City of Adventure

CCC City, the City of Opportunities

"Follow me to a place
where incredible feats
are routine every hour or so.
Where enchantment runs rampant,
just wild through the streets.
Open sesame, here we go!"

— Theme to Aladdin: The Series, about Agrabah.

No need for Adventure Towns; all the excitement, glamour, outlandishness, and romance you could ever hope for just happens to be right in your own city. Unlike Tokyo and New York, this city is usually fictional.

The place to go to get easy Hero Insurance, judging by the massive collateral damage they can sustain.

Taken to the logical extreme, you get Building of Adventure or Academy of Adventure.

There may be a Magnetic Plot Device hidden somewhere around here. Try to find one. Alternatively, the reason for extraordinary happenings is the Big Bad trying to Take Over the City.

See also Geographic Flexibility, New Neighbours as the Plot Demands, Superhero Capital of the World and Aliens in Cardiff. Contrast Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here. Best served with a heaping of Land of One City or Hub City. May sometimes be accompanied by Where the Hell Is Springfield?.

The City is bound to be this.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• Parodied / Lampshaded in an ad for Degree Deodorant.

Anime and Manga

• Aokana: Four Rhythm Across the Blue spans four islands of flying citizens, set in an island paradise.
• The importance of Karakura Town, a fictional district of Tokyo, to various spiritual entities in the anime Bleach is explained by an area of "high spiritual density" (a phenomenon which occurs more or less randomly across the world) coinciding with an area of high population. A notably high population of former Shinigami and other spiritually-attuned beings doesn't hurt, either.

• Academy City in A Certain Magical Index. The city is famous for grooming powerful power users, but it also has a dark side. The "questionable" research that's done at the city leads to many story arcs in the anime, and is enough to for a complete spin-off: A Certain Scientific Railgun. They're under international law, which apparently explains why this is considered "legal" there. The city is also far ahead of the outside world in terms of technology, and they have to use this to their advantage in order to make sure more unruly Espers (and powerful) don't go on a rampage. This may also fall under Academy of Adventure as Academy City is made up of dozens of different schools.
• Ikebukuro in Durarara!!. Something is always happening, whether it's a gang war, Slashers, or vending machines flying through the air.
• Fukuoka City in Excel♡Saga, thanks to the machinations of two silly warring entities.
• The main setting of Fantastic Detective Labyrinth is Kyuto, the Urban Ruins of former Tokyo that was abandoned after an earthquake thirty years ago. Since then, the place is home to numerous “phantom cases” with bizarre circumstances not easily explained by simple means. The young detective Mayuki tends to assist the police and his friends in solving these cases as a hobby.
• FLCL takes place in Mabase, a town with a colossal building shaped like a clothing-iron that lets out an enormous amount of steam every now and again. The main character (Naota) is 12-years-old yet has a "girlfriend"/Stalker with a Crush who is in high school, and just about every adult he comes in contact with in the city are presented as childlike and looney. Despite this, he views his life as "boring". If this isn't odd enough, between the beginning and the end of the series, he meets an alien, is targeted by a secret organization, and grows a portal in his own head that creates lumps that eventually turn into giant mecha/plant/anything aliens that destroy most things in their path. Naota himself temporarily turns into a god in the series climax, before letting out a super-powerful being that could destroy the planet if it wanted to, but leaves for some reason. Despite everything that happened, he still refers to his life as "absolutely ordinary", said just before a robot with a tv-like head hangs his family laundry.
  "Nothing ever happens here, it's all absolutely ordinary."
  • It's also eventually revealed that the giant iron is a device to be used by the series' villains (the ones responsible for all the killer robots running amok and imprisoning the aforementioned super-powerful being) to iron out all human thought on Earth.
• Morioh in Part 4 of Jojos Bizarre Adventure, which comes with a large concentration of resident stand users (though part of that is because of Keicho creating new stand users with the Stand Arrow.) The heroes' actions even end up adding new landmarks and urban legends to the town.
• Kamakura, a small beachside town some 50 km away from Tokyo, forms the setting for a few series:

• The main characters from Uta∽Kata spend a lot of time at its beaches, only leaving the town for one Class Trip to Hakone;
• The town's shrines, temples and local railway form the perfect backdrop for the drama in Sweet Blue Flowers;
• Asumi from Twin Spica grows up at Kamakura's Yuigahama Beach, after surviving the space rocket crash there in which her mother got killed.

• Kiki's Delivery Service takes place in a really beautiful port city, which provides an appropriate amount of adventure for pre-teens. It's a case of pleasant dieselpunk.
• The Secret of Twilight Gemini portrays Morocco as a city of mystery and intrigue — complete with beautiful women, shady characters, and all the thrills and chases of an Indy flick.
• Uminari City in the first two seasons of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. This trait was passed to Mid-Childa when the heroes officially joined The Federation, but then again, it is the Capital World of The Multiverse.
• The beach town in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, although it's because the protagonists live there that things keep happening.
• Like most things in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, deconstructed with Mitakihara, the elaborate, beautiful, somewhat-futuristic city full of places where witches roost and are hunted by magical girls. Mitakihara is full of witches because witches are fallen magical girls, and wherever Kyubey goes, there'll be more of both in time.
• Death City, Nevada, of Soul Eater is not only the place where the Shibusen (or DWMA, if you're watching the dub) is located, it also holds the significance of being the place where Asura was trapped and, as such, is a commonly targeted place by whoever wants to set him free (which Medusa eventually manages to do, indirectly). And while the students and their weapon partners have to travel around the world for their field assignments, holding the fort is also of utmost importance.

Audio Plays

• Biggeveen, the setting from the Dutch audio play series Ome Henk (Uncle Henk) seems to be one. It is the location of multiple UFO landings. Meanwhile, the three little pigs race around in a stolen sports car, robbing and shooting at everyone they can find, while a slime monster from the sewers tries to run a mobile fast food joint. And one of the accountants of the biggest company in town is actually a wizard. To top it off: the Dutch Sesame Street is located in said town, while the forest the Smurfs live in lies beside it.

Comic Books

• It is extremely common in solo Super Hero series for the hero to have a specific city that they are known to patrol as "their territory":
  • Gotham City (Batman)
  • Metropolis (Superman)
    • Metropolis is considered to be the single most adventure-riddled city in the DCU, even compared to all the other cities of adventure.
  • Central City/Keystone City (The Flash)
  • Opal City (Starman)
  • Fawcett City/Fairfield (Captain Marvel)
  • Ivy Town (The Atom)
  • Blüdhaven (Nightwing)
  • Coast City (Hal Jordan's Green Lantern)
  • Gateway City (Mr. Terrific / The Spectre / Wonder Woman for a time)
  • Boston (Wonder Woman)
    • ...or Washington DC at other times.
  • Hub City (The Question)
  • Midway City/St. Roch (Hawkman / Doom Patrol)
  • Sub Diego (Aquaman / Aquagirl)
  • Star City/Seattle (Green Arrow)
  • The Teen Titans' Titans Tower is generally accepted to be in the San Francisco Bay.
    • Earlier on, it was on an island in New York's East River.
  • Middleton/Denver (Martian Manhunter)
  • Park City/Seattle (Black Canary)
  • El Paso (Jaime Reyes's Blue Beetle)
  • Chicago (Ted Kord's Blue Beetle)
  • Smallville (a *Town* of Adventure) (pre-Crisis Superboy)
  • New York City (Iron Man / Fantastic Four / The Avengers / Spider-Man... specifically the fictional Empire State University)
    • Salem Center, Westchester County, just north of NYC (Home of the X-Men's Mansion). They have since relocated to San Francisco and now reside in Utopia, a rock floating on the ocean just off the US Pacific Coast.
    • Hell's Kitchen, NYC (Daredevil)
    • Damn, let's just put "New York" (in a more general/historical sense) for 9 out of 10 Marvel characters and leave it at that, okay?
  • Dakota (the city, not the state) — Static, Icon, Hardware, Blood Syndicate and other Dakotaverse characters.
  • Citrusville, FL (Man-Thing)
  • Parodied in The Tick with "The City".
  • Used straight in Runaways with Los Angeles, with a justification: after the kids take out the Pride, there's a power vacuum and supervillains try to make their niche. But also deconstructed somewhat with regards to New York City, the City of Adventure for the rest of the Marvel Universe - superpowers are seen as something that mostly happens far away from our heroes; then they visit NYC and are awed at seeing superheroes in the streets, and one character comments "here, we're not so special".
• Kurt Busiek's Astro City; much of the plot hinges on subverting and lampshade hanging this very trope.
• Cynosure from Grim Jack. Perhaps justified since it was built at the center of the multiverse.
• Judge Dredd's Mega-City-One from the British comic 2000AD. Which makes sense since it takes up the entire East Coast.
• Snap City in Madman.
• Madripoor in the Marvel Universe.
• Chicago from Savage Dragon. Also, later in the series, there's God City.
• Bugtown, in Matt Howarth's various comics, including Those Annoying Post Bros and Savage Henry. Notable for being infinite in size, and having such screwed-up laws of physics that entropy works in reverse — dead people inevitably come back to life after some time.
• New York City in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise.
• Neopolis, the Science Hero ghetto that the police of Top 10 patrol.
• The City in Transmetropolitan, home to Spider Jerusalem and every vice there is.

Fan Works

• Boomfield a fictional city from the Joe the Great Franchise has lots of crime, which is usually stopped by Joe on a regular basis.
• Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton: Upon arriving on Tokyo-3, Asuka finds and fights everyday robbers, thugs, terrorists, super-powered villains, aliens, robots, time-travellers, EldritchAbominations... And that is not counting the ancient evil conspiracy to end mankind her boss is concocting.
• RWBY Abridged takes a deconstructive approach to this trope, with Ruby pointing out how such a city could only really exist given the state of affairs is because the city's leaders are horribly incompetent. To whit, the lead bad guy got away on a VTOL aircraft without any interference from law enforcement in the middle of the city, after trying to rob a place that sells weapon's grade materials in a manner not unlike a candy store, and whose sole guardian is a doddering old man. Without competent vigilantes like Ruby, the place would be swept away in a tide of crime.
• Principal Celestia Hunts the Undead: Canterlot is on a Ley Line, attracting monsters and magic of all kinds. Naturally, monster-hunters have a lot to work with.
• The city of Balmora becomes one of these in Daria in Morrowind. Helps that it's where most of the stories take place.
• Tarkin's Fist: Culter City later renamed Amidala City serves as the capital of the New Empire on Mars and is the site of car chases, gambling, industrial plots, riots, gang warfare, political protests, and more court intrigue than you can shake your fist at.

Films — Animation

• During the "Golden Age" introduction of The Incredibles, Municiberg fits the role well. In the course of just a few hours as Mr. Incredible is on his way to his wedding we see or hear about: a high speed pursuit with gunfire through the city's streets, a tour bus robbery, a purse snatcher, a helicopter flying through the city with guns blazing, an attempted suicide by jumping off a building, a bank robbery by a supervillain and a destroyed train track with a last minute save by Mr. Incredible.

Films — Live-Action

• Dinosaur City, of appropriately titled Adventures in Dinosaur City.
• Casablanca qualifies as a Trope Codifier.

Literature

• Thousands of British juvenile adventure novels were published by the pulp presses, and an overwhelming number — somewhere in the hundreds — were set in Calgary. It may be because the writers wanted to show exciting things like cowboys and Indians, ranches, mountain climbers, and hunting (popular subjects of American juvenile literature) but in an Empire setting, and Calgary fit the bill. Many of these books were also translated into German.
• Hogboro in several stories by Daniel Pinkwater. In Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, Alan and Leonard remark on their luck finding that one of the dozen places in the world listed as suitable for interplanar contact is right in Hogboro (though tracking down the exact spot proves troublesome). The next closest spot on the list is in Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories, Canada.
• Angie's First Case: Angie and Jess encounter three different criminal conspiracies (although some of them are associates with each other) and one petty thief in their Florida hometown over just a few days.
• Trantor in several Isaac Asimov stories, which is in fact a city covering the entire surface of a planet. (Timothy Zahn would later adapt this idea to the planet Coruscant in the Star Wars Expanded Universe; it would later appear in the prequels.) A 47th century New York City is used to the same effect in his novel The Caves of Steel. Such a world city is known as an Ecumenopolis.
• The mythical "Bear Country" where the main characters live in The Berenstain Bears series of picture books by Jan and Stan Berenstain is ostensibly an isolated rural community but features many familiar trappings of urban and suburban life (such as a shopping mall) as well as more nostalgic and fanciful settings, like a dank swamp home to roving teenage hooligans and a woman suspected of being a witch. And Bear Country never gets boring for Brother and Sister (although, to be sure, when you're a child and are just seeing many things for the first time, it's awfully hard to get bored).
• The titular city "at the center of time" in Edward Bryant's Cinnabar.
• Cooley in "Clockpunk and the Vitalizer". It's implied other shenanigans have occurred here despite the first entry being a standalone short story.
• Deepdene in the Dark Touch novels. The portal to hell in one house doesn't help. Either deamons are coming through it or get drawn to it.
• In the web-novel Domina the titular city is like this. Gangs of bio-augmented crazies rule the streets, hunting giant rats is a common way to make money, and it's about to be hit by a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Chicago in The Dresden Files. Justified being due to a confluence of magical leylines in the area and the fact that Chicago is a travel hub in the real world so that draws at least some members of the magical community through there as well. In addition, by later books, it's clear that a lot of the action is going on in Chicago because that's where Harry himself happens to live.
  • In addition, averted in the seventh book when it becomes apparent that there are some really important things going on elsewhere that Harry and the reader don't find out about until later.
• Faction Paradox:
  • The City of the Saved, a galaxy-sized, sentient ecumenopolis situated at the edge of time itself, before the point of collapse of the current Universe and the beginning of the next. Every human to ever live, every hybrid in between, and most fictional characters ever to exist. The only prerequisite for citizenship in the City of the Saved is a certain part of human DNA.
  • The Eleven-Day Empire. Having your entire history rewritten in a whim counts as an adventure, right?
• Popular in fantasy settings. Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar from his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories is probably the archetype, but its parody Ankh-Morpork from the Discworld novels is now much better known.
  • One of Leiber's short stories specifically links Lankhmar with its historical inspiration, Alexandria.
• Ferals Series: Blackstone. Feral lineage runs deep there because the land it's built on was once a community for their kind.
• The fictional English town of Blackbury in Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell Trilogy. It's also the location of The Store in the Nomes Trilogy. Blackbury originally appeared in some of Terry's short stories for the kids' page of the Bucks Free Press.
• St Mary Mead, where Agatha Christie's little old lady/amateur detective Miss Marple lives. Given her advanced age, the events described in the books starring her must take place over the space of a few years, so it seems that mysterious murders occur in her village with alarming frequency.
• River Heights and Bayport in the Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys books. Fridge Logic makes their high crime rates plausible; they were created in the '20s and were suburbs of Chicago and New York, respectively, so it could be assumed that there's a large influence from the mafia.
• Nightside, the secret city within London.
• San Miguel is where almost all of the action in The Pantheon Saga takes place. It's technically the real California city of San Luis Obispo, but is very different in size and population due to the story being set in an Alternate History, as a 1987 earthquake resulted in the city being renamed and rebuilt as a major metropolis.
• This is kind of the main idea behind the Quentaris books and the one thing they have in common. (They're not even all by the same author.)
• Calyx, Reynard's hometown in The Reynard Cycle, is clearly one, even though most of Reynard's adventures there took place prior to the novels. Maybe in the prequels?
• The London depicted in Rivers of London fulfills this role whether it wants to or not.
• Caribol in Skate the Thief is a port city full of wizards, witches, nobles, sailors, and thieves where the titular Street Urchin makes her way through various burglaries and wild escapes.
• MK Gibson's Technomancer has New Golgotha, a center of the demonic empire. It is a Cyberpunk Dystopia with the poor living on the bottom and the city's demonic masters living at the top of skyscrapers.
• The Sprawl, in William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy. Officially known as Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA), it is essentially one huge megapolis covering most of the east coast of the USA.
• The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign is set in Toydream 35, a combination city/theme park that was bought out by the equivalent of Walt Disney. Everything in it is made to attract tourists, so the streets are immaculate, mascot costumes are so common that actual supernatural beings go unnoticed, and there's a plethora of secret maintenance tunnels. Of course, it also has its own Chinatown, dockyard, and Venice-esque canal bridges, all of which have been fought in at some point.
• Chicago in Wearing the Cape and its sequels: Chicago is the post-Event Metropolis of the Wearing the Cape setting, with good reason; Atlas and the Sentinels created the template for superheroes and superhero teams, and with the Sentinels and the Guardians teams, the city has more superheroes per capita than any other city. Chicago is also the center of the Villain-Rap culture, which means the place is crawling with street-villains and fashion-villains. The Sentinels' reputation is also creating a problem, in that supervillain-terrorists and thrill-villains who want to make their reputations may target them and the city they protect (it has been noted that Chicago was the only freshwater port to get a Godzilla attack).
• Worm's Brockton Bay, hometown of our Villain Protagonists the Undersiders.

Live-Action TV

• In 24, terrorists always make a point of attacking Los Angeles, despite the fact that it is the one city in America that has the indestructible Jack Bauer in it.
  • In the seventh season, they finally wise up and attack Washington, D.C. But their timing really sucks...
    • And again in the eighth season, when they attack New York on the day Jack plans to leave for L.A.
• Babylon 5 justifies this trope by having the station be a crossroads for many different space-faring races.
• In Big Wolf on Campus, Pleasantville is beset by an astonishing number of bizarre supernatural occurrences; a few of them are connected to the heroes, but mainly it's just a place where weird things happen.
• Both Star City and Central City in the Arrowverse count. By the end of Season 4 of Arrow, Star City has been the target of four terrorist attacks in as many years, while on The Flash (2014) Central City has remained plagued by a variety of metahumans since Star Labs' Particle Accelerator exploded.
  • Deconstructed in Arrow in Season 4. Team Arrow managed to save Star City from those attacks, but the attacks still had consequences; citizens are leaving the city in droves, so its economy is failing, and there's no longer a mayor because the last two were assassinated, and nobody else is willing to risk their lives.
• The town of Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, being set upon a "Hellmouth", is very much a town of this sort. The Hellmouth is described as a portal that leaks mystical energy, both drawing demons towards it and affecting things in supernatural ways: e.g., a girl becomes invisible because she feels invisible, and later we see various kinds of Mad Science that might not work elsewhere. Thus, there is an automatic answer for so many supernatural things all occurring in this one town. The town transformed at need so that in one episode it was small enough to be taken over by a dozen bikers and in others it became a major University town with international sea and air hubs. At the end of Season 3, Xander jokes about this, asking "Why do people still move here?" Turns out people usually stay the hell away from Hellmouths, but the Mayor was actually a hundred-year-old wizard who created Sunnydale as a smorgasbord for demons. After the Scoobies blow him up, the town gradually shrinks, ultimately depopulating completely by the final episode in which it falls into a sinkhole.
  • Los Angeles from Angel is a more conventional example. Demons obviously like living in the same town as the Occult Law Firm — and Doyle or Cordelia's visions served to explain why Angel usually dealt with them.
• In Burn Notice Miami, Florida seems to have an awful lot of violent criminals ^note which is not entirely unrealistic, con men, and, well, spies. And commandos. And drug dealers. And high-end top-secret government contractors.
  • And in Dexter an alarmingly high number of active serial killers.
• CSI's Las Vegas
  • And obviously CSI: NY's New York and CSI: Miami's Miami.
  • Played with in one episode when a Vegas-based rapper claimed it was "the new New York." A certain New York rapper took offense, and a "beef" started.
• Despite all the Adventure Towns the Doctor often visits, aliens in Doctor Who like to invade 20th and 21st century Earth from the Home Counties, usually London. After two consecutive Doctor Who Christmas Specials bring Alien Invaders to London, the residents are smart and make sure to leave the city at Christmas time.
• Eerie, Indiana: The titular town is said to attract all kinds of weirdness. A few examples are a family who sleep inside tupperware boxes to stop themselves from aging, a haunted house and Elvis living in the main character's neighborhood.
• Forever Knight's Toronto, with a serial killer for every day of the year.
  • Same with Blood Ties (2007), with monsters taking place of serial killers.
• "Seacouver" in Highlander: The Series, especially when Duncan is there. When he's in Paris, guess where trouble happens.
• Lampshaded in the In the Heat of the Night TV series, set in the fictional Mississippi town of Sparta. "I should join the Marines...I'd see less dead bodies."
• Averted in Lie to Me, as Washington, D.C. is just too small.
• Monk's San Francisco
  • And Charmed's San Francisco, though sometimes for no reason whatsoever.
• All of Monster Warriors takes place in Capital City (although exactly where it is the capital of is never established) and its immediate surrounds, with the nearby North Woods being an especially popular spot for monsters.
• Cabot Cove in Murder, She Wrote. They do get Jessica out and about regularly, but there are still an awful lot of murders in her small hometown — it's a wonder there's anyone left. After Sheriff Tupper left, his replacement in Cabot Cove (an ex-New Yorker) lampshaded this.
• NBC's Powerless (2017), set in the DC Comics Universe, unsurprisingly features this — though in this case, it's not so much a side effect of being a superhero series, as it is half the point of the show: the premise being that the non-superpowered civilians in a superhero world living in major cities have to deal with a lot of added inconvenience and potential hazards due to the constant superhero vs supervillain battles going on around them. In this case, the series even goes so far as to pointedly not use a DCU-famous city that gets the "A List" heroes, like Metropolis or Gotham, but a new one called "Charm City" — which is described by the show's staff out-of-universe as "the Scranton, PA of the DCU". The citizens are so blase about the superpowered battles in their City of Adventure that in the first episode, nobody but out-of-towner Emily finds the battle between Silver Fox and a supervillain to be of any interest whatsoever (instead merely being annoyed at the delay caused by their train derailing) and in the opening of episode two, a street vendor's immediate response to having a flying supervillain chuck a postal box onto his table, is to pause for a Beat, and then tell Emily: "We're out of...everything." Yeah, it's that kind of series.
• Power Rangers usually follows this trope, with the occasional side trip. To date: Angel Grove, Terra Venture, Mariner Bay, Silver Hills, Turtle Cove, Blue Bay Harbor, Reefside, Newtech City, Briarwood, Ocean Bluff, Corinth, Panorama City, Harwood County (which is not actually a county), Amber Beach, Summer Cove and Coral Harbor.
  • Subverted in Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, where the characters are based in San Angeles, but travel all over the world.
  • Justified in Power Rangers Lost Galaxy and Power Rangers RPM, as Terra Venture and Corinth are the only cities in at least a several-thousand-mile radius - Terra Venture is a traveling space colony and there's nothing outside the city but the empty expanse of space; while Corinth is the only city left on earth, the rest of the planet being a bombed-out wasteland.
  • Also justified in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue; the demons limit their attacks to Mariner Bay because the city was built on the site of their old temple and they want it back.
• Wherever Pushing Daisies takes place seems to attract really, really odd murders.
• Ryukendo's city of Akebono is a hot spot for the Power Spot located conveniently beneath the city.
• The city of Cascade in The Sentinel. Ebola virus threats? Uranium smuggling? Yakuza gang wars? Paramilitary terrorists taking whole buildings hostage? Just another day in Cascade.
• The town of Smallville in Smallville. The explanation for the large number of unusual occurrences is the presence of a significant amount of Kryptonite in the area, which in this case causes humans in its presence to gain powers varying from individual to individual.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: the titular Deep Space Nine space station near the independent planet of Bajor acts as this especially as the nearby wormhole provides a Plot Magnet to attract others to a space station.
• Super Sentai and Kamen Rider work on the same principle, but the events of both series apparently happen in the exact same (unnamed) city every single year. An avid fan will quickly be able to spot reused locations and come to pity the people who live there. This city could as well be Tokyo, given the appearances of the Tokyo Dome (which actually sponsors some of the tokusatsu series by Toei) in some of them, among a few other hints.
  • Except for the one time where it was specifically named Futo which was just Tokyo with a bunch of windmills added everywhere. The TV Asahi building (the channel that airs the shows) was reappropriated as the TV Futo building. And for the other time where it was named Zawame City.
  • Averted in at least two Sentai series. Ressha Sentai ToQger traveled all over the country and had towns-of-the-week where they'd make a stop to kick out the monster that was plaguing it — it even set up a crossover simply by saying "this week, we're stopping at (the aforementioned) Zawame". Uchu Sentai Kyuranger was a Space Opera series that sent them throughout the galaxy (though they did spend extended stretches of the show on Earth).
• In Torchwood, Cardiff is located on an inter-dimensional rift, which results in plenty of weird things ending up there.
• Bon Temps in True Blood is a little town in Louisiana that just happens to attract all manner of supernatural creatures for no apparent reason, from recently outed vampires up to an ifrit. Gets a major Lampshade Hanging in Season 4 when Tara pulls a Screw This, I'm Outta Here after she gets fed up with the weirdness.
• The Vampire Diaries is set in Mystic Falls, a small town in Virginia. The town had a "vampire problem" around the time of its founding, one of the founding families carries the hereditary werewolf curse, and there has always been plenty of witches around. It also turns out that in pre-colonial times, the same stretch of land was home to Europeans who could somehow sail there and those people happen to include the Mikaelsen family, also known as the "Original" vampires. AND somebody tried to open a gateway to hell there shortly before the first Founders' Ball, and many witches had to sacrifice themselves to keep the hellfire contained. Of course, a bunch of teenagers and their history teacher have to deal with the consequences of all of that crap in present day. It is amazing how little effect the constant stream of deaths has on the lives of the residents.
  • The show's Spin-Off The Originals uses New Orleans in a similar way.

Music

• The works of Paul Shapera focusing on the city-state of New Albion, which has seen voodoo cults, civil war, digital predators feeding on VR gamers, everything in between, and many things beyond.

Pinball

• Secret Service is set entirely in Washington D.C., which is apparently just filled with secret agents, Soviet spies, and shootouts between the two.

Radio

• Dead Ringers: Spoofed when one sketch has the characters of Stranger Things note that since their town has weird portals opening up all the time, it'd actually be more unusual if this didn't happen.

Roleplays

• City of Lost Characters is set in an extradimensional city which, similarly to the Massive Multi-Fandom RPG setting above, is changed to fit a new theme every day, and contains a large crowd of exotic, eccentric and dangerous individuals from various universes.
• Seasons 1 and 2 of The Massive Multi-Fandom RPG are set in a city which keeps shifting its layout, and the presence of large crowds of disparate individuals from all over the multiverse guarantees adventure, in addition to the daily "curses" which affect the inhabitants in various ways.

Tabletop Games

• Arkham in Arkham Horror. Home to a number of cults, the infamous Miskatonic University, and far too many eldritch secrets. Most of the expansions add to the madness and make Arkham home to things like a cursed museum exhibit or the only attempted performance of a Brown Note play. A few involve mysteries outside of Arkham and add Adventure Towns to the game.
• In the Champions Universe, Millennium City gets far more superhuman action than you would expect for Detroit Redux. Partly justified due to its The City Of The Future meme.
• Freedom City and Emerald City in the Mutants & Masterminds "World of Freedom" setting. Freedom is basically the superhero capital of the world; Metropolis if it had the same density of supers as Marvel New York. Emerald is a city where supers are new, following a Mass Empowering Event but which also harbours much older secrets.
• Every setting for the Dungeons & Dragons game has at least one of these.
  • The Free City of Greyhawk in Greyhawk is one of the very first.
  • Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate from the Forgotten Realms. Waterdeep was significant enough to get its own sourcebook.
    • Neverwinter too, in 2011. Gloomwrought, Hestavar, and the City of Brass all have extensive write-ups as well.
  • Eberron's got two! Sharn, the City of Towers, and Stormreach, outpost of Xen'drik. Sharn is the main one, though.
  • Sigil of Planescape fame, being the foremost crossroads of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse.
    • Planescape also has the "gate towns," which built up around portals between the True Neutral plane of the Outlands and the other Outer Planes. Each was meant to allow lower-level players to get a taste of life in the other planes without facing all the risks of actually going to many of them.
  • TSR did an entire box set on the city of Huzuz for the Al-Qadim setting.
  • 3rd Edition's Epic Level Handbook introduced Union, a planar city in the vein of Sigil, but managed by the mercane and meant to cater to level 21-plus gameplay (when the game had a previous soft cap of level 20). Even the generic City Guards start at level 14. However, the city didn't have much appeal compared to mainstays like Sigil, partially because of the limited space to cover it in the book and partially because epic-level play didn't catch on too well.

• Ravnica, of the Magic: The Gathering multi-verse, is not quite a straight example, as it's a city that covers its entire world.
  • It now fits better with the presence of the headquarters of the Infinite Consortium, essentially a multi-planar organization, and several other planeswalkers living there incognito.
• The New World of Darkness tends towards one signature city per game line — New Orleans for Vampire, Denver for Werewolf, Boston for Mage, Detroit for Promethean, Miami for Changeling, Philadelphia for Hunter, and New York City for Geist. There's also an independent book for Chicago that covers plot hooks for mortals, as well as laying out the politics of the local "big three" (vampires, werewolves, and mages).
  • Fan game Genius: The Transgression does the same thing, with Seattle as its city of choice.
    • By chance, Demon chose Seattle as its signature city as well.
  • Mummy has two, one in the USA and one international - Washington, D.C. and Rio de Janeiro.
  • Both fan games Princess: The Hopeful and Dragon: The Embers chose San Francisco as their signature cities.
  • For the second editions of the game lines, the approach is to present a number of Cities of Adventure in the corebooks, with all of them featuring Tokyo as that particular splat sees it. Beast also goes this route.
  • Fan-game Siren: The Drowning uses Honolulu.
• The Old World of Darkness produced several guides to real-world cities, with details of the nasties there.
• One sample scale for map-drawing on On Mighty Thews, presumably because of places like Lankhmar.
• The city of The Edge in the island nation of Al-Amarja is the setting for all the weirdness in Over the Edge.
• The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game has the city of Absalom.
• Monte Cook's Ptolus, a setting revolving entirely around the titular city (and, incidentally, one of the fattest roleplaying books ever published, at 672 pages).
  • The city is built around Sealed Evil in a Can and on top of multiple layers of Sealed Evil in a Can, and (mostly unrelatedly) is home to several men who are, or can at least get away with claiming to be, emperor. The evil is leaking, the cans have become something of a tourist industry, and the political tensions are on the rise. Yes, there are some explanations.
• Lots in Rocket Age. The best example is the Republic of Emancipation on Mars, which is a fully fleshed out revolutionary state and is the setting for the Mars sourcebook's adventure. Many other adventures either connect to Emancipation, or feature characters coming from there, as it is a city in flux.
• Sentinels Of The Multiverse: As befitting a superhero setting, the environment decks Megalopolis and Rook City portray expy locations of Metropolis and Gotham City respectively, each with their own hazards and pitfalls for everyone. Megalopolis is a straightforward bright city that at the worst suffers the occasional alien invasion while Rook City is a gloomy locale stagnating under mob rule, corrupt police officers, and plague rats.
• Shadowrun's Seattle Metroplex.
• Warhammer has Mordheim, a warband setting that takes place in the titular City of Adventure and puts its own unique perspective on it. The city was levelled by a meteorite of Warpstone, a substance that has tremendous value for magical experiments and is a vital ingredient in the Philosopher's Stone- that is, an alchemical concoction that can change "base" metals into pure gold. So, naturally, the city is swarming with violent, opportunistic mercenaries and treasure hunters. Of course, Warpstone is also Toxic Phlebotinum, or perhaps Psycho Serum would be a better descriptor, as it causes physical, mental, and spiritual corruption. So, naturally, the city is also teeming with all manner of horrific monsters...
• Similar to the Warhammer example above, Warhammer 40,000 has Necromunda, its equivalent of Mordheim. Taking place on the Hive World of the same name, it's justified in that, like all Hive Worlds, the actual planet has been polluted so terribly by eons of industrial production that humans now live in tremendous ant-hive like buildings that serve as the new equivalent of continents.

Video Games

• In Academagia, Mineta◊ is one of the largest and most important cities in Elumia; as well as the home to "The Academy of Magic of Mineta", more commonly called "Academagia". The game includes many potential events and adventures set in and around Mineta.
• Assassin's Creed features several games where the cities are essentially the main character. Special mentions to Florence and Venice (Assassin's Creed II), Rome (Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood), Constantinople (Assassin's Creed: Revelations) and of course, Paris (Assassin's Creed: Unity).
• Baldur's Gate: The city of Baldur's Gate itself, naturally, as in the Forgotten Realms.
• Baldur's Gate II: The First Town of Athkatla, which is also one of the most active areas for quests and encounters.
  • You may be attacked by low-level muggers every once in a while.
  • Any mages caught casting any form of magic are imprisoned and horrifically tortured for the rest of their lives. Or simply murdered, as in the case with the player character (unless you manage to just keep on killing Cowled Wizards until they give up).
• Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal: Saradush, although it's a lot smaller than Baldur's Gate or Athkatla.
• Baldur's Gate III: The game's third act takes place in the sprawling titular city.
• The city of Yharnam of Bloodborne is very much like Victorian London — if Victorian London was designed by M.C. Escher, plagued with an illness that transforms people into murderous beasts, and filled with Lovecraftian horrors that reveal themselves to you as soon as you gain Insight. Still, it is an attractive place for outsiders, as its art of Blood Ministration can provide a cure to any disease known to man.
• BlazBlue has the 13th Hierarchical City of Kagutsuchi, the main setting of the first game. Every stage from it was set within the city's confines, but even as the story moved on to other locales like Ibukido, Kagutsuchi has remained a large part of the series' mythos.
• Blue Archive takes place in Kivotos, a massive, Tokyo-inspired city built entirely around and servicing several schools and their students; the "adventure" is handled by the armies of students and delinquent gangs packing heat. Granted, the burgeoning anarchy of the city is actually a recent development, which is what forced the General Student Council to create the player's taskforce in order to return order to the city.
• Befitting that it borrows a lot from Grand Theft Auto (as listed directly above), Crackdown takes place in 'Pacific City', and seems to be either inspired by or borrows the idea of a multi-island approach for geography.
• Cyberpunk 2077 has Night City, California, which was rated the worst city in America with its sky-high rates of violence and poverty. In spite of its reputation as a veritable Wretched Hive, it still attracts a lot of people into coming for the opportunities presented in the city, your Player Character included.
• The city of Kirkwall in Dragon Age II.
• Dungeons & Dragons Online in Stormreach.
• Etrian Odyssey: The majority of games are set in a City of Adventure built around a labyrinth or dungeon; Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City shakes things up by instead featuring a Port Town as your base of operations.
• The eponymous city in Fallen London, the underground capital of a failing British Empire, is home to (among other things) Humanoid Abomination Corrupt Corporate Executives with an inexplicable fondness for romance novels, ambassadorial missions from both Hell and an isolationist nation of immortals, a smuggling ring run by a thirteenth-century Mongolian princess, a body-surfing Jack the Ripper, a movement of Bomb-Throwing Anarchists who want to overthrow the gods, and hundreds if not thousands of spies.
• The Fallout series is no stranger to urban settings, but the eponymous city of Fallout: New Vegas stands out, being the closest thing to an actual honest-to-God city in the series. Being built from the largely intact remains of the Las Vegas strip and getting power from the Hoover Dam certainly doesn't hurt.
• South Town is a focal point for events in the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting series, and also gets a mention in The King of Fighters series. Appears to be quite a multicultural place, possibly justifying how so many people there master several martial arts from around the world.
• The town of Fuyuki in both Fate/stay night and Fate/hollow ataraxia
• South Town itself is "largely inspired" by Metro City, where the events of Final Fight happen.
• Final Fantasy
  • Final Fantasy VII sets its entire first act in the confines of Midgar, a sprawling Mega City rife with corporate corruption, freedom fighters, terrifying monsters, and dangerous robots.
  • Final Fantasy XIV has the Hub Cities in each of the game's regions, with later expansions adding at least one more. These include (but are not limited to): Ul'dah in Thanalan, Gridania in the Black Shroud, Limsa Lominsa in La Noscea, Revenant's Toll in Mor Dhona, Ishgard in Coerthas, Kugane in Hingashi, the Crystarium on the First, Old Sharlayan, and Radz-at-Han in Thavnair.
• The Grand Theft Auto series consistently gives us three of this kind of city since the first game: Liberty City (an expy of New York City), San Andreas (an expy of California and Nevada), and Vice City (an expy of Miami). GTA 2 also gives us "Anywhere, USA", though it's almost forgotten.
• The city of Hekseville in Gravity Rush. There's always something going on...
• Most of The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure takes place in Crossbell City, with the rest of the game taking place in Crossbell's immediate outskirts. These games pack as much into one city as other Trails games pack into a much larger country.
• Powerwash Simulator's Muckingham has UFOs, time machines, an active volcano and the remnants of Atlantis. All of which are in serious need of a deep clean, of course.
• Sigil of Planescape: Torment, where one could easily spend over half the game and to which you periodically returned even when out adventuring in other planes.
• The Prince of Persia franchise practically has this as a staple trope starting with the Sands of Time saga. Each one is notable in that it manages to find ways to make its cities abandoned and filled with enemies, specifically Azad (sand zombies), The Island of Time (sand cult), Babylon (invading army), the unnamed Ahura city (Ahriman's influence) and King Solomon's Palace (invading sand zombie army).
• Reality-On-The-Norm from the eponymous series.
• Stilwater in Saints Row happens to be a city full of opportunities and if Stilwater didn't have enough opportunities alone, the new bigger city of Steelport is gonna have a lot more than that of Stilwater.
• Shin Megami Tensei loves this trope, mainly due to its Urban Fantasy stylings. In fact, many of the games take place in Tokyo (or what's left of it anyway). Games that don't take place in a city are the exception rather than the norm.
  • Persona: All games take place in cities serve as the base for your exploits, where you meet various interesting teammates and allies, and stumble upon supernatural adventures. From 3 onwards, the cities let the protagonist engage in loads of activities like singing karaoke, working at a daycare, and practicing his home run swing at the batting cages.
    • Mikage-cho in Persona is the epicenter of a zombie apocalypse.
    • Sumaru City in Persona 2 is barely a hair away from Wretched Hive. Between the rumor curse, foreign crime syndicates, rampant police corruption, zombies and demons in both private and public buildings, an Apocalypse Cult, widely available Murder, Inc. services, Conspiracy Theorists, demon summoners, too many ancient ruins, and drug stores with brainwashing music, it's miracle the locals don't move out en-masse.
    • Tatsumi Port Island in Persona 3 is an artificial island that mainly draws the youth (since it also hosts an Academy of Adventure) and is the target of the supernatural phenomenon of the Dark Hour.
    • Inaba in Persona 4, despite being a small rural town, is full of quirky people, Urban Legends and mysteries to uncover even without taking the murders into account.
    • Tokyo in Persona 5 is as exciting as you'd expect, with to s of jobs, unique crowds, events, interesting locations and other things taking place.
• The Sonic the Hedgehog series includes a lot of urban areas and levels, including (but not limited to) Station Square in Sonic Adventure, an unnamed "Capital City" in Sonic Adventure 2, Central City in Shadow the Hedgehog, and Empire City in Sonic Unleashed.
• Urban Chaos takes place in Union City.
• Clint City in Urban Rivals most certainly qualifies. It has gangs, vampires, aliens, robots, pirates...
• Much of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt takes place in the bustling medieval city of Novigrad. Markets hum with activity, shady characters lurk in the back alleys, children play in the puddles, ladies of pleasure ply their trade in the docks, soldiers patrol the streets in the day and drunks wander them at night.
• Yakuza is set mainly in Kamurocho, a district of Tokyo based on the real-world Kabukicho district. In addition to being a hotbed of criminal activity, Kamurocho is also home to many attractions and amenities that make it a popular place for average people: bars, arcades, hostess clubs, batting cages, cat cafes, and restaurants that cater to just about any taste. Later games in the series feature even more urban settings, the most notable location aside from Kamurocho being the Osaka's Sotenbori district (itself inspired by the real-world Dotonbori district).
• Ys IX: Monstrum Nox is set in the Prison City of Balduq. As the party is prevented from leaving Balduq by a mysterious power, it serves as the primary setting of the game. The city itself is split into several vastly different districts, and has dozens of caves and secret passages, not to mention an entire Building of Adventure that is the Balduq Prison. It's also constantly under attack by weird monsters known an "Lemures", that the party is forced to fight to prevent them from entering the real world.

Web Animation

• CCC City, the 'City of Opportunities' in the popular flash video series, in which literally every day in and around the city (so large it renders maps pointless) involves countless adventures of many different levels.

Webcomics

• Cumberland, Maryland. Inhabited by McNinja, Danish ninja-hunter actors from The '80s, Timetravelling Mayors, Zombies and Badasses all over the place.
• Baskets of Guts: Ancard, though some events of the plot take place in its surroundings.
• Electric Wonderland has Nettropolis, a city evolved from the Internet and populated by digital avatars.
• El Goonish Shive events take place mostly in Moperville. With all the Humanoid Aliens, Half-Human Hybrid, shapeshifting, Functional Magic and Mad Science. When a news reporter wanted to investigate a story of "evil monkey" rampaging in a public school, her boss, Ed, shot the idea down:
  Ed: A public school in Moperville, where the local newspaper is sold in neighboring towns with all the regard of a tabloid. We've got a reputation to protect! We can only report on confirmed monsters, like Mega Hogs, or Bigfoot!
  Carol: Ed, I grew up in Moperville. Weird stuff happens here...
  • Later revealed to be a (mostly) Justified example. As it turns out, someone has been increasing the magical energy that exists in Moperville. Because of this, magical beings and whatnot found themselves (and are still finding themselves) being drawn to the town, without realizing it. And by the look of things, it's supposed to get worse soon.
• Gunnerkrigg Court's eponymous boarding school.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! has the "pleasantly innocuous hamlet" of Generictown, which has become a City of Adventure purely because Bob the Weirdness Magnet lives there. Presumably, it would quiet down again if he moved, but he shows no signs of doing so.
• Last Res0rt has its reality show in its very own space station built expressly for this purpose; it houses the show, the arena, and everything else you need for a world-class tourist resort to house and host all the spectators coming to watch.
  • And in fact, there IS a named city built into the space station, known as the City of... Wonder. Since we're talking about a city manufactured into the space station, it's not that surprising of a name.
• MegaTokyo. Among other things, Magical Girls and Ninja exist, zombies invade on a semi-frequent basis, video game companies like Sony and Sega are in league with Satan and employ psychotic mercenaries to enforce their edicts, the Tokyo police department ride around in Humongous Mecha, and Kaiju insurance is a bitch to get.
• Opplopolis starts with a mysterious man assigning Carla Tumblemas the task of going into the city of Opplopolis to uncover the meaning of the word "marvedyne". All of the ensuing action takes place there.
• In Ronin Galaxy, the characters wander around the city of New Edo, searching for mercenary work. All of the adventures so far have occurred without them leaving the same city.
• Tackleford from Scary Go Round and Bad Machinery.
• Whatever unnamed city the Sluggy Freelance crew lives in seems to have an unusually large number of vampires, talking animals, mad scientists, zombies, ghosts, FBI agents, and demonic possessions, not to mention some really weird stuff.
• The city of Cwcville in the infamous Sonichu attempts to follow this trope within the comic's pages, though the author's canonical descriptions of the laws and government in the city outside the comics have made it sound more like a fascist 1984-like Dystopia.
• Templar Arizona the comic is about this kind of city.
• The Ruhr Area from Union of Heroes consists of more than one city so "Cities of Adventure" is more to the point here.
• The town of Podunk, Oklahoma in Wilde Life is home to adventure far beyond what one would expect for a town its size. When main character Oscar moves there, he quickly finds himself with a witch for a landlady and a ghost for a roommate. His first living friend is a werewolf, and his next-door neighbor is haunted by the ghost of her daughter.
• Port Metro of Woo Hoo is a surreal blend of modern Vancouver and Seattle, with sci-fi and fantasy elements (including high technology, superheroes, and alien/non-human races) and a sprawling subterranean component.

Web Original

• Achievement City is not really a city per se,^note It is a Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition world whose "Downtown" district consists of just one stone skyscraper with no windows and only one main floor and a few small houses. but it is the home of the majority of the Achievement Hunters' Let's Play competitions.
• Mayfield in The Descendants. It's somewhere in Virginia.
  • Inside the city itself, a healthy amount of the action takes place in or around Westinghall Plaza.
• Welcome to Denfair City, New Jersey. Home of The Impossible Man.
• Metro City, the title city of the Metro City Chronicles.
• The titular city of Mortasheen is a continent-sized version of this combined with the Industrial type of Mordor, filled with crazy mutants and monsters in a constant state of chaos.
• Questport is a village, rather than a city, but has enough adventure and oddness for a city a dozen times its size.
• Megalopolisville from Society of Virtue.
• ''Star Harbor Nights" This is to be expected, considering Star Harbor and Nebula city is set in a classic superheroes universe/
• The Transformers fan club fiction has Axiom Nexus.
• Whateley Universe:
  • Dunwich, New Hampshire, only a couple miles from Whateley Academy.
  • Boston and New York City. Whenever one of the characters goes to either place, something happens.
  • Los Angeles, since that's where Phase now lives when she's not at school.

Western Animation

• Aladdin: The Series: In Aladdin, Agrabah is a fairly normal Middle Eastern city (with a vizier problem). In the show, it becomes a full-on City of Adventure, with Evil Sorcerers, Sekhmet ripoffs, and giant flying snakes attacking seemingly every week. Lampshaded in an episode where Aladdin is running from a giant floating eyeball and Iago tries to explain to him that he's only dreaming by pointing out how absurd their situation is. Aladdin merely shrugs and says, "Stranger things have happened."
• Atomic Puppet has Mega City, your classic superhero-protected metropolis where supervillains and giant monsters of every kind show up on a regular basis to give the local do-gooders plenty of action.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: The unnamed yet strangely familiar hometown of the Rescue Rangers.
• Marzipan City from Chowder, a diverse and bustling metropolis with an exotic aesthetic, all manner of strange sights straight out of Dr. Seuss' work, some truly whacked-out everyday occurrences, and some of the most whimsical culinary delights one can imagine.
• The in-universe Cleveland from Codename: Kids Next Door, where the main Sector V protagonists live. Other major operatives like Numbuh 362 and Numbuh 86 also live there.
• The Middle of Nowhere in Courage the Cowardly Dog seems to be some sort of nexus for "creepy stuff", to the point where it takes obvious danger to get anyone but Courage to take notice. Talking animals, aliens, deities, and supernatural entities (not to mention Courage's own sapience and abilities) are all treated as normal until the big pointy teeth come out.
• Danny Phantom has Amity Park, a town with ghost/occult-related names for obvious reasons.
• Darkwing Duck: St. Canard was a cross between San Francisco and Disney's rendition of Gotham City — complete with its own Rogues Gallery of villains like: Megavolt, The Liquidator, and Nega Duck. And it was always up to Darkwing Duck and his trusty sidekick, Launchpad McQuack, to stop them.
• The Day My Butt Went Psycho!: Mabeltown is this, what with it being home to the greatest living buttfighters and the mortal enemy of human and buttkind.
• DuckTales (1987) lampshades the trope during the opening verse of its intro:
  "Life is like a hurricane... here, in Duckburg."
  "Race cars, lasers, aero-planes... It's a... duck blur."
  "Might solve a mystery. Or rewrite HISTOR~YYY!!!"
  Duck Tales! WHOO~OO!!"
• In The Fairly Oddparents, Dimsdale became this when Timmy wished for a comic book world, and again in the "Abra-Catastrophe" movie when the entire planet became a jungle world after Bippy the chimpanzee ate some of the rule-free wish muffin.
• New New York, in Futurama. The series takes place many years in the future where aliens and Ridiculously Human Robots are commonplace.
• Trolberg from Hilda functions as this due to the titular character and her friends encountering several supernatural occurrences throughout the city.
• Gravity Falls, where mystery lurks around every corner. The town is so weird in fact, that when Bill Cipher unleashes Weirdmaggedon, the borders of Gravity Falls prevent Bill's magic from spreading to the rest of the world, much to Bill's frustration.
• Miseryville on Jimmy Two-Shoes. While as much of a Crapsack World as the name suggests, Jimmy shows the citizenry that plenty of thrills are to be found when you live in a town populated by The Legions of Hell and ruled by a Corrupt Corporate Executive Reality Warper who makes products that May Contain Evil. But what do you expect from a town that's practically in Hell?
• Middleton, home of Kim Possible, was full of Supervillains.
• The Legend of Korra: Republic City was already being compared to Gotham, from the promos alone. Sure enough, in its first season, the city's reputation for peace and equality for benders and non-benders soon gave way to its seedy underbelly. Korra found herself having to contend with The Equalists, whose public face was a nonviolent protest group, but was really a terrorist cell, secretly plotting to take over the city. Plus, corrupt politicians, like Tarrlok.
• The Life and Times of Juniper Lee is set entirely in Orchid Bay, a Fictional Counterpart of San Francisco. This is a Justified Trope because Juniper is magically prevented from leaving the city as long as she's the Te Xuan Ze.
• Most of the experiments seen in Lilo & Stitch: The Series were found in Kokaua Town, the title characters' hometown on Kaua'i, Hawaii. (The town doesn't exist on the actual island, but it is based on the real-life Hanapepe over there.)
• Tremorton in My Life as a Teenage Robot, a place where earth-shaking events from alien invasions to giant monster attacks are just an average day for the town's local superpowered Robot Girl.
• Ponyville in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, to the point where the townsfolk just shrug and continue with their daily activities while the Mane Six do battle with a bugbear. It is situated right next to an Eldritch Location called the Everfree Forest, and from season five onwards it is the location of the magical Castle of Friendship.
• Danville in Phineas and Ferb. Besides the titular characters' physics-defying daily projects, there's a city-wide organization of animal secret agents who go undercover as pets, a league of evil scientists and girl scouts who get patches for wrestling sewer alligators.
  • Milo Murphy's Law continues the tradition, showing that alongside all of the above, there's also a kid who's both Born Unlucky and a Walking Disaster Area, as well as time travelers, getting into all sorts of misadventures on the other side of town.
• PJ Masks: The nameless city of the 3 heroes has no shortage of adventure for the heroes; there are various villains roaming the streets at night, a portal to another dimension hidden behind a wall in an alleyway, and another portal to what is implied to be the afterlife in a sphinx statue in the museum, various relics hidden in the city, and caves underneath it that contain even more relics.
• The City... of Townsville in The Powerpuff Girls.
  • And the Town... of Citysville is a Deconstruction.
• Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja has Norrisville, where most of the show's mystical and technological conflicts revolve around.
• The Bay Area in Robotboy. More specifically in San Francisco, from the looks of it, but only the term "Bay Area" is ever used.
• RollBots: Flip City provides adventure for all its citizens simply because the roads are all autobahns designed by an extreme sports enthusiast for robots that turn into high-speed spheres.
• Springfield in The Simpsons is a deliberate parody of this. At one point Our Favorite Family suddenly notices that they live across the street from an expensive mansion that wasn't there before and was created for that episode so that George Bush could move in.
  • Capital City is one of these in some early episodes. In "Dancin' Homer", it's even given its own theme song (sung by Tony Bennett, no less) which overtly invokes the trope in its lyrics.
    • Subverted in which the family travels abroad on occasion, and them being the Simpsons, wherever they go, hijinks follow.
• South Park, Colorado. It can all be summed up in one quote...
  Reporter: "And so just weeks after the devastating attack of mutant genetic creatures, zombies and Thanksgiving turkeys, the town of South Park has managed to rebuild itself once again-" (sees giant robotic Barbra Streisand destroying the town) "Oh, Goddamn it, not again!"
• Tales of Arcadia: This entire trilogy of series is primarily set in the town of Arcadia Oaks, California.
• TaleSpin: Cape Suzette was often plagued by Don Karnage and his henchmen, with Baloo and Kit Cloudkicker being the only thing standing in their way. Which is aptly conveyed in its intro, as well.
• The TV series Teen Titans has the Titans Tower in "Jump City", at least according to the comic adaptation Teen Titans Go!; the team's hometown was never named in the cartoon. Meanwhile, "Steel City" is the location of Titans East.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: Acme Acres was its "own wide world apart," according to the show's theme song, but was more like an adventure campus, than an actual city.
• Detroit in Transformers: Animated, which seems to have had a reasonable population of supervillains even before the Transformers came along. Some of it can be explained by being the center point of the robotic revolution created by Isaac Sumdac.
• Wishfart is set in a City with No Name where everything is weird and magical. It's populated by a Fantasy Kitchen Sink's worth of characters, with a good chunk of the citizens are the way they are because of Dez's wish-granting. And did we mention that The Underworld is located not too far beneath the city sewers?
• Heatherfield in W.I.T.C.H., which is where all the portals are, and where all the Guardians live.

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