Every Hoenn city is distinct.
Littleroot, Petalburg, Verdanturf, and Mauville all say no to this. I'll cut Oldale some slack since it has stately baroque music and it's the second town, but even Pallet Town lets you Surf south of its borders. Littleroot's as generic as starter towns get, Petalburg's basically a big pond and Norman, Verdanturf's best remembered for Contests and the cave right beside it, and Mauville's got a boring-ass layout and is redeemed only by Rydel, the Game Center, and easy access to routes all around. I love all of the other cities, but don't pretend Hoenn doesn't have weak spots in its town array.
Visually, Pokemon has some of the most unmemorable towns I've ever seen in a RPG series. Ask me to hum some town/city/route/etc. themes from any region and I'll be able to fairly quickly without much thought, but ask me to sketch out a region and some of their towns and the best you'll get is Kanto, so I'd say by default it's the most memorable region if only because every game afterwards borrows so much from it in terms of their structure, for better or worse. Fortree might be hanging in the trees, but it's still just a couple of random, identical houses filled with uninteresting locals scattered around a stock gym, mart, and center that they've done so many times before.
It's the same with gym leaders honestly. I can name Kanto's eight off the top of my head, any farther would force me to think even though the Sinnoh and Unova ones played a bigger part in their respective games than the originals do in theirs sans Giovanni.
Some of this comes down to the modern-day-ish setting, since buildings end up looking all clean and sparkly in most instances. I don't mind this, really, and the newer games have gotten better at offering camera angles and ridiculous theme-ing for certain settlements. The music has a big role in defining a town's emotional state, something that Ichinose in particular always tries to imbue into a town theme (Slateport's got a sing-song, City Pop feel to it, for example).
I'm probably a few pages late to the discussion but I absolutely agree that while some towns are brilliant and look cool, they are all lifeless and useless. Unovas NY was probably as close as we got in terms of stuff to do and even that feels a little subpar.
Castelia's an impressive place and actually has a lot of unique rooms to enter with NPC dialogue, but it's still pretty small for a Pokémon city and has boring architecture. Oh well.
Towns need to be more than a stop gap to the next route with only the gym, poke center and occasional store. Maybe some battles, optional side quests and in the spirit of gen 3, local competitions to have. You speak to people once for no other reason than to occasionally get an item and then your interaction with them is over. No reason to revisit houses or speak to people unless they do offer you something.
I definitely agree. Game Freak's script-writing's improved to the point that they can suggest more to the Pokémon world than they have before, so not capitalizing on this with more interesting world-building's kind of lame. One solution wold be to give NPCs daily schedules ala Ultima V or Shenmue; this means a good deal more work for the team, but it would do a lot for verisimilitude.
They also need to be more open, as in lead directly from one route to the other. would be nice to enter a town and see 2 or more new routes available to you that ARENT arbitrarily locked off because some dude told me that they need to drink water in the spot that I have to go in for 12 more hours.
Being able to show the full population of a town, including suburb complexes and every damn flat bustling with activity, would be a dream come true for Pokémon towns. For too long they've been reduced to abstract approximations of living, large settlements with seemingly unrealistically-low populations. There's no reason why Game Freak shouldn't try and take advantage of future handhelds' processing abilities for this end.
I don't really remember much of XY's music. Except those two that were listed above, Anistar and Snowbelle.
Anistar's definitely one of my favorites, and I think Snowbelle's great too (though it was and still is over-represented in favorites lists).
NOPE
RSE, DPP and BW are easily better for route themes. Nothing in XY comes close to route 225, for example.
Route 15 is one of several X/Y route themes that benefits from the improved brass and orchestral samples, and the way it develops is suitably epic and interesting. Kageyama generally upped his game on overworld music compared to Gen V.
No, it's relatively underdeveloped and feels like it's high on cotton candy without much in the way of dynamics. Gen III and Gen IV have the best, most romantic bike themes.
Goldenrod City has the best theme.
I can't tell if it's a recycled arrangement of the Gen II bike theme or if the bike theme's a recycling of Goldenrod, but it's lacking next to Ecruteak's or Violet City's themes.
(((