Natsume's Book of Friends is set in an unnamed country town, but many of its scenes are modelled on Hitoyoshi in Kumamoto, the author's hometown, with Hitoyoshi Station, Okadome Kofuku Station and Ichifusa Dam all shown in the anime.
This route follows the rails and hills of the Hitoyoshi-Kuma region and ends with one detour to Fukuoka. The series gives no street addresses, so most pins mark the area, not a single scene.
The Fast and the Furious (2001) turned real Los Angeles places into Dom Toretto's world: Dodger Stadium, Bob's Market in Echo Park, the house on East Kensington Road and Neptune's Net in Malibu.
This route follows nine of those places in story order, from the opening test at Dodger Stadium to the final race on Terminal Island, with a detour to Race Wars at San Bernardino. Some are working shops, homes or airport ground; the film's streets are still the draw.
Ubisoft sent a team of developers across Bolivia in 2012 and built a cartel-ridden version of the country from what they saw. The game's story is fiction, and Bolivia's government complained about it in 2017.
This route follows the real landmarks the game's map recreates: La Paz, the Yungas Road, the Uyuni train cemetery, Laguna Colorada and the silver mines of Potosí. All pins are approximate, since the game's world is fictionalised.
Two years after a pandemic turns millions of people into feral Freakers, outlaw biker Deacon St. John rides central Oregon as a drifter and bounty hunter. He believes his wife Sarah died when a NERO helicopter lifted her out of the outbreak — until he learns she was moved to a military outpost at Crater Lake.
Days Gone's Oregon is a compressed, renamed version of the real high desert: Bend becomes Farewell, Black Butte Ranch becomes Iron Butte Ranch, and the militia holds Crater Lake. The route follows Deacon's ride from the opening evacuation to the volcanic lake where the story ends, through the hot springs, small towns and logging country that Bend Studio used as its model.
Age of Empires II follows Joan of Arc from a French army camp at Vaucouleurs to the stake at Rouen. The designers said they deferred to history wherever it did not interfere with gameplay, and the campaign's spine — Orléans, Patay, Reims, Paris — is close to the record. But the game also bends the story, placing Joan at a battle she missed and turning a failed assault on Paris into a betrayal. This route follows the campaign's stops in order and sets each one beside what the sources say happened there.
The Driver series began in 1999 as a car-chase game and grew into a tour of real cities: Miami, Los Angeles and New York in the first game, Havana, Las Vegas and Rio de Janeiro in Driver 2, Nice and Istanbul in Driver 3, and a fictionalised San Francisco in the 2011 sequel. Tanner's undercover work runs from a Miami parking garage to a presidential car, a Rio climax beneath Christ the Redeemer and the Golden Gate Bridge.
This route follows the series city by city, from Ocean Drive's Art Deco hotels to the Las Vegas Strip and the Bosphorus. Some stops are city-level pins because the games recreate whole urban areas rather than single buildings; only Christ the Redeemer and the Golden Gate Bridge are pinned exactly.
Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West cross the American West from Colorado Springs and Denver to Yellowstone and drowned San Francisco. A thousand years after the old world fell to Faro's machines, Nora outcast Aloy travels to uncover what destroyed it.
This route follows both Horizon games from the red rocks above Colorado Springs to the drowned streets of San Francisco, pairing each stop with the real landmark behind it. Guerrilla compresses the map — in-game locations are not exactly where they are in the real world — so the pins mark real stand-ins, not exact game coordinates.
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth sends Ichiban Kasuga to Honolulu. The developers rebuilt a compressed stretch of the city, from the sand of Aloha Beach to the markets of Chinatown, mixing real streets, shops and landmarks with renamed and invented ones.
This route follows that Honolulu from Waikiki into downtown: Waikiki Beach, the International Market Place, the Ala Wai Canal bridge, Ala Moana Center, Iolani Palace and Chinatown. Names and distances have changed — Anaconda Shopping Center stands in for Ala Moana, Aloha Beach for Waikiki — but most of the streets and buildings are recognisable. It is a tour of a real city as a game remembers it.
Wednesday Addams is sent to Nevermore Academy, a school for outcasts in the fictional Vermont town of Jericho. Netflix built that world in Romania: a castle above Bușteni, Bucharest interiors, a backlot town and a country mansion standing in for the Gates house. When season 2 moved production to Ireland in 2024, Nevermore gained a castle in County Offaly, a waterfall campsite and a Dublin cemetery. Much of the Irish shoot was based at Ashford Studios in County Wicklow.
This route follows the show's geography through the real places that played it, season by season. The pins mark filming locations, not invented Vermont addresses.
Goblin was filmed in Seoul, on the Jumunjin breakwater on Korea's east coast and in Quebec City, where the red door in Petit-Champlain, the Château Frontenac and the Tourny fountain appear. A Goryeo general killed by his king returns as an immortal goblin and spends 939 years looking for the bride who can pull the sword from his chest.
The route follows the story from the palace set where his Goryeo past was filmed to his house in Seoul, the Gangneung breakwater where they first meet, and the old streets of Quebec City beyond a red door. It ends at the park that stands in for the Yoo family cemetery.
Every Far Cry game drops you into a country that does not exist, and almost every one was built from a real place. The developers camped on the savanna, sent a team to Nepal, spent two weeks in Montana and a month in Cuba.
This route follows the series in release order, one stop per game. Pins mark whole countries or regions, not scenes: they show where each fictional setting came from, and one entry has no sourced real model.
Port Royal and Tortuga were built on a quiet St Vincent bay, Cannibal Island is Dominican rainforest, and a private Bahamian cay sits behind a famous duel.
This route follows the shoots from St Vincent in 2002 through Dominica in 2005 to Grand Bahama, where the ships were filmed in a hurricane season. Most pins mark areas, not exact sets; the sets themselves were built and taken down.
Hemingway wrote his last great novella in Cuba, about a fisherman and one enormous marlin. The places around it are real: the hotel room where he first lived, the bar he loved, the house where he wrote, and the fishing village next door.
This route follows the writer's Cuba from Old Havana to the harbour of Cojímar, where the Pilar was moored. The novella itself is under copyright, so the story is kept to its outline.
A boy born in Eisleben becomes a monk, a professor and the man who defied an emperor. Along the way he vows in a thunderstorm, challenges the church over indulgences, is spirited away in disguise and ends his life where it began.
The route follows Luther through seven places in Germany: his birth house, the Erfurt monastery, the Wittenberg church doors, the Diet of Worms, the Wartburg, his Wittenberg home and the house where he died. The Worms pin is approximate, and the Castle Church doors story is tradition.
Peaky Blinders mostly filmed its 1919 Birmingham on Liverpool's Powis Street, the Worth Valley Railway and Bradford's Little Germany. Tommy Shelby's gang rules Small Heath.
The route follows the story from Small Heath, through the Liverpool street that played Watery Lane, a Yorkshire railway, Aunt Polly's village and the Black Country, to Bradford's warehouses, Tommy's country house and the beach where series 4 ends. Most pins mark stand-ins, labelled as such.
Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is a Stockholm novel before it is a thriller: journalist Mikael Blomkvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander live, drink and work on Södermalm, the island district where much of the action takes place.
This route walks the real addresses behind the books, from Blomkvist's home on Bellmansgatan to Lisbeth's penthouse on Fiskargatan, and ends at the City Museum that runs the official tour. Some addresses are private homes, so most are seen from the street.
Attack on Titan is set behind three great walls, but its author comes from a real mountain town in Ōita, Japan. Hajime Isayama grew up in Ōyama, now part of Hita, and used the landscape around it as the model for his world.
The route follows the town from his birthplace to the 2014 event that made him Tourism Ambassador, and then to the statues of Eren, Mikasa, Armin and Levi that Hita set up in 2020 and 2021. The sources do not tie the series to any single real wall, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
In September 1786 Goethe slipped away from Carlsbad at 3 in the morning, telling none of his friends, and headed for Italy. He was arrested for drawing a castle, met the ancient world at Verona, and shared a house in Rome with a painter.
The route follows his diary from Carlsbad over the Brenner and the Italian lakeshore to Verona, Venice and Rome, then to Vesuvius and Sicily. Some stops are towns or mountains rather than single buildings; the pin accuracy says which.
Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas, 1799–1804: Cumaná in Venezuela, the electric eels of Calabozo, Chimborazo in Ecuador, Callao in Peru, the silver mine at Guanajuato and Jefferson's White House. He and Aimé Bonpland spent five years measuring, collecting and climbing.
This route follows eight stops from the landing at Cumaná to Washington in 1804. Several pins are approximate because the sources name a region or river rather than one spot.
Qin Shi Huang's China: his capital Xianyang, Mount Tai, where he proclaimed the empire's unity, the Lingqu Canal near Guilin, and his tomb at Mount Li with the Terracotta Army. He unified the warring states in 221 BC; some of what is told about him is legend.
This route visits seven places tied to him, from Xianyang to the Terracotta Army. Stops marked as legend or speculative (the elixir quest on Zhifu Island, the lost course of the Qin wall) are kept apart from sites that archaeology has confirmed.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon moves from the Karamay Ghost City in Xinjiang to Hongcun and Nanping in Anhui and the Anji bamboo forest, with Mount Cangyan playing Wudang. Ang Lee's wuxia romance follows a retired swordsman, a runaway governor's daughter and a stolen sword.
This route follows the story through the real locations behind it: a desert ghost city, two Anhui villages, the Anji bamboo forest, and Cangyan Mountain, which plays the fictional Wudang. The real Mount Wudang sits in the story, but the film was not shot there.
The French Way is the most popular route of the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, It starts at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, crosses the Pyrenees, and from Roncesvalles on the Spanish side still runs about 780 kilometres west to Galicia. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
This route follows it through seven landmarks: a mountain gate, a village of legend, a pilgrims' bridge, a great cathedral, a knights' tournament, a Galician hilltop and the tomb of St James.
Pixar's Coco follows the boy Miguel from his shoemaking family's town of Santa Cecilia into the Land of the Dead on the Day of the Dead. Neither world exists on a map, but the filmmakers drew on real Mexican villages, families and festivals, and Mexican guides have since linked more places to it.
This route follows five of those places in the order the story needs them. Almost every link is an inspiration, not a filming location, and the pins say so.
Team Ninja's open-world samurai game drops a masterless Blade Twin into the last years of the shogunate. Between 1858 and 1868 the story runs from Yokohama's foreign quarter through the killing of a Chief Minister to Kyoto's Shinsengumi and a plot to burn Edo.
This route follows the game's main story through seven places, from the port to the capital, pairing each scene with the real site that history ties to it. Where the game names only a district, the pin marks the nearest well-known landmark.
