terastal energy, is the in-fiction reason why Terastallization can be used everywhere there, and nowhere else without an explanation of its own. Getting around has to be earned: large signs mark the Ten Sights of Paldea, ten scenic viewpoints whose visit unlocks flying. The two 2023 expansions step off the map.

The standout location

The Great Crater of Paldea — "the great hole of Paldea" in Japanese — sits at the geographic center of the region. The Academy's own rules forbid students from entering because of the Pokémon that live there: a school ban, not a regional law. Once the three storylines are finished, you go down into Area Zero through the Zero Gate in the northwest, or by jumping into the mist that drowns its floor. It is daytime there at all hours.

Terastallization was born there: the crystals of Area Zero are its source, and Tera Orbs are drawn from them. Bulbapedia dates the Area Zero Underdepths to two million years ago, formed by seismic movement, and the crater to one million, by means it does not explain. Two hundred years ago, the expedition Heath was part of claimed to be the first to reach the bottom; the book he wrote about it, scarlet or violet depending on the version, fell into oblivion, and Area Zero became an urban legend.

The twelve cities, the eight Gyms and the three storylines are covered in detail in the complete guide to the Paldea region.

Hisui

Hisui is not a tenth region: it is the name of Sinnoh in an earlier era, and the setting of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, released on January 28, 2022. Only at the very end does Kamado suggest renaming it Sinnoh, in tribute to Almighty Sinnoh.

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The playable territory fits into five open areas — the Obsidian Fieldlands to the southwest, the Crimson Mirelands to the southeast, the Cobalt Coastlands to the east, the Coronet Highlands in the center, the Alabaster Icelands to the north — plus Jubilife Village and the Ancient Retreat: 88 named sub-areas.

From Sinnoh, the territory keeps the relief: the Mt. Coronet already cuts the region vertically in two. What is missing are the cities, not one of which is built, and the numbered routes — along with Paldea, one of the two main-series regions in that case: you travel from area to area. For each of them, Poképédia names the cities to come.

The real-world model

The model for Sinnoh, and therefore for Hisui, is Hokkaidō : "most" of its towns sit on the exact spot of real towns on the island, Poképédia notes. Two matches are firm: Jubilife Village is built on Sapporo, as Jubilife City is after it, and the Galaxy Team headquarters takes up the architecture of the former Hokkaidō Government Office.

The rest is interpretation. Bulbapedia suggests that Hisui might be based on the island back when it was called Ezo, before it was renamed Hokkaidō in 1869, and it likens the founding of Jubilife Village by settlers to that of Sapporo. Poképédia states without reservation that the Diamond and Pearl Clans are based on the Ainu. Game Freak has declared nothing and Anime News Network disputes the intent: the colonial parallel remains hypothetical.

Another framework holds up better: the Japanese names of the four outer areas carry the colors of the Chinese Four Symbols — black, vermilion, azure, white — with the Coronet Highlands in the center. The directions match only twice out of four: Crimson Mirelands in the south, Cobalt Coastlands in the east.

How geography changes the game

Hisui has no Gym, no Pokémon League, no Pokémon Center : healing goes through the base camps, which "replace the Pokémon Centers as well as the Poké Marts, neither of which is present in this game," Poképédia writes. The Sinnoh League will later stand on the coast of what is now the Cobalt Coastlands.

False friend: the five "Gyms" of the French version are the Arenas of the Noble Pokémon, not Gym Leader Gyms. Badges are replaced by Survey Corps ranks, which raise how far Pokémon will obey you and unlock the areas one by one.

The region is built out of five symmetrical blocks : per area, one biome, one Noble Pokémon, one Mount Pokémon, two Wardens. The Mounts replace the HMs used to get around, Basculegion to travel by water, Sneasler to climb. Only two areas hold a clan settlement.

The standout location

At the summit of Mount Coronet, in the Coronet Highlands, stands the Temple of Sinnoh, the future site of the Spear Pillar. The game explains the ruin Sinnoh will find there: in the final act, the power of Dialga and Palkia destroys a good part of it, along with the ten statues of the Noble and Mount Pokémon it housed.

The story takes place "long before" those of Diamond, Pearl to Platinum and Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, but no official source puts a number on the gap, and the game's internal markers date its own past, never its distance from Sinnoh. The Red Chain destroyed in Hisui turns up again at the Spear Pillar, at the heart of Cyrus's plan.

The other Legends game does not extend that timeline: Z-A takes place exclusively in Lumiose City, five years after X and Y, so in the present day. The link is curatorial, not narrative : the upper floor of the Lumiose Museum houses an exhibit on Hisui.

Story and catching mechanics belong to the complete feature on Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

The areas that extend a region

Too vast to be a mere location, too thin to be a region: these territories have a map, sometimes a Pokédex, never a documented Professor. The series has been building them since 2004, from the "third version" to downloadable content.

The Sevii Islands, the prototype

The Sevii Islands turn up off the coast of Kanto with FireRed and LeafGreen. Access in two stages, a pattern every piece of additional content has reused since: One Island through Three Island as soon as you reach the Cinnabar Island Gym, Four Island through Seven Island after the League, sixty species caught and the Ruby recovered on One Island. No Gym, no League, no big city, one small town per island. The count is disputed: seven main islands for Poképédia, nine, seven of them inhabited, for Bulbapedia.

Their function, to import Johto into a first-generation game: twenty-five second-generation species to catch, and a soundtrack that replays the themes of Azalea Town, Blackthorn City, Violet City and Olivine City. Whether they belong to Kanto has never been settled: official sources from 2004 place them outside the region, later ones fold them into it.

The islands a ticket used to open

Southern Island, opened in the third generation by the Eon Ticket, is home to Latias or Latios depending on the version; in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, it goes from event content to a step in the story, the one where Steven Stone hands over the Mega Bracelet. Faraway Island never left Asia: the Old Sea Map was distributed in Japan in 2005 and in Taiwan in 2006, and Mew waits behind a half-faded sign.

Two others belong to the Sevii Islands, reserved for Emerald and the Kanto remakes. Navel Rock sits between Four Island and Five Island: a cave, a fork, Ho-Oh to the left, Lugia to the right. Birth Island hides Deoxys behind a puzzle of a black "delta" to be moved in as few steps as possible; it alone stays invisible on the maps before the visit, the others appear there from the start.

"Zone de Combat" (Battle Frontier): one French name for two facilities

In French, the Battle Frontier is officially called Battle Frontier ; "Frontière de Combat," a calque of the English name, appears in no game. The first, exclusive to Emerald, occupies an island southeast of Hoenn, after the League: seven buildings, seven Frontier Brains. The 2014 remake cuts it down to the Battle Resort, a single building.

The second arrives with Platinum : five buildings, five Frontier Brains, no Pokémon Center, so no return trip by Fly. Above all, the same complex has changed regions : HeartGold and SoulSilver reuse it unchanged in Johto, west of Olivine City - two regions on its page.

In Sinnoh, it occupies an island in the northeast reserved for the post-League, where three "Areas" stand in for towns. Poképédia sees in it "a sub-region along the lines of the Sevii Islands" and notes that its inhabitants do not consider themselves Sinnohans. It has no proper name of its own in French.

2020: the Expansion Pass replaces the third version

On January 9, 2020, a Pokémon Direct announced and put on sale the same day the Expansion Pass for Pokémon Sword and Shield. Junichi Masuda and Shigeru Ohmori said as much: extend the adventure without a new title, like Platinum or Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. Its two parts, The Isle of Armor (June 17, 2020) and The Crown Tundra (October 23, 2020), are expansion titles; the places themselves are called the Isle of Armor and the Crown Tundra.

The Isle of Armor, an island east of Spikemuth, sixteen areas, a theme of self-improvement, modeled on the Isle of Man, confirmed in January 2020 by the official British Pokémon account. Its weather changes every day at midnight, area by area, and governs which species appear - never any snow, caves locked on sunny weather. Pokédex: 211 entries, 110 of them species found nowhere on the mainland.

The Crown Tundra occupies the southern tip of Galar, seventeen areas, a theme of exploration, modeled on Scotland confirmed by the same source; the official brochure Galar Tour Brochure links the Crown Shrine to Edinburgh Castle. A pedestal dates its place names: Couroplaine before the freeze. There you catch Calyrex and the Galarian forms of the three birds, for 210 entries, 74 of them exclusive.

Paldea, or the expansion that moves to Unova

Kitakami, opened up by The Teal Mask on September 13, 2023, is described as a land beyond Paldea, discovered on a school trip: one village, Mossui Town, one mountain, no sea, a plane ride required. Hence an explicit rule about species - Paldean forms do not exist in Kitakami - but a Terastallization justified by the crystals of the Crystal Pool. Pokédex: 200 entries; Ogerpon reigns there over a story the village signs tell backwards.

The second part, The Indigo Disk (December 14, 2023), relocates: Blueberry Academy, the sister school to the player's own, is located in Unova. Below it, the Terarium, an artificial reserve of four biomes under a sky that simulates weather and time of day. The engine knows where it is: no Exeggcute evolving into Alolan Exeggutor, no regional form hatched from two regional parents without an Everstone. Only Pokémon HOME ignores this geography: catches from the Terarium and Kitakami are logged as coming from Paldea.

The pass's three areas come together in a single object: on the ceiling of the dome, the Terra-Noyau blends soil from Paldea, water from the Crystal Pool and crystals from the Area Zero Underdepths - dug about a kilometer beneath the Zero Lab, it extends Paldea downward rather than outward, beneath Area Zero and its Paradox Pokémon.

Where a sub-region ends and a region begins

There is no official criterion published by Game Freak, and the two wikis disagree. Poképédia applies the label "sub-region of" to only four entries: the Sevii Islands, Blueberry Academy, the Isle of Armor, the Crown Tundra. Yet its region infobox covers only the Sevii Islands and Kitakami, not the two Galar expansions: its classification and its tagging contradict each other. Bulbapedia marks five pages with a region=no, but cites only four of them as examples.

The only measurable marker remains the regional Pokédex : the Isle of Armor, the Crown Tundra, Kitakami and Blueberry Academy each have one; the Sevii Islands do not, having stayed on the National Pokédex. Even then, you cannot make a rule of it: the Galar, Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra dexes coexist in a single game and overlap heavily - content indexes, not countries. The same blur elsewhere: no Professor and no starter Pokémon documented, and a single League, the academy's Blueberry League, unofficial and reserved for its students.

Kitakami makes the disagreement visible: a Pokédex of its own, a position given as outside Paldea, a rank Poképédia lines up with Kanto, and no sub-region label. Bulbapedia states in black and white that nobody knows whether it is a region, part of a larger region, or neither - a grammar that no longer knows how to name its own territories.

The regions of the spin-off games

Outside the main series, the Pokémon world holds more territories than you would think: Poképédia lists nineteen entries in its "Other" table alone, three of them for the trilogy Pokémon Ranger, seven for Mystery Dungeon. A misleading figure, since the list mixes mapped regions (Orre, Lental), stadium islands with no inhabited geography (Pokétopia) and menu backdrops, whose common ground is editorial, never geographical. The spin-off overview runs through the catalogue.

These maps do away with catching, and sometimes with Pokémon themselves. Mystery Dungeon goes furthest, with seven continents given French names, no humans at all and the only region pages that list their neighbors by compass direction ; the series where you wake up in the body of a Pokémon is the only one to sketch out an atlas. The surveys diverge, the Terre Inconnue putting the Terre du Vent to its east, and that one putting the Terre de l'Eau to its west. Three maps from three games, not a world map.

Orre: a desert where you steal Pokémon

Orre, whose English name has no page on Poképédia, covers Pokémon Colosseum (2004) and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness (2005). It contradicts Poképédia's own definition of a region, with no varied climates but with a desert hostile to humans and Pokémon alike. Five towns on record, four at most at any one time, Suerebe only in Colosseum and Gateon Port in XD. Known population: 310 inhabitants at the end of Colosseum, 113 of them in its four towns, Gateon Port excluded. No other region is counted this closely: its townspeople are tallied town by town, whereas elsewhere the two encyclopedias agree neither on the totals nor on what they cover.

Colosseum has no wild Pokémon, XD only three preserves, the Poké Spots, hence the "None" on the Pokédex line of the infobox. You steal your team from opposing Trainers; see the Shadow Pokémon of Colosseum and XD. With no League and no Pokédex, Orre remains the spin-off most firmly moored to the canon: a Pokémon that leaves it carries the "distant land" label for life, right through to Pokémon HOME. The only real-world model officially confirmed outside the main series: Phoenix, Arizona, according to an interview from November 2003.

Fiore, Almia and Oblivia: three regions without a single Poké Ball

The three regions Ranger (2007, 2008 and 2010 on Nintendo DS) all fall under the Ranger Union, the only case of regions explicitly attached to one and the same supranational administration. You catch nothing there, and Poké Balls are not even sold in Fiore: you pin a Pokémon down with the Capture Styler, ask it for a favor, then release it. The log is called the Browser, not the Pokédex, with 213 entries in Fiore, 270 in Almia, and two lists in Oblivia, Present and Past, a region traveled in two eras.

Fiore is the only one of the three built on an explicit geometric figure, a cross, with every town named for a season in French: Printiville to the west, Automnelle to the east, Îlot-Été to the south, Bourg-l'Hiver to the north. Oblivia, far to the south of the other two, names its seven islands after the musical scale, the French one in the French version: Dolce, Ré-en-ciel, Mironda, Faldeira, Solphiana, Latempête, Sikulélé.

Lental and Ferrum: when a phenomenon draws the map

In Lental, the archipelago of New Pokémon Snap (2021), you photograph instead of catching, and the log is called the Photodex, with 214 species at launch and 234 since the free update of August 4, 2021. Poképédia counts six large islands whose names all derive from Greek, Bulbapedia four "main" ones, yet the two wikis name the same six landmasses. Only one is inhabited, Anthos, while every one of them carries ruins: a region in demographic decline, like Oblivia.

Ferrum, the region of Pokkén Tournament (2016), takes its name from iron and names its locations after chemical elements : Technoville for technetium, Tellureville for tellurium, Néoville for neon. Three others have no attested French name, Selen Island, Phos Volcano and Thalia Beach, given in English for lack of an official translation. A geography of deposits, not of settlement: you fight where the ground gives off the most Synergy. The real-world model is unsettled between Greece, Iriomote Island and Sardinia, since no developer has ever decided.

Ransei and Pasio: two entirely manufactured maps

Ransei, the region of Pokémon Conquest, crossed with the saga Nobunaga no Yabō, came out in Europe in 2012 but never in France : the PAL release was English only, no official French place names, not even a page under its name on Poképédia. A dated layout, seventeen kingdoms, one per Pokémon type, the exact count in Generation V. Its map has the silhouette ofArceus, the region's creator in the game's legend, an isolated case justified by that myth.

Pasio, the island of Pokémon Masters EX (2019), is spelled with two S's in French, from the Esperanto word for "passion." An artificial island built by Lear, a single city, Cordis, one big stadium, no wildlife, "N/A" on the Pokédex line, mountain rock imported from other regions. And yet you win five Badges there at the World Pokémon Masters, and Ferrum has its own League in five ranks: Poképédia says only that these regions have no League "as a whole."

And Pokémon GO? There is no region, there is the Earth

Pokémon GO has no region at all, no name and no page in Poképédia's list. Its map is the real world, built on OpenStreetMap's crowdsourced data, and geography rules there: Water types near water, real weather changing encounters, continents keeping certain species to themselves. The labels have to be read word for word, Tauros going to the United States outside southern Florida and to Canada, not to "North America." Exclusives shift and every figure needs a date: on September 26, 2019, non-legendary regional species entered the 5 km Eggs of their own area, and major events spread them worldwide for a time. Everything that changes compared with the main games is covered separately.

The lands only the anime knows

The anime and the games don't describe the same map: two separate canons. Bulbapedia sets the core series games as the ultimate canon and the animation as a distinct canon; Horizons opens a third one, whose connection to the earlier series has not been confirmed. The show has therefore been free to add towns, move facilities and invent an entire archipelago without binding the games: of the Orange Archipelago, Poképédia writes that no mention of it exists in the video game canon.

The Orange Archipelago, a region the games never had

The archipelago stretches south of Kanto and Johto : some thirty mostly tropical islands; Poképédia's table lists thirty-two of them, ten unnamed. None is linked to another by land; some inhabited islands, with no port and no airport, are supplied by parachute drop. Having no Pokédex of its own, the region borrows Kanto's. The wikis disagree: a region for Poképédia, an archipelago for Bulbapedia.

The Orange League has four Gym Leaders and one Leader, the head of the Orange Crew, with each Gym on a different island. Its four Badges come not from a standard battle but, most often, from trials that test a Trainer's resourcefulness and bond with their Pokémon; the Kumquat Island Gym, however, is housed in Luana's hotel. Six generations before Alola, the show was already judging by trials on four tropical islands.

The French dub undid the Japanese naming, in which most of the islands bear the name of a citrus variety: seven of the twenty-two named islands keep it, the others switching to a dessert theme — île Dame Blanche, île Caramel, île Guimauve. The thirty-six episodes of season 2 recount that detour, and the only League Ash Ketchum won before Alola.

The Decolore Islands

The second territory unique to the series, the Decolore Islands lie in the sea between Unova and Kanto; Ash crosses them in season 16 on his way home, with the wikis disagreeing on the port of arrival — Pallet Town for Poképédia, Vermilion City for Bulbapedia. Poképédia names eleven islands there, Bulbapedia tabulates seventeen, unnamed ones included. No League, no regional professor and, according to Bulbapedia, the only archipelago in the series without a criminal organization of its own. It is also the only setting where no main character, Ash included, catches a new Pokémon; populated by the first five generations, it still serves as the staging ground for the announcement of the sixth.

The places slipped into the games' regions

The bulk of the work lies elsewhere: the 376 locations exclusive to the animation that Bulbapedia listed in early September 2026, including 67 in Kanto, 59 in Johto, 42 in Hoenn, 37 in Sinnoh, 32 in Kalos, 29 in Unova and 13 in Alola. That figure measures the shape of a cycle, not its length: Alola runs 146 episodes against Sinnoh's 191 for nearly three times fewer locations, since Ash lives there out of a home base and goes to school instead of walking.

These towns settle into the blank spaces of the games' map : Terracotta Town between Pallet Town and Pewter City, Rubello Town between Littleroot Town and Fortree City, Brackish Town and Calanthe Town on the only stretch linking Cyllage City to Geosenge Town. In the most extreme case, the arm of sea between the Safari Zone and Cinnabar Island, empty on the Kanto map, holds six locations on Bulbapedia. On the French-language side, Poképédia's equivalent category has only 78 pages.

What the series moves

It also redraws what already exists: longer distances, larger cities. The Whirl Islands of Johto, mere undersea caves on Route 41 in Game Freak's games, are inhabited; Littleroot Town, which the games tuck away in the woods of Hoenn, becomes coastal; Landorus's Abundant Shrine leaves Unova's Route 14 for Milos Island. An entire facility is transplanted: the Battle Frontier from Pokémon Emerald moves from Hoenn to Kanto in Battle Frontier. In Alola, the League is held at Manalo Stadium, floating near Aether Paradise, where the games put it at the summit of Mount Lanakila.

Horizons goes further with locations deliberately given no region : Laqua, at the top of Mont Péricarpe, Kumuri Town at its foot and the Lapras Sea all fall on Bulbapedia into an "unknown region" category of twenty-five entries, ten of them from this series alone. Their airship, the Brave Asagi, makes the map continuous and does away with the very notion of a route. The first season of Horizons still starts from a very grounded point, the Indigo Academy, on Kanto's Route 22.

The movies belong to the series canon through the nineteenth, Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel, then open one of their own starting with I Choose You! ; Pokémon on film is a story of its own. That separation isn't airtight: "Decolora" served as the Original Trainer of a Japanese Jirachi distribution in 2013, the only known trace of an anime region in a core series game. The journey can be followed in the panorama of the twenty-five seasons.

Nine Leagues, nine sets of rules

The standard path comes down to five steps: eight Gym Badges, Victory Road, the Elite Four, the Champion, and the Hall of Fame where you register your team. Several of the nine regions depart from it, each in its own way: a League's rules say what its region is.

Nine sets of rules, eight buildings. Eight of the nine seats occupy an edge of the map, Paldea alone at the center, nearly all of them guarded by a natural obstacle — a cave in Kanto, a waterfall in Hoenn and Sinnoh, a snow-capped mountain in Alola, a crater in Paldea — except Galar, in the region's largest city, served by a train station. Victory Road bears that name in only five regions. Since Pokémon Legends: Z-A (October 16, 2025), Siebold has left the Kalos Elite Four for the kitchen.

Kanto and Johto: one Elite Four, two sets of Badges

In the first generation, the Indigo Plateau serves Kanto alone; starting withGold and Silver, the Gym Leaders of both regions come under a shared Elite Four and Champion, but each keeps its own eight Gyms and eight Badges. A Johto Trainer therefore has to leave the region, along Routes 27 then 26, into Kanto. Of the two Elite Fours, only Bruno keeps his seat; Lance appears in both as well, but moves from the Elite Four to the title of Champion.

Alola builds its League during the game

Alola has no Gyms and no Badges. Its qualifier is the Island Challenge, open from age eleven: seven trials in Sun and Moon, eight in Ultra, under Captains and Kahunas appointed by their island's guardian Pokémon. Founded partway through the game by Professor Kukui, the League replaces the ceremony that used to close the island challenge, at the summit of Mount Lanakila, the highest point of the third island. The first Champion then defends the title there.

Galar swaps the staircase for a tournament

Galar is the first League without an Elite Four, and to date the only one. Seven of its eight Gyms — all but Spikemuth — are tiered stadiums broadcast on regional television. The sponsors show up even on the Gym Leaders' outfits, with the Gyms ranked in a major and a minor division: British sports culture, without a single real club being named. The Champion Cup replaces the four steps: a tournament of badge holders, a tournament of Gym Leaders, and a title match against Leon, six on six. All of it in Wyndon, which Poképédia takes to be the stand-in for London.

Paldea: a written exam, and a title that is shared

Every Paldea Gym first sets a test, often drawn from the customs of its town. Access to the Elite Four, theChampion Assessment, begins with a written portion, questions from Rika, who sits on the Elite Four herself. The Champion title isn't exclusive there : several Trainers hold it at the same time, and Geeta, the Top Champion, can't be dethroned — the only League in that situation. Larry holds both the Medali Gym and a seat on the Elite Four, like Alola's Kahunas; no other Gym Leader does.

Hisui has none of that: no Gyms, no Badges, no League, no Hall of Fame — that last absence being shared only with Sword and Shield. Not out of any rejection of the institution: this is Sinnoh before Sinnoh, before the League was invented, when the Galaxy Team stands in for authority. The League is therefore not a given of the Pokémon world: it is a construct, with a date and a place. The full progression of each region, Gym by Gym, is covered separately; Gym Leaders, Elite Four members and Champions each have their entry in thecharacter index.

The regional Pokédex, the region's thermometer

The regional Pokédex isn't a different device from the National one, just a different order: the National sorts by appearance in the series, the regional one by encounter in the field — starters first, Legendaries toward the end, Mythicals right at the finish. It puts back together families that the National order splits apart : 234 numbers separate Aipom from its evolution Ambipom in the National, while Sinnoh places them at 063 and 064. A list drawn from a pair of games can't be filled out on a single cartridge, since each version reserves a share of it for the other version ; the Pokémon Legends, released without a twin, escape that.

Almost every region has received an expanded version that reopens its Pokédex. The entries below are distinct species : regional forms, Mega Evolutions and Gigantamax forms share a number. Two lists start at 000 rather than 001, those of the two Unova pairs, whose entry zero is Victini : hence 155 or 156 for the same Pokédex.

Adding these figures does not give a species count. Kalos is the exception: its three Pokédexes are strictly disjoint, so 457 is a real total — one no screen in the game ever displays. Lumiose too: with no overlap with Hyperspace, 232 and 132 do come to 364 species. Elsewhere the lists overlap — the four island views of the Rotom Dex add up to 480 entries for 302 species in Sun and Moon, and Poképédia and Bulbapedia do not even agree on their sizes in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. Likewise, 400 + 211 + 210 makes 821 on paper, when the three Galar Pokédexes together hold only 584, and Paldea's 664.

A generation does not fit whole into its own region's Pokédex

The Pokédex in Diamond and Pearl contains 81 of the 107 fourth-generation species. The 26 missing ones are in the cartridge all the same: eighteen — seventeen evolutions of older species, Magnezone, Togekiss, Mamoswine, Porygon-Z and the rest, plus Rotom, neither an evolution nor a pre-evolution — and eight Legendary or Mythical Pokémon. Platinum brings nineteen of them back, including Giratina, which becomes its final entry, #210; seven stay out: Heatran, Regigigas, Cresselia, Phione, Darkrai, Shaymin and Arceus.

Manaphy closes the Sinnoh Pokédex at #151, while Phione, which hatches from it, does not appear in it — and the 2021 remakes carry that list over unchanged, not the 210 of Platinum.

The gap is not unique to Sinnoh: Galar's base Pokédex holds only 81 of its generation's 89 species, Paldea's 103 out of 120, the rest moving to the expansion Pokédexes. The difference is one of kind, not of degree : those species did not yet exist when the games shipped, and the lists became complete again with the expansions, 89 out of 89 and 120 out of 120. Sinnoh remains the only case where a regional Pokédex leaves out species present in its own cartridge — and the counterexample comes from the same land at another time: the Hisui Pokédex lists the 107 fourth-generation species, every last one.

Only two lists hold their own generation, and hold all of it: Kanto in 1996, Unova in 2010. The second one comes from a design choice, not from the calendar — no earlier species enters the Unova Pokédex in Black and White, while Johto gives 151 of its 251 entries to the Kanto roster alone.

Galar's "Dexit"

On June 11, 2019, at the Nintendo Treehouse at E3, Junichi Masuda announced that not every species would be transferable into Sword and Shield. Bulbapedia counts 455 affected species, generations I through VII; the figure only adds up if you take the 890 species numbered at the time and subtract the 435 present in the game, eighth generation included, and the point is not settled. Three arguments were made on stage: a species count grown unmanageable, graphical fidelity and animation quality, and battle balance, which assumes every Pokémon present has a chance of proving useful.

"Dexit" was never anything official: a fan portmanteau of "Pokédex" and "Brexit", Galar being modeled on the United Kingdom. The response was a campaign under the hashtag #BringBackNationalDex, and The Pokémon Company International published a statement signed by Masuda on June 28, 2019, promising that a species missing fromSword and Shield was not gone from the series for good.

The finished game shows the scale: 400 entries in the Galar Pokédex, 319 of them species predating the eighth generation, when the National Pokédex held 890 at launch and 898 after The Crown Tundra ; eighty more species are compatible without appearing in any of the three Pokédexes. What the Expansion Pass gave back is disputed : Bulbapedia says 221 species recovered, a count of the final lists says 238, the gap most likely coming from event distributions rather than from the expansions. The bottom line does not move: 664 species obtainable out of 898, so 234 left outside the eighth generation.

The rule has not been lifted. Scarlet and Violet carried it over, and do not even list regional forms foreign to Paldea. No National Pokédex at all in the core games since the seventh generation, with one exception: Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, the 2021 remakes, offer a complete one of 493 species. The complete atlas has moved to the storage apps, Pokémon Bank then Pokémon HOME : the list of 1,025 numbered species is no longer read inside a game, but alongside it — a count as of September 2026, the three starters of the tenth generation not having received a National Dex number yet.

Deserts, volcanoes, snowfields: the environments compared

A Pokémon region is a catalog of environments, and that catalog drives the rest: a desert calls for Ground-type Pokémon, a seafloor for species you meet nowhere else. The terrain decides the wildlife before the story does. Yet no one puts the ten territories side by side: guides stop at the cities and the Gyms, encyclopedias sort locations by category.

How to read it: a cell is checked only when a location carries an official name. A dash therefore does not say "this environment does not exist", but "no location in the region is named that way". No coastline column: all ten territories have one, Paldea included with its four named seas, and a column checked everywhere tells you nothing. Hisui keeps its row without being a tenth region: it is the land of Sinnoh at another time, and the two rows are meant to be read against each other.

What the table shows

Sinnoh checks six columns out of seven, everything but the seafloor, and a single landform fills its snow column on its own: Mount Coronet, said to be crowned with snow all year round, whose snow becomes the harsh, unrelenting blizzard of Route 217 and then the permanent winter of Snowpoint City. Variety that the Sinnoh region does not extend underwater, the one cell it leaves empty. Kanto, for its part, has only two cells.

No law of progression: Kalos and Paldea check four columns, Alola and Galar five, and the fullest row belongs to the fourth generation. Two of Galar's five cells sit on the Isle of Armor, an expansion, not on the mainland: "Galar has no desert" stopped being true in 2020, without ever having been true of the main territory. Hisui keeps its desert cell empty despite a Poképédia page crediting it with "more extreme climates such as desert": none of its zones is one, and its only stretches of sand are the beaches of the Cobalt Coastlands.

The seafloor column carries a single entry: Hoenn. Reached by Dive, the Seafloor covers every location that lies beneath the sea: Seafloor Cavern and the Sealed Chamber cannot be reached any other way. The only complete map layer the series has ever laid underwater.

The reverse does not follow: few sea routes does not mean little water. Sinnoh's four sea routes do not stop Bulbapedia from describing it as rich in water, which the three lakes at its far corners confirm; Galar and Alola, for their part, have no sea route at all, and Alola is an entire archipelago. An empty cell never says there is nothing there to swim in.

It was Hoenn, in 2002, that introduced weather as a mechanic — rain, sandstorm, hail — and every generation has changed its grain. Route 113 stays cool in every season: ash from the nearby volcano blocks the sun permanently, and a local craft lives off it. Alola runs its weather by the clock, sand blowing through Haina Desert from 5 p.m. to 9:59 a.m. before giving way to harsh sunlight; Galar turns it into an encounter generator, nine weather types per day and per Wild Area zone, hence a region with almost no location of fixed weather.

Weather and terrains in battle form a system separate from the map's, and it has shifted: hail disappeared as a weather condition in the ninth generation, replaced by snow, which deals no damage but raises the Defense of Ice-type Pokémon by half. Talking about "permanent hail" without dating the generation has become inaccurate.

Unova, the only region with four seasons

Seasons appeared in the fifth generation and exist nowhere else. Each one lasts a real month, hence three seasonal cycles a year — spring comes back in January, in May and in September — and the switch only happens when you leave a building or move to another map. The day-night cycle dates from the second generation, weather from the third: what is unique to the Unova regionis the yearly cycle, not the idea that time passes.

The Moor of Icirrus freezes in winter, the only "marsh" cell whose state changes with the calendar, and some ways into Twist Mountain depend on the season. That does not make Twist Mountain the volcano of Unova, a common misreading: it is a mine, known for the quality of its ore. The volcano is Reversal Mountain, present in Black 2 and White 2 only, and its interior changes with the version: magmatic in one, watery in the other.

The Terarium, four climates under one machine

Just one climate set owes nothing to the terrain. The Terarium is a dome of four biomes — the Savanna Biome, the Coastal Biome, the Canyon Biome and the Polar Biome — linked by a Central Plaza, each one reproducing an ecosystem and a climate suited to the Pokémon that live there, to the point that species with regional forms can survive in it. Bulbapedia adds a temperature regulated biome by biome and an artificial sky that simulates the weather and the time of day. The Polar Biome, permanently covered in snow, houses Chargestone Cavern, a recreation of Unova's Chargestone Cave — and the reference is anything but distant: the dome is dug beneath Blueberry Academy, in the sea off Unova, and not in Paldea.

The case is unique for its cause, not for its artifice: four climates held together by a machine instead of inherited from a mountain or an ocean. The closest precedent, Aether Paradise, Alola's only artificial island, houses just one habitat. The Terarium files four climates at a single address, whereas the table has to go looking for them region by region, and it has only existed since The Indigo Disk, the second half of the expansion pass for the Paldea games, released in December 2023.

The terrain builds the bestiary

A region doesn't just shelter species: sometimes it rewrites them. The regional forms (Sword and Shield also said "regional variants") are officially alternate appearances of known species, with type, Ability, weight or height altered to fit the environment. Unveiled on August 1, 2016 with five Pokémon — Sandshrew, Sandslash, Vulpix, Ninetales, Exeggutor — the concept is detailed species by species in the feature on the regional forms of Alola, Galar, Hisui and Paldea — here, geography is what's at play.

Because a regional form keeps the National Pokédex number of its original species. An Alolan Geodude, Rock/Electric rather than Rock/Ground, is still 0074, just like the Kanto one. Hence the delicate counts: 54 species for a greater number of forms, Meowth being the only Pokémon in the series to have two, an Alolan one and a Galarian one.

A total the two big wikis don't give the same way

Poképédia lists 55 regional forms as of September 3, 2026: 18 in Alola, 19 in Galar, 16 in Hisui, 2 in Paldea. Bulbapedia counts 57, and 58 with White-Striped Basculin. Neither one is wrong: the gap comes down to convention. Poképédia counts the three breeds of Tauros from Paldea as a single form, Bulbapedia as three; and the White-Striped form remains a hypothesis: its shared traits, Professor Laventon writes in the Pokédex, "make him think" of a regional form. No official source publishes a total, and no form has been added since Scarlet and Violet, in November 2022.

Four corpora, four methods

Alola is the exception, a singularity and not a rule: its 18 forms all come from Kanto, without a single later species. The causes given there are often less ecological than human — Geodude, Graveler and Golem owe their Electric type to the region's power plant, and Grimer was imported to absorb the waste of an archipelago that produced too much of it. The neck of Exeggutor is one of the rare points confirmed by a developer: Shigeru Ohmori attributed it to Hawaii's intense sun in an interview, in October 2016.

Hisui pushes the process all the way to its starter Pokémon: Typhlosion, Samurott and Decidueye, the final evolutions of Cyndaquil, Oshawott and Rowlet, exist only in their Hisuian version. Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the only main game where regional forms live without their original form — except for two, Sneasel and Vulpix. Hisui is not an elsewhere, it's a before — Sinnoh in another era. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, the same territory in the present, are the only main games released since 2016 to contain none at all.

Paldea almost turned away from them: two regional forms, Tauros and Wooper. The ninth generation created the fewest of them since the concept was invented, preferring convergent species and Paradox Pokémon, twenty-two in all, eleven per version — whose endemism is not geographic but temporal.

What looks like a regional form and isn't one

Six recent species imitate older Pokémon without being related to them. Wiglett, first taken for a Paldean form of Diglett, is a species in its own right: it carries number 0960, Diglett 0050, distinct stats, no biological kinship. Wugtrio, Toedscool, Toedscruel, Poltchageist and Sinistcha complete the list, the last two from Kitakami. The fan word, "convergent species," is not official (Scarlet and Violet says only of Wiglett that it is "a completely different Pokémon" from its lookalike).

The Ultra Beasts raise the symmetrical question: these eleven creatures, discovered in Alola, arrive there through Ultra Wormholes from other worlds — being discovered in a region is not the same as being native to it. Meltan and Melmetal form the only known case of Pokémon with no region of origin — seventh generation but absent from the Alola Pokédex, they are filed under "Unknown Origins" in Pokémon HOME, outside any regional section.

Regions without a regional form are not poor regions

Six of the nine regions explored so far have produced none: Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova and Kalos. Nothing to conclude about their wildlife, everything about what each generation chose to develop. Kalos received Pokémon Legends: Z-A in October 2025 without a single Kalosian form: its mechanic is Mega Evolution. Since the sixth generation, every region has arrived with its own phenomenon — Z-Moves in Alola, Dynamax in Galar, Terastallization in Paldea.

One word of caution, finally: the causes on display are often hypotheses. In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, the Pokédex, in the first person, owns up to its doubts — "I speculate" for the legs of Hisuian Lilligant, "I think" for Typhlosion's form. Eight entries across Poképédia's four tables have no documented cause — seven in Hisui, plus Paldean Tauros, whose three breeds have never been given an explanation. And the intuition that a "normal" form is always the ancestral one is contradicted at least once: the Pokédex entry for Galarian Zigzagoon states that "this is the original appearance of Zigzagoon, and therefore the oldest one." The cradle is Galar.

One mechanic per region, and its geographic alibi

Since 2013, every new region has arrived with its own battle transformation, which the fiction justifies through a substance. The principle is substitutive, not cumulative: Pokémon Sword and Shield remove Mega Evolution and Z-Moves. What they have in common is not the battle rule, a matter for the guide to types and mechanics, but the address.

Kalos's mechanic is industrial waste: according to Professor Sycamore, Mega Stones are not ores but jewels created by AZ's ultimate weapon, raised three thousand years before X and Y and then buried beneath what is now Geosenge Town. The stones can be picked up only between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., and the ring is upgraded in front of the Anistar City sundial. The rest goes to the feature devoted to Mega Evolutions.

Alola's Sparkling Stones are given by the guardian deities, the island kahunas shape the Z-Ring from them, and Z-Crystals are earned along the island challenge: there the place of origin is a rite, not a soil. The two encyclopedias don't write this alibi with the same confidence: Poképédia makes it the belief of Professor Kukui, Lillie and the Ultra Recon Squad — Necrozma supposedly lost those shards when the latter's ancestors wounded it to capture its light — while Bulbapedia writes it as fact and files the Z-Crystals there too, scattered by the Ultra Wormholes.

In Galar, the substance is dated: Eternatus arrived in a meteorite twenty thousand years ago, and its Pokédex entry says it becomes active as soon as it absorbs the energy of the region's soil. Poképédia stops there; Bulbapedia closes the causal chain: its energy leak created the Power Spots — which Poképédia elsewhere calls Energy Circles, without flagging the divergence — on which Gym stadiums were built, the others becoming the dens of the Wild Area. The Dynamax and Gigantamax feature adds that Gigantamax depends on a gene, not on a place.

Paldea turns it into a law: every Pokémon living in the region can Terastallize thanks to the Terastal energy in its ground, where Mega Evolution and Gigantamax touch only selected species. The substance is no longer a rare item, it's a terrain — the crystals of Area Zero, then the walls of the Area Zero Underdepths, one notch further down.

What happens at the border crossing

The proof that these mechanics are geographic facts in disguise lies in the way out. Z-Moves don't travel: no main game outside the seventh generation offers them. Neither does Dynamax, in the main series — but it has emigrated to Pokémon GO on September 4, 2024, carrying its constraint with it — only Pokémon caught at a Power Spot can Dynamax there.

Mega Evolution is the exception: it follows the player to Hoenn, Alola, Kanto, then comes back to Kalos; and in the fiction, it isn't Kalosian — according to a descendant of the Draconid people in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, the first species to have Mega Evolved is Rayquaza, under a meteorite that fell on Hoenn a thousand years earlier.

Terastallization travels too, the only case the game explains. In Kitakami, the energy of the Crystal Pool's crystals is said to be similar to its own. In the Terarium, beneath Blueberry Academy, in Unova, the device hanging from the roof mixes Paldean soil and water from the Crystal Pool — a composition only Bulbapedia documents. The mechanic wasn't exported, the terroir was imported. Counterexample: Ogerpon's masks, carved from the same crystals, need no outside source. Details in the feature on Tera Pokémon.

Pokémon Champions, released April 8, 2026 on console and then June 17 on mobile, tears down the partition: all four mechanics fit into a single item, the Omni-Anneau — with only Mega Evolution available at launch. The official competitive platform from the 2026 World Championships onward, it cuts them loose from any map: no more region, no more alibi.

The negative fact: seventeen years without a mechanic

None of the first five regions received a transformation mechanic in its launch game : not Kanto, not Johto, not Hoenn, not Sinnoh, not Unova. Kalos is the first to bring one, in 2013: until then, a region set itself apart through its roster of Pokémon and its map.

Two qualifications keep this from becoming a retroactive rule. Hoenn got its own after the fact: the Primal Reversion in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, in 2014, transforms Kyogre and Groudon through the Blue Orb and the Red Orb, triggers the moment they enter battle and is not considered a Mega Evolution in the classic sense. Hisui has its Strong and Agile Styles, exclusive to Pokémon Legends: Arceus : it is not a transformation, and Hisui is still Sinnoh in another era.

As for the why, there is nothing to cite: no Game Freak interview explains the "one mechanic per region" rule, and crediting the studio with one would mean inventing it. The only documented design rationale applies to Dynamax alone, inspired by the Nintendo Switch's TV mode, whose big screen is a better fit for giant Pokémon. For the tenth region, announced on February 27, 2026 with Pokémon Winds and Waves and still unnamed, nothing is known about its mechanic.

Every Team goes after the geography of its own region

Poképédia defines a team as "a hierarchical organization based in a given region," whose leader "most often" wants to conquer everything or reshape the environment as he sees fit. That definition needs limits: only four organizations set out to remake the map or the universe — Aqua, Magma, Galactic and Flare.

Four plans to remake the map

The Hoenn duel pits two symmetrical plans against each other: Aqua wants Kyogre "in order to raise the water level," Magma wants Groudon "in order to expand the landmass." The symmetry extends to the hideouts, in the same spot east of Lilycove City. The same inversion at Mt. Chimney: Magma wants the eruption, Aqua wants it snuffed out so the rain can fill the cooled crater. Poképédia sticks to the quantitative goal of the third generation; Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, Bulbapedia notes, rewrite it in terms of civilization.

In Sinnoh, the operation can be read straight off the map: Team Galactic attacks all three lakes at once — Verity to the west, Valor to the east, Acuity to the north — then converges on Mount Coronet, the central mountain that cuts vertically across Sinnoh and carries the Spear Pillar at its summit; no source, however, reads a drawn figure into it. Lake Valor is drained of its water with explosives, the only terraforming a team carries through without a Legendary; the lake fills back up afterward. Cyrus's plan is the only one that aims to re-create the entire universe.

Kalos still bears the mark of its ultimate weapon, buried beneath present-day Geosenge Town, near the monoliths of Menhir Trail. To fire it up again, Team Flare hijacks the Kalos Power Plant, plunging Lumiose into darkness. The blast fails without reaching past its own base, but it opens a chasm where the three bent menhirs of the town center once stood; the ones on Menhir Trail are still standing. The only existing landform an organization permanently disfigures in the main series.

The others target infrastructure

Team Rocket never touches the landscape. Giovanni's organization reads its region like a resource map: the fossils of Mt. Moon, "for their rarity, and therefore their market value," the Master Ball prototype at Silph Co., the Goldenrod Radio Tower. Both of its headquarters are buried under a commercial front, the Celadon City game corner and then the shop in Mahogany Town.

Team Plasma's initial ambition — freeing Pokémon by abolishing the role of Trainer — is legal and moral, not spatial; it only turns spatial after the split, when Ghetsis's new Team Plasma sets out to awaken Kyurem's freezing powers in order to hold Unova in servitude. Its means: the Plasma Frigate, a flying ship that bombards Opelucid City with columns of ice. The shift from N to Ghetsis turns an activist cause into a climate program.

In Galar, Rose, chairman of Macro Cosmos and of the League, made it possible to tap the Power Spots beneath the cities, hence Gyms turned into stadiums where Dynamax is possible. Spikemuth, abandoned for lack of a power source, is the only stop on the player's route with no stadium and no place that enables Dynamax; that is where Team Yell was born, whose misdeeds get in the way of travel.

The Aether Foundation, which Poképédia files among the pseudo-teams, added an island to the region, Aether Paradise, Alola's fifth island and the only artificial one, built out of floating blocks. Team Skull, which Bulbapedia credits with no goal of its own beyond causing trouble and getting by, occupies Po Town, has driven out its original residents and blocked the arrival of electricity; the barricaded town is down to twenty-three inhabitants.

Paldea draws: the five Team Star bases are named after five of the brightest stars in Cassiopeia and reproduce the constellation on the map, except for the Segin and Ruchbah squads, which are swapped. The motive, though, has nothing geographic about it: the team is born out of a bullying conflict at the Paldea Academy. Clavell does not disband it, he converts the bases into training centers. Flare, Skull, Yell and Star share a feature of their own.

What the pattern reveals

The proof by absence lies outside the main series: in Orre, arid and without infrastructure, two criminal syndicates flourished "taking advantage of the absence of a Pokémon League" and of the ineffectiveness of law enforcement. In the first of the two Orre games, Cipher's leader Evice gets himself elected mayor of Phenac City under the identity of Es Cade; his successor Greevil prefers the façade of the wealthy philanthropist.

The pattern has changed scale: released in October 2025, Pokémon Legends: Z-A brings the stakes down to the single city of Lumiose, where Quasartico Inc. carves out wild zones behind holographic barriers. The motive is geographic in only four cases : the others, academic, athletic, commercial or activist, end up occupying, blocking or transforming a place. In Hisui, the Galaxy Team bears the same Japanese name as Team Galactic but administers the settlement instead of plundering it; its project stays strictly geographic: found a town, then expand it.

A place, a myth, a Legendary

Poképédia files certain articles under a label unique to this world: the mythical place, a spot on the map tied to a myth, listed region by region — caves, towers, altars, ruins. The list is no ranking: it measures how the wiki carves things up.

Kanto stands in contrast: plenty of folklore — Mt. Moon, the funerary cult of the Pokémon Tower in Lavender Town — but no creation myth backed by a Legendary. Its origin story reads like a lab report: a modified clone born in the ruined mansion on Cinnabar Island.

Johto and Hoenn: the myth is a building you can visit

In Ecruteak City, two towers built "to encourage friendship and hope between humans and Pokémon": the Burned Tower, resting place of the Legendaries, and the Bell Tower, their awakening. Lightning struck the first; the fire lasted three days to Ho-Oh to Lugia fled. Three Pokémon perished there, revived by Ho-Oh: the three Legendary beasts. The games' traditions diverge: Lugia perched atop the Burned Tower in one, in the Whirl Islands in the other.

Hoenn buries its myth, and that myth moves around. The Cave of Origin, north of Sootopolis City, spells it out: "It is said that a Pokémon plunged into a long, deep sleep will one day awaken in this place." Groudon sleeps there in Pokémon Ruby, Kyogre in Pokémon Sapphire ; in Pokémon Emerald it empties out in favor of Terra Cave and Marine Cave, whose locations shift. Only Rayquaza, at the top of the Sky Pillar, can stop their fight; the text is written in braille in the Sealed Chamber buried under Route 134.

Sinnoh: the only myth that tells of the world's birth

Sinnoh tells it in writing. The Canalave Library, the region's only library according to the game, lines up seven readable books — eight since Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl —, including L'histoire Originelle : an Egg emerging from a swirl of chaos, an Original One splitting into two and then into three, "time began to move, space began to expand." The Spear Pillar, at the summit of Mount Coronet, is home not to that birth but to the birth of Dialga, Palkia and Giratina, brought into being by Arceus — which counts among the Mythical Pokémon, not the Legendaries.

The Hall of Origin, one floor above, can only be reached with the Azure Flute, never distributed in the fourth generation: no legal access, and the Arceus caught there is still turned away by Poké Transporter. The myth is up for debate there: in Celestic Town, Cynthia rereads the cave painting to see in it no longer the three lake spirits but Dialga, Palkia and Giratina — without ever naming Arceus.

A war, a weapon, a Darkest Day

Three regions tell of a catastrophe, not a genesis. Unova makes it political: Reshiram to Zekrom were once a single dragon, used by two twin brothers to create the region, then split apart: the elder took Truth, the younger Ideals. Neither one prevailed, and years later their sons took up the fight again and ravaged the region with fire and lightning. It resides in Dragonspiral Tower, built no one knows when or by whom; the rest, Unova imports: four of its six mythical places house Legendaries from elsewhere.

Kalos gives its own an author and a date: theultimate weapon, built by AZ three thousand years before Pokémon X and Y, brought Pokémon back to life before being turned into a weapon of mass destruction. The king's brother had it buried beneath present-day Geosenge Town; the monoliths of Route 10, subtitled Menhir Trail, honor the Pokémon that fell victim to AZ's madness. Fired up again, it falls back onto its own base: the crater at the center of the town only exists after the fact.

Galar warps its own before our eyes. The Darkest Day, three thousand years before Pokémon Sword and Shield, was set off by Eternatus siphoning the region's energy; three in-game sources disagree: the Turffield geoglyph shows one hero, the Hammerlocke tapestries show two, and the Stow-on-Side statues show the sword and the shield of the legend as the two heroes' Pokémon. Here, even more than in Celestic Town, setting the myth straight is the mainspring of the plot; Pokémon Legends: Z-A links the two catastrophes by making AZ a witness to the Darkest Day.

Alola, Paldea, Kitakami: keeping, forgetting, lying

Alola runs the most regular system in the series: one island, one ruin, one guardian — Ruins of Conflict on Melemele Island, Ruins of Life on Akala Island, Ruins of Abundance on Ula'ula Island, Ruins of Hope on Poni Island. The French titles copy neither the Japanese nor the English: the Ruins of Hope become Ruines de l'Au-Delà in French, ひがん referring to the world of the dead. The myth there is written down and versioned — the book in the Malie City library differs between Sun Pokémon to Moonlight Pokémon — and censored: a king of Alola had the works devoted to Necrozma burned, once revered as the Blinding One.

Paldea does the opposite: its founding myth is discredited. The expedition that went down to the bottom of the Great Crater of Paldea two hundred years before Pokémon Scarlet and Violet brought back a book that ended up filed under urban legends; Area Zero passes for an invention until the player goes down into it. Kitakami goes all the way: its myth is the only one a game declares false — the village raises statues to three heroes who were thieves, and the monster, Ogerpon, was the victim.

Variants and texts are covered in the feature devoted to regional legends and mythologies. Every myth has an address the player can walk through, though not always in the region it explains. The Embedded Tower on Route 47, in Johto, built by people from Hoenn, links Groudon's land, Kyogre's sea, and Rayquaza's sky; Unova's Cave of Being sees the three lake spirits of Sinnoh pass through; the Sinjoh Ruins, blending the Ruins of Alph and the Spear Pillar, lie in no known region.

How much time separates Hisui from Sinnoh

Poképédia places Pokémon Legends: Arceus "well before" Diamond, Pearl to Platinum ; Bulbapedia writes "set prior to Generation IV": precedence, with no number. No official source puts a number on the gap between Hisui and Sinnoh, for lack of a shared calendar — each region dates its past from its own present.

The timeline, as far as the sources allow

The dated milestones, from oldest to most recent. The second-to-last column governs how to read them: each span is counted from the present of its own game, never from a shared year zero.

The Paldean Empire, the founding of its Academy, and the dating of the Abyssal Ruins exist only on Bulbapedia ; the same wiki contradicts itself on the first Terastallized Pokémon, 140 years in one article, about 150 in another. The Paldean series runs on past the table up to the year before the game: its story is an investigation into its own past.

Why Hisui stays out of the table

On Hisui's distant past, the game offers only one figure, Cogita's: "A thousand, even two thousand years ago… Arceus was a Pokémon revered by the ancient people of Sinnoh, my ancestors." She dates the ancient people relative to Hisui, not Hisui relative to Sinnoh ; Bulbapedia places it between 2,000 and 1,000 years before the game. Concluding from that that Hisui precedes Diamond and Pearl by one or two millennia is the most widespread reference-point error.

The only numerical bracket is a piece of encyclopedia reasoning: Bulbapedia cross-references the Pokédex, which says Spiritomb was sealed five hundred years earlier, with Vessa, who in Hisui traces that seal back "centuries," to deduce a ceiling of three hundred years before the fourth generation — a calculation flagged as fan speculation in the page's second line, and a ceiling is not a measurement. The two hundred years put forward by any number of online guides rest on no primary source.

Time travelers fill in nothing: the player is brought from the present by Arceus, Ingo thrown into ancient Sinnoh by a space-time distortion — they jumped, they did not age. That leaves one confirmed human link, Kamado as an ancestor of Professor Rowan, with no number of generations. The only hint of scale: in Pokémon Legends: Z-A, the Lumiose Museum has Hisui on display, Kamado's kimono included, and a placard calls the script ancient Sinnoh writing.

The only gaps the fiction puts a number on

Only three gaps are stated outright, each between a game and its sequel; nothing confirmed connects these pairs. Team Rocket re-forms in Johto three years after it disbanded, and Sabrina's vision goes back "three years": that is exactly what separates Red and Blue fromGold and Silver. Black 2 and White 2 follow the first Unova act by two years, and Z-A by five years X and Y : "Legends" is not a label for the past.

The rest is deduction, and the studio owns it: Toshinobu Matsumiya answered in 2014 that the time elapsed is a secret, free for players to imagine; Junichi Masuda added in 2019 that everything gets complicated as soon as you pay too much attention to timelines. A relative order does exist all the same, and it does not follow the order of the generations: Red and Blue to Ruby and Sapphire take place simultaneously, and the order between Scarlet and Violet to Z-A remains unknown.

This internal chronology is not the release chronology: the two coincide twice, by construction — three years of fiction and of calendar alike between 1996 and 1999, two years between 2010 and 2012 — and diverge everywhere else, with twelve real years separating X and Y measuring Z-A for five years of fiction, Pokémon Legends: Arceus released fifteen years after Diamond and Pearl but set before them. A single line of dialogue anchors this world in our calendar: a character mentions the Moon landing of July 20, 1969.

Three thousand years twice over, and no numerical bridge

The same number comes back in two regions that nothing synchronizes: the ultimate weapon fired three thousand years before X and Y, the Darkest Day striking Galar three thousand years before Sword and Shield. But these games are not contemporaneous — Bulbapedia places Galar after Kalos — and the gap between their presents is nowhere given a number : stacking the two scales amounts to confusing two different rulers. The two accounts, detailed in the feature on regional mythologies, never date each other.

Two bridges do exist all the same. In the Delta Episode, Mr. Stone, in Hoenn, speaks of the peace-bringing weapon created "3,000 years ago in a distant region": he is picking up the figure of the region where the event took place. The second is AZ, immortal since the weapon was fired, witness to the Darkest Day, whose letter to the player counts in "3,000 years." These bridges are narrative, not metrological : they rest on a witness, not on a shared scale, and say nothing about Hisui.

The records, and what they mean

It all depends on what you measure. The only two measurements in meters in any map description are heights, Mt. Chimney and Prism Tower, with no others in a systematic sweep of Bulbapedia. What follows therefore keeps only what can be counted: routes, sea routes, towns, Pokédex entries, listed locations, recorded inhabitants — six criteria that do not crown the same region.

The conventions weigh as much as the numbers here: cities counted League excluded, otherwise Bulbapedia's "sixteen" for Hoenn, League included, would line up with the sixteen for Kalos, which exclude it; locations listed for guidance only, since Poképédia mixes anime and manga in; playtime set aside, since a remake changes the length, not the map.

Unova leads with 21 settlements, League included, but that total combines two pairs of games, Pokémon Black and White then Black 2 and White 2, including two version-exclusive cities; Black 2 alone gives 19 plus the League, more than any other region. Same convention for the Pokédex: a floor of 151 for Kanto (Red and Blue) and Sinnoh (Diamond and Pearl), 210 with Platinum, and 457 in Kalos with expansions excluded, the two add-on dexes given to Galar and Paldea pushing their totals past that.

Population, the only quantified indicator of size, sets the wikis against each other. Bulbapedia gives Paldea the lead, with at least 1,523 inhabitants, ahead of Kalos (1,288) and Alola (1,005), and Kanto last, 391 inhabitants in the first and third generations, 364 in the second and fourth — a last place it has never left since the second. Poképédia counts only 875 in Kalos: the wikis do not survey the same characters, and Bulbapedia states its scope only on a case-by-case basis — in Paldea, it leaves out Trainers found outside the cities and most passersby. The ranking holds up better than the values.

Hoenn, the half-liquid region

The two wikis agree here down to the number: Hoenn has 34 numbered routes, ahead of Sinnoh (30) and Kanto (28). A route crossed over water has been called a chenal since the third generation: out of 28, 17 are in Hoenn, or 61%. Bulbapedia notes, without a figure, an expanse of water almost equal to that of the land.

Not all zeros say the same thing

Paldea has no numbered routes at all, the only case in the main series, apart from Hisui, which is Sinnoh in another era. Not a floor, but a change of unit: four provinces and fifteen areas divide up the region, the area being a territory, the route a corridor. Galar, second lowest with ten routes, cannot be crossed by them alone, unlike most regions: there they form four clusters linked by a rail network.

Another matter for the sea routes: Kalos, Alola, and Galar have numbered routes but no "Chenal," and Paldea no route to name at all; zero chenal does not mean zero water, though, since "chenal" is a French naming convention, not a survey of the terrain. Bulbapedia thus classes Alola's Route 15 as a water route, Kalos has its Azure Bay, a named sea route, and Sinnoh, water-rich according to the same wiki, has only four chenaux.

And first of all, how many regions are there?

Bulbapedia's "Region" page announces "at most eighteen" known regions, all canons combined; Poképédia's equivalent table lines up 46, 47 with Hisui; its "Region" category holds 29, including "Pokémon World," which is not a region. Three orders of magnitude, no arithmetic error: these sources are not counting the same thing.

Bulbapedia only keeps what is formally called a region; Poképédia lists every named setting, one-off towns, islands from spin-off games, archipelagos from the card game, with Légenville and Bourg Carpe appearing there as red links with no page. The only wording that holds up: nine regions traveled in the main series, from Kanto to Paldea, a tenth announced and still unnamed in September 2026, and several dozen other named settings elsewhere, depending on what you agree to call a region.

Which is the largest region? The only honest answer

No official surface area exists, and this comes from a survey, not an impression: Poképédia's ten region pages and Bulbapedia's ten, searched word by word on September 3, 2026 across their full source text, return zero occurrences of "km²", of "square miles" or of their French equivalent, and no developer interview offers any more. Their only ranking is demographic, labeled by Bulbapedia as "the largest region by population", never "the largest region".

The only word about size left on Poképédia is an adjective: Sinnoh is an "immense region" there, and Bulbapedia says the same thing without the word. It measures nothing, it explains a biological fact, the color split that separates the populations of Gastrodon on either side of Mount Coronet — size is never invoked as a magnitude, only as a cause. ScreenRant, comparing the maps of Paldea and Hisui, finds no distance figures for either one and counts towns instead.

Why the game's scale cannot serve as a measurement

The planet itself is calibrated on Earth: according to an exhibit at the Oceanographic Museum, more than two-thirds of the world is covered in water, exactly as on our own, hence the comparably sized globe Bulbapedia infers from it. The inconsistency lies between the planet and its regions: the Magnet Train crosses the Johto-Kanto border at a speed that implies hundreds of kilometers, when you can walk across both territories in a few hours of play and the animated series has its characters walking for days on end between two towns. The compression is technical and gameplay-driven, not diegetic: fan measurements diverge just as widely, "less than 0.3 square mile" for Kanto by counting tiles, national-scale dimensions by town size or by the distances traveled.

Measuring the real-world territory, the only defensible method

That leaves measuring the real places the regions trace over. This is the method behind the only complete ranking in circulation, published by TheGamer on October 28, 2025, which ranks the nine main-series regions, with Hisui folded into Sinnoh — a method stated on the page, "based on the real-world location that inspired it", but hidden by the SEO title, which promises a ranking by geographic size. Its real flaw: taking the entire model territory where the encyclopedias write that the region covers only part of it. The table adds the columns for that scope; its surface areas, taken on September 3, 2026 from Wikipedia's infoboxes, measure real-world territories, not regions.

These caveats shift the magnitudes more than the rankings. Kalos goes from 93% of the area of Paldea's model to less than half without giving up second place; no source draws the dividing line, so halving the figure holds as an order of magnitude, not as a measurement. Sinnoh gains 36% — Bulbapedia takes away the Oshima Peninsula and adds southern Sakhalin and Kunashir, which are not Japanese, while Poképédia makes the additions without the exclusion — and does not move either.

Alola is the most counterintuitive: the four islands it keeps, out of the eight main ones, add up to 92% of the State of Hawaii's land area ; what inflates its figure is water, 41% of the state's area — counting it amounts to putting the Pacific Ocean inside a region. Galar repeats the pattern: the Crown Tundra adds Scotland, already included in the United Kingdom figure, and the Isle of Armor adds the Isle of Man, a Crown dependency the figure excludes.

Only two caveats shift the order. Unova, the only main-series region modeled on a metropolitan area rather than on a country or an island, has three nested scopes spanning a factor of 115: with the metropolitan area it is no longer the smallest, with the state it reaches fourth place. The other flip comes down to 2%: "Kansai" has no single definition, 33,125 km² with Mie Prefecture, about 27,351 without it, and under the narrow definition Johto falls below Kanto — the Japanese duel is settled in the vocabulary, not on the ground.

The ranking changes leader with every criterion

This ranking only separates real-world territories. Paldea, first by the area of its model, is last by numbered Routes, with zero : the Routes go to Hoenn, the towns to Unova, the catalogued locations to Sinnoh, the Pokédex to Kalos, with the detailed counts above. Only Bulbapedia's population count crowns it a second time, and that measures a population.

The criterion players reach for first, how long it takes to get through, is the least measurable: neither wiki documents it, and the same title wraps up in ten hours or in sixty depending on how you play — it measures a playthrough, not a territory. A Pokémon region has no size: it has a density of events, a number of towns, Gyms and encounters per hour of walking. By the area of the real-world place, the largest is Paldea; by the counts, it changes name with almost every column.

Where to explore each region in 2026

As of September 3, 2026, three of the nine main-series regions cannot be reached on any new Nintendo hardware : Johto, Hoenn and Alola. This table will age: it describes the state of the market, not a lasting rule.

Nintendo Switch Online holds no main-series game

No main-series game has ever appeared in the Nintendo Switch Online catalog. The seven Pokémon titles offered as of that date are all spin-offs: the only Game Boy Advance one is a Mystery Dungeon, the only Game Boy Color one the card game. Poképédia counts only six, its page overlooking Pokémon XD, released in March 2026. The subscription costs €19.99/year in France, €39.99 with the Expansion Pack, the only tier that unlocks GBA, Nintendo 64 and GameCube.

FireRed to LeafGreen, whose feature retraces the first two remakes, were re-released for the franchise's thirtieth anniversary, digital only, €19.99 each, outside any subscription. Navel Rock and Birth Island, until then reserved for event distributions, now open with a ticket handed out after the Hall of Fame: these Sevii Islands have been in the data since 2004, only the way you reach them has changed.

On February 26, 2027, the transfer chain breaks

The March 27, 2023, the Wii U and 3DS family eShop closed: no more purchases, no more demos, but games already bought remain re-downloadable — a distinction that is often stated wrong. On April 8, 2024, their online services shut down, with one named exception: Pokémon Bank and Poké Transporter. Their end, announced in August 2026, falls on February 26, 2027 ; the American notice says February 25 at 7 p.m. Pacific time, which does land in the early hours of February 26 in Paris.

The cutoff closes a route : a Pokémon born on a Game Boy Advance cartridge crosses four machines and five relays before the modern games, Pal Park, Poké Transfer, Poké Transporter, Bank, HOME. The first link requires a GBA cartridge slot, which only the original DS and the DS Lite have; the second requires two consoles powered on together and two games in the same language. After February 2027, nothing will travel back up from Game Boy to 3DS: from Bank to HOME, the transfer is one-way and requires a Premium subscription. Other losses date from 2023: the Virtual Console release of Crystal, the only Western edition that gives Celebi in exchange for the GS Ball, can no longer be bought.

HOME remains the only bridge still open, on Switch, Switch 2, Android and iOS; the Basic Plan caps out at 30 Pokémon, Premium costs €15.99 for 365 days on Switch and goes from 6,000 to 9,000 slots in October 2026. The same update connects FireRed to LeafGreen, one-way here as well.

Pokémon XD joined the Switch 2's Nintendo Classics app in March 2026, putting Orre, the region of a spin-off game, back within reach on new hardware; Pokémon Colosseum, announced for the same app, still had not been released in September 2026. Of the main-series regions born before the Switch, Unova, Kalos and Alola are the only ones whose games have never been re-released or remade ; of Unova and Kalos, the Switch has received only a fragment, the Blueberry Academy and Lumiose. Fifteen years and eleven months separate the Japanese release of Pokémon Black Version from September 2026. That's a measure of the gap, not a hint: nothing has been announced. The system-by-system breakdown is in the complete guide to Pokémon video games, and the case of Lumiose in its own dedicated article.

Which region to start with

The question isn't which region is the prettiest, but which map shape suits which player : a signposted corridor and an open playing field don't call for the same kind of attention. Five profiles follow, each with a game, a console and the geographic reason behind the choice. The starter trio changes from one region to the next as well: the nine trios are compared separately.

Anyone who has never touched a Pokémon game will start with Galar, in Pokémon Sword and Shield (Nintendo Switch, November 15, 2019, playable on Switch 2). The map reads from south to north, from the village of Postwick to Wyndon: only ten numbered routes, in four clusters linked by the rail line, and a single large open space in the middle, the Wild Area, which you can cross without stopping. The thread of the journey is never out of sight here.

Anyone who wants the classic experience — route, town, Gym, in a fixed order — will head to Sinnoh, with Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl (Switch, November 19, 2021), whose full article covers the remake in detail. There, the terrain stands in for the plot: Mount Coronet cuts the continent from south to north, and the thirty routes numbered 201 to 230 are laid out around that central spine, with fourteen towns on either side. For the formula in its original form, Pokémon FireRed to LeafGreen returned to the eShop on February 27, 2026.

Anyone who wants an open world chooses between two openings with nothing in common. Paldea, in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (Switch, November 18, 2022, with a free enhancement update for Switch 2 on June 5, 2025), is an ellipse pierced at its center by a crater, without a single numbered route: fifteen areas split between the South, the North, the East and the West take their place. The eight Gyms can be challenged in any order there, at the cost of an uneven difficulty curve, since levels don't adjust to the player's progress. Hisui, in Pokémon Legends: Arceus (Switch, January 28, 2022), opens up differently: five large areas that unlock one after another around a single fortified village, Jubilife Village, and a strictly solo game. The comparison of this game with Z-A shows that the break from the formula takes several forms.

Anyone who wants the longest adventure has a clear answer and a problem. Pokémon HeartGold to SoulSilver (Nintendo DS, March 26, 2010) revisit the setup ofGold and Silver : two regions on the same cartridge, Johto first, Kanto second, sixteen Badges instead of eight, and route numbering that runs continuously from one region to the other, from 1 to 48 — numbers 1 to 28 on the Kanto side, 29 to 48 on the Johto side. But neither one is sold new anymore: Johto has no door open on recent hardware, and those cartridges have to be hunted down secondhand. On a console bought today, it's the expansions that stretch the journey — Paldea extended by Kitakami then by the Blueberry Academy, or Galar by the Isle of Armor and the Crown Tundra, three maps instead of one in both cases. The complete catalog of games details what runs on what.

Anyone playing with a child will take Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! (Switch, November 16, 2018), which bring you back to Kanto. Poképédia presents them as the first games where two people play at the same time: the second controller joins the game to help with catches and battles, and drops out whenever they like. The geography lends itself to it, Kanto being a loop of ten towns. HMs have given way to Secret Techniques there: opening up the map no longer costs a move slot on the team.

The tenth generation isn't a choice yet

Pokémon Winds and Waves were announced on February 27, 2026, during a Pokémon Presents held for the franchise's thirtieth anniversary, and will be released in 2027, exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2. Their region has no public name as of September 3, 2026: neither Poképédia nor the English-language encyclopedias give one, and a region without a name can't be compared to any of the nine already traveled. Waiting until 2027 to start means putting off by a year a decision the five entries above already settle.

One constraint remains that these five answers work around without solving: Johto, Hoenn and Alola can't be reached on any Nintendo hardware sold new in 2026. Starting with one of them means a secondhand console and cartridge — not an obstacle, but a choice to make with your eyes open. The first game is often a gift, and it rarely arrives alone: the buying guide takes care of everything that comes with it.

The regions in one table

The opening table sorted the regions by their vital statistics: generation, games, towns, routes, Pokédex. This one keeps the other half of the inventory, the half you can see on the map — the shape of the territory, the treatment the real-world model went through to fit into it, and the terrain feature the game turned into a rule. Each row condenses what the previous sections establish, without adding a single new fact.

Two caveats apply to the middle column. The word "model" doesn't carry the same weight of proof everywhere: five of these correspondences came straight from the developers, the others hold up only through their outline or through a resemblance nobody has ever formalized. And a transformation is not an approximation : a map that has been rotated, flipped or rearranged is still a faithful tracing, simply read in another direction. Hisui closes the table without being its tenth row in the same way as the others — it's Sinnoh before its towns.

In short

The template of a region fits into eight points, and each one has been broken at least once: it's the exceptions, more than the rule, that teach you something. What never breaks is the constraint of the terrain. Without Surf, whole swaths of Kanto stay closed; without Dive, it's an entire level of Hoenn; in Unova, you don't go around a river, you take the bridge; in Galar, four clusters of routes only connect by rail. The map doesn't decorate the adventure, it drives it.

The rest follows. The terrain builds the bestiary — a Magneton becomes Magnezone because it gains a level on Mount Coronet — it supplies the alibi for the battle mechanic, with Terastal energy coming out of Paldea's soil, and it gives each criminal organization its plan, Hoenn's duel being a quarrel over a coastline. The institutions follow the divisions : in Alola, a Kahuna answers for an entire island, whereas the figure of eight Gyms, elsewhere, owes nothing to the territory.

What the series has never supplied is a measurement: no official surface area, no map of the entire world in a main-series game, no shared timeline from one region to the next. A superlative here is only as good as its criterion, and the largest region changes name with every column. Geography governs even what stays playable: in 2026, Johto, Hoenn and Alola can't be reached on any Nintendo hardware sold new. About the tenth region, announced in February 2026 and still nameless, we don't know the essential thing: its shape.

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In the shop

Let's put it plainly: the catalog doesn't contain a single region map. The posters are manga-style panels centered on a single species, not landscapes. What actually comes close to geography amounts to four pieces, all named after a place: among the puzzles, a Sinnoh Forest and a Kanto Pop Art; among the rugs, a Kanto Panorama and a Kanto Mosaic, with Pikachu in the foreground in both cases.

The rest of the decor section is species portraits on neutral backgrounds, and Kanto comes back in nearly every backdrop that places a scene somewhere. So the eight other regions come together through their creatures rather than their landscapes: the legendaries section brings together Mew and Mewtwo for Kanto, Lugia, Entei and Suicune for Johto, Kyogre and Rayquaza for Hoenn, Giratina for Sinnoh. If you want to dress up a wall, that's where to look.

Browse the decor section

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Explore the Pokémon universe

This page is part of a series of guides covering the whole Pokémon universe:

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