Recurring Location

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A place which is not the main hub or boss area in a series, but a minor place which appears over and over again within the same series.

Like Recurring Riff, but a place. Different from Nostalgia Level in that it is merely a recycled locale rather than a place meant to invoke memories.

Examples of Recurring Location include:


  • The Mario Kart games always have Mario Circuit, a beach level, Bowser's Castle, and Rainbow Road. Wario Stadium and a Donkey Kong track usually appear too.
  • The Legend of Zelda games often have incarnations of the Lost Woods, even in the games that don't take place in Hyrule. Death Mountain, Lake Hylia, Kakariko Village, and the Gerudo Desert often appear too.
  • The main Pokémon games always have a variation of Victory Road.
  • The Brookhaven and Alchemilla hospitals in the Silent Hill games.
  • In the Sonic the Hedgehog games, Green Hill Zone has appeared many times, in both older games and newer games.
    • Actually, the series has a whole mess of levels that show up over and over again. Almost every game has a tropical zone, a casino/carnival zone, a lava zone, etc.
  • In the Star Wars Expanded Universe games, Tatooine appears all the time, especially in the MMORPGs.
  • The Clock Tower in the Castlevania games.
    • And the chapel, the entrance, the underground reservoir, the castle keep and throne room, the library...
  • The games in the Gradius series have almost always a level set in a field full of active volcanoes, an organic level, a Moai level and the mechanical Bacterion base.
  • The Tales (series) has players go to the tree of Mana, Yggdrasil, in several of its games.
  • A non-video game example: The Biers pub is mentioned a lot in Discworld.
  • Playground Commons, Sandy Flats, and Dirt Yards appear a lot in the Backyard Sports games.
  • Every single Monkey Island game so far has had its own version of the Voodoo Lady's shack, generally as a one-stop shop for all things voodoo (titled The International House of Mojo in two appearances, and Voodoo & Things (formerly just Voodoo in one). Monkey Island itself, however, appears in some form or another in every game except Tales (the climax of the second game takes place on Dinky Island, an atoll off the coast of Monkey Island, and the final confrontation occurs in the underground tunnels connecting Dinky and Monkey together).
  • All over Kingdom Hearts. Agrabah, Halloween Town, Neverland, and Olympus Colosseum are the top four offenders, though Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden is another frequently frequented locale along with the Hundred-Acre Wood. In five games released in the USA as of September 2010, some form of each of these levels/locales has appeared in four (though Neverland and Agrabah are quite different each visit), and Olympus Colosseum in all five. Several other levels have appeared in two or three games, and only a small handful in just one (Deep Jungle and End of the World from the original game, and about half of the total worlds from Birth By Sleep).
  • W(i/y)ndia of the Breath of Fire series.
  • The Hulle Granz Cathedral (aka Δ Hidden Forbidden Holy Ground, the area key words used to access it) in the .hack series. It is the only location to consistently show up in every single installment of the franchise, and something plot-important is practically guaranteed to happen there.
  • The World of Mana series has the Mana Tree, and the remote inaccessible land (Illucia / Pure Land / Mana Holy Land) that surrounds it and keeps it safe from human spoil.
  • Floor 60 of The Tower of Druaga.
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