You have to wonder how anyone gets to Pewter City.

I mean what are the access routes? A dark labyrinthian forest full of dangerous bugs, a set of caves whose other opening is halfway up the mountain, a tunnel full of territorial burrowing animals, and a small road so poorly used that nobody has cut down the saplings choking the pathway.

And the place has a big fancy museum.

Part of what I love about playing Pokémon is running through the world and seeing how these various towns and cities are separated by long tracks of rural lanes and overgrown fields. It always makes me wonder how they're supposed to be prosperous. Admittedly travel through most of Kanto is easy because it's well-connected to the Saffron City hub, so for Generation 1 I didn't wonder all that much. But Pewter City is an outlier to the Saffron hub, as if it wanted to keep itself hidden, tucked away in the foothills of the mountains...

And it has a big. Fancy. Museum.

It's wild. I love the earlier Pokemon games for those weird incongruities. They're a wonderful video game example of the operating principle of a children's story, which is that it doesn't have to make perfect sense because perfect sense is not the point. The point is to have fun. Explaining things in an effort to make perfect sense spoils the fun a bit.

And I play Pokemon for the chance to run my character through the wild, and stumble on these weird little towns, full of people who seem to be doing quite nicely, thank you, would you like to visit our lovely little five-story-tall museum?

That is the primary reason I stopped playing Pokemon Sun and Moon before I had got halfway. I felt as though Alola was not the landscape of wilderness dotted with towns that I had known in Kanto and Johto and Sinnoh and Unova. It felt like the opposite. It felt like the towns had taken over, and there was little space left to have fun the way I wanted. Maybe I just didn't get far enough to find the open fields, or maybe the games accurately depict the shape of life in Hawaii.

Either way, the first part of the game felt like the rest would not be a world that could hold something like Pewter City. I saw a closed horizon instead of an open one.

I would probably not enjoy living in Hawaii.