Oh dang, featured. Yeah, playing through these games again is making me love Kanto's layout as I said. Hopefully the new games will give us some of the old magic along with all the great new additions they've brought. The multiplayer and the collecting aspect gets better and better every gen, but the single player seems to get worse and worse. Too linear, too absurd, less intriguing.
3 things I want from the single player of the new games:
1. Simplify. Don't simplify all the great extra features. Don't "go back to the original 151" like some weirdos keep saying. Just simplify the plot. As the plots of modern pokemon games get more and more absurd I feel more and more detached from what's going on. Focus more on my character and his/her pokemon journey. Gotta catch 'em all! Gotta be a pokemon master! Build an adventure around the concept the entire series is based on. Make the evil team a much smaller part of the game, or just get rid of them entirely if you can. Sure, I'd like to meet cool characters, sure I'd like to unravel some mysteries about a legendary pokemon, but keep the focus on my goals as a pokemon trainer, and build a simple, but enjoyable narrative out of that. One of the things I like about Team Rocket is that they're just thugs. Their leader is Al Capone, not Darkseid. They extort people, pokemon, and businesses for money. They own a dirty casino. They're not trying to flood the whole world, or threaten everything on a galactic scale. They didn't secretly build a giant castle underneath the pokemon league and then raise it out of the ground at just the right moment.
2. Go back to Kanto-esqe openness, possible even allow me to choose my starting town, and go the various gyms in various orders. Pokemon is just a numbers game, so it should be easily possible for them to tweak the levels and states of wild pokemon, trainers, and gym leaders in order to allow the player to choose which town they want to start in, or which order the want their journey to go in. If I want to start in the "grassy plains" town with mostly normals and flying pokemon, then fine. If I want to start in the coastal town with lots of water types, then fine. One of the biggest problem with starting a new pokemon game is knowing that your early team is just gonna be a bird, a bug, and some kind of rodent. Scale the levels based around where I first start, and the order I get badges in. If that's too much, I understand. So if it can't be done this way, then go back to the Kanto way. Linear for a few gyms, then open afterwards.
3. Mix up the starters. There is no reason other than tradition to stick with the fire/grass/water starters. Yeah, in theory it teaches you about type effectiveness, but it doesn't actually work because there are far, far more types than those three. The game doesn't actually tell you every type matchup until you fight them. Sure, I can intuit that electric beats water, but I can't do that with fighting and flying. It's not intuitive that ground is immune to electric, but rock is neutral. So teaching players about those 3 starting types doesn't actually matter because the player still either has to look up everything else on their own, or just play through, read the text, and learn as they go. Make more interesting, more various starters. They don't even have to be a rock/paper/scissors trio either, because again, that stuff doesn't matter in the long run. They could possibly even have different trios of starters depending on which town I decide to start in, leading to even higher variety and personal choice in your adventure. And for the love of god give them better abilities.
Again, I like the new games. But I like them for their quality of life improvements in building teams, multiplayer, and post game content. The initial single player mode is just a drag and I hope they mix it up.