5

I've been trying to find out how far Ash traveled across the Kanto region in the anime. But I haven't been able to find a good way to do so.

I wouldn't mind if reference to the game is required to get to a proper answer. enter image description here

Deity of Automation
  • 51
  • 3
  • What kind of answer are you looking for - one in distance (km, mi) or in cities/landmarks visited? – Makoto May 17 '19 at 20:11
  • 1
    To those who watched the anime, is it even possible to determine this? Could not recall there being a way to measure distance between towns/cities in the games, – W. Are May 18 '19 at 01:06
  • Distance. I was thinking of converting building height in the games to building height in the anime and using that proportion on the tile equivalents to get the anime distance, but tracking that would be a large task for one person. – Deity of Automation May 18 '19 at 08:04
  • 2
    @W.Are Yes, roughly at least. The pokemon world reflects the real-world as depicted in the series several times. Most pokemon regions map 1-1 to specific regions in Japan as well. It would be quite the task to plot his whole trip, but not impossible. [see also, bulbapedia](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_world) – Dimitri mx May 20 '19 at 08:11

1 Answers1

-1

Interesting question and strangely enough, I've been asked a variation of this question several years ago, and this is how I tried to estimate the size of the Pokemon World in the games at least. The biggest challenge would be to scale something in the Pokemon Universe to something in real life.

An easy and trivial approach would be is to first, slice the picture into squares. Then, the obvious thing to do would be to look at the number of squares covered by a particular character or object that you have an accurate distance for, and then, it is simply a matter of converting those figures into the number of squares you have remaining.

Now the question is to find that particular object or character. One interesting way of doing it, would be to use a Legendary Pokemon or some of the Pokemon that appear on the map like Poliwrath in Celadon City or Slowbro in Cerulean city. Since these pokemon have a fixed height, we could simply look at the number of squares they take up. Then we basically see the number of Slowbro or Polywrath we can Place on a map.

An example would be something like, a Slowbro takes up 2*2 squares = 4 squares. Now suppose we can split Cerulean city into a 1000 squares, we can technically fit 250 Slowbros on the map. Then we can simply multiply the distance with the final value you have.

That said, the value would obviously be incredibly inaccurate. However, it is a decent enough strategy to accomplish the task at hand. However, your question with regard to the anime, would be impossible the answer because, in the anime, the map is obviously significantly more extended and has lots of new places which isn't present on the game maps. To top it off, the characters also get lost and take several detours to reach a particular destination and, since they do most of their traveling on foot, a huge chunk of their travels is often cut out or skipped until they reason a particular decision.

Something to help you visualise

Gary Andrews30
  • 6,401
  • 11
  • 29
  • 2
    The games aren't the same as the anime. For instance, the Seafoam Islands are depicted as a beach resort. Your calculations couldn't account for this from games alone. – Makoto May 20 '19 at 14:10
  • @Makoto I think I made that clear in my answer where I stated that the anime map was much more extended and had newer places. For example, there is the secret garden where Ash captured Bulbasaur which isn't in the games. OP in the comments talks about trying to use a Building size to estimate the size of a pokemon map. I suggested a better alternative. – Gary Andrews30 May 21 '19 at 02:34
  • Do you think that there would be a way to compare buildings and areas to account for that? Also, the detours might be able to be determined by looking at the starting point and destination and determining the only detour that they could have used, labelled or not. – Deity of Automation May 22 '19 at 05:31
  • 1
    @DeityofAutomation How exactly do you plan on using Buildings and areas to account for distance? There are several buildings of various sizes in each town. Plus, there are houses of varying sizes which he have no idea about. The only reasonably way I can think off, to estimate the distance traveled in the anime, would be, to study the script extensively and look for lines between characters where there is any mention of distance. So using that for measurement, you could try to approximate the distance covered during the rest of their travels. – Gary Andrews30 May 22 '19 at 09:04
  • One cannot translate game geometry into real world geometry, since it is intentionally deformed. Just compare the flowers to the trees to notice this. – Ocean Apr 12 '22 at 16:02