My turn.
Map Name: Random Route
Game: Fire Red
Credits: Masterofpuppets for his ROM base, and the tile creators who contributed to it.
Gonna preface this by saying that she asked me to review it, because she liked my mapping style, so I'm more or less just explaining how I do things, because I'm bad at reviewing maps. lol
Looks like this is actually sort of 3 maps in one. Overall, I like the concept, and the shape of the map seems quite nice. If you're going for a natural feeling, you might find tree placement easier if you don't use them to line the border of the map. In my maps, I don't use borders at all. I leave 7 tiles of just trees or mountains or w/e between the edge of the map and the player at all times, so I don't have to worry about borders at all. It's more work of course, but you won't end up with that sudden jump from nintendo trees to natural trees.
I also generally try to fit in as many trees into a space as I can without making any sort of specific pattern. I'd personally say to try fitting them closer together, and leave less empty space in areas that the player can't reach.
Grass placement is a little too irregular for me. I'd say it would be better to shoot for wider but shorter sections of grass, because in some places the player will have to walk through grass for like 20 tiles, in a fairly narrow area, which I think could get annoying. Generally, I'd shoot for maybe an average length of 4-10 tiles for each section of grass.
The mountains look too uniform to me as well. Varying it up a bit, and leaving small gaps to place trees along the edge of the mountain looks a lot more realistic to me in most situations, unless you're going for a sheer cliff face (which you might have been, but I usually avoid it because I don't think it looks as good in general. If that's what you were going for ignore this though.)
I generally think of paths as a guide to keep the player going the right direction. Usually straight-ish lines or slight curves (well as curvy as you can make it with tiles. lol) separated every 10-20ish (usually) tiles by sections of grass. You seem to be more or less doing the same thing, but they're short, large areas of dirt, which doesn't really look like an area where people have repeatedly walked over and over.
As for tile errors, you're missing a couple tree tops in the center of the map and a grass tile where there should be a cliff corner in the upper middle.
And one other little thing that sort of bugs me is the fact that you enter a cave at the left of the map, and right behind the cave entrance there's a big crater, so if the cave is very large, it would seem somewhat unrealistic, because there wouldn't really be that much space there. May not actually be a problem depending on how you design the cave, plus the player can't see a huge amount of the crater, so they'd probably never actually notice anyway, but just something that stood out to me.
So, if you couldn't tell by now, I'm trying really hard not to say anything is definitively good or bad, but just comparing it to what I do, because mapping involves so much personal preference, that I really can't say that what you did is right or wrong, just how I personally think things look best. If you like it, it's by no means bad, so keep it up.
