Over two months after its release, someone has finally made a nearly complete, mostly 1:1 replica of the Kanto region in Pokémon Pokopia.
This comes from a post on Reddit by u/starguy13, who’s been documenting their progress on this project almost since the game came out. They’ve been using the blank-slate Palette Town map to recreate the map from the original Pokémon games as accurately as possible, and it genuinely looks quite impressive. You can scroll through a lot of their WIP photos to see how close it looks:
However, they’ve run into some hurdles along the way that have resulted in a few…discrepancies. Self-admittedly, starguy13 didn’t follow the old “measure twice, cut once” adage, and accidentally started their built in an unideal spot, resulting in there not being quite enough room on one side of the map and too much room on the other side. They’ve had to do some squishing of certain spots to make it work. As they write, “With the loss of routes 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 24, and 25; losing most of routes 8, 10, 12, and 17; having to shrink Cerulean, Celadon, and Fuchsia Cities; AND having to fudge the spatial relationships of the locations a bit… yes, it can be done.”
There’s some cool detail work that starguy13 got into here, though. While most of the buildings don’t have 1:1 interiors, a few do, such as Professor Oak’s Lab and (astonishingly) Mt. Moon, which you can apparently walk all the way through just like in the games. This was a bit excessive, though, as starguy13 says they decided not to do the same thing for places like Diglet Cave and just made it a regular tunnel.
There’s also been an advantage to starguy13’s lack of measurement early on: they’ve got some bonus room on the western side of the map. With that space, they say they plan to make Route 29, which connects Victory Road and the Pokémon League to Johto, and New Bark Town, which is where that connection point happens. There is, uh, no room for the rest of Johto, though.
This is genuinely a cool endeavor and it’s no surprise it took two whole months to build. A lot of other creators have built parts of Kanto, or done builds from other games like buildings from the Mystery Dungeon series, entire towns from Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, or Prism Tower from Pokémon X and Y. Meanwhile, other folks are settling for rebuilding Kanto from the ruins of the rest of the game, like this person who has fully restored the Pewter Museum in even more glory than it originally had.