The Pokémon World Map Project

The Pokémon World Map is a small personal project I have been working on! It is an attempt to create Pokémon RSE style maps of every "canon" Pokémon region and attaching these maps together into maps of wider areas in the Pokémon regions!

What are "canon" Pokémon regions?

To create this project I first needed to define which region would belong on the world map! Obviously, every mainline Pokémon game should be considered canon, as all auxiliary Pokémon media is based off of these games! So, in that case, the most "canon" regions in the series are: Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, The Sevii Islands, Sinnoh/Hisui, Unova, Kalos, Alola, Galar, the Isle of Armor, The Crown Tundra, Paldea, Kitakami, and Blueberry Academy!

Some areas that aren’t regions but are included in this project are areas like Faraway Island from Pokémon Emerald and The Nature Reserve from Pokémon B2W2, since both of these areas are in mainline games but not in the regions of those games.

But what about Pokémon side games? To decide which games were to be considered "canon" to the series, I had to choose a bit of an arbitrary line, and I decided that line was the ability to trade a Pokémon with a mainline game. I took this from Bird Keeper Toby's video where he attempts similar project (but we have very differing results!). This means that the side game regions that are added to the list of regions include: Fiore, Almia, and Oblivia (The Ranger series regions), Orre (Pokémon Coliseum’s and XD: Gale of Darkness's region), and Pokémon Island (Pokémon Battle Revolution's region).

There are 4 side games that are not included despite having Pokémon that are transferable. Pokémon Channel and Pokémon ranch take place within Pokémon regions (Kanto and Sinnoh respectively). Dream Radar takes place in the world of dreams and thus can't be mapped. Lastly, Pokémon GO's region is simply real-world Earth!

How do I decide where they go?

I decided to keep this pretty simple all things considered! While one could try to figure out where the regions exist in relation to each other through in game lore and clues, this ends up being a daunting task, as every game says something different and they end up contradicting themselves numerous times, making it near impossible to establish a list of rules. There are some we know for a fact such as Kanto being next to Johto, and Sinnoh being somewhere north of Johto and Kanto (due to the Sinjoh ruins), but other than that, nothing definitive.

Instead I have decided on a more economical route. Most Pokémon regions should be relatively close to real-life locations! If the Pokémon world is an earth like planet, then its climatic zones should be similar as well. Thus, the hot/tropic regions should be near the equator and the colder areas be near the poles! Plus this makes for easy organizing of this large amount of disparate regions.

Thus, below will be what I have organized as the Poké-Continents of the world!

Poké-Japan

Because the first four regions of the series all are based off of regions of Japan, Japan becomes its own continent in the Pokémon world map. Not only is Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh present but also Fiorre, Almia, Oblivia, The Sinjoh Ruins, Pokémon Island, and the Sevii Islands. Currently this map is missing Kitikami and that will go north of Kanto once created due to its basis being many places in the Tōhoku region of Japan.

Poké-Europe

Poké-Europe is currently made up of Kalos, Galar, The Isle of Armor. It is the biggest Poké-continent currently, mostly due to Paldea's size.

Poké-North America

Poké-North America is currently made up of Unova and the Orre region. Because the Unova is based on NYC (on the East Coast) and Orre is likely based on Pheonix/Arizona (near the West Coast) and we have not gotten a region in the middle of North America, they are not currently stitched together. An interesting challenge here is that Unova is a region based on a city but is a region with multiple cities in it, so how large is it? Does it take up the space of all of New England? who knows!

Poké-South America and Alola

The two other parts of the world we have only seen small parts of are Poké-South America and Alola. Alola is based on Hawaii which would be an island in the Poké-Pacific Ocean. Faraway Islands lore is more vague, but in the Pokémon Mansion in both Red/Blue and Firered/Leafgreen mention that the place they found Mew was in the jungles of Gyana, so Faraway Island would likely be off the coast of Poké-South America!