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.

Video Game Examples:

• 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.
• Playground Commons, Sandy Flats, and Dirt Yards appear a lot in the Backyard Sports games.
• Each game in the Banjo-Kazooie series begins at Spiral Mountain, even if the rest of each game features a completely different Hub Level.
• W(i/y)ndia of the Breath of Fire series.
• The Castlevania games have more than a few recurring settings, chief amongst them the entrance hall, a chapel, a library, a clock tower, a underground reservoir, the castle keep, and the throne room. This is usually owed to the fact that most entries are set within itself the eponymous castle, though the supernatural nature of Castlevania means it's common for some of these locales to have radical makeovers between appearances.
• All three games in the trilogy of Chronos, Remnant: From the Ashes and Remnant II see your hero travelling from post-apocalyptic Earth through the mystical otherworldly Labyrinth to explore various weird and wonderful alien worlds. However, aside from Earth and the Labyrinth, the only world that appears in all three games^note in fact, none of the other worlds even appear more than once in the trilogy, unless you subscribe to the theory that N'Erud from the third game is actually the far, far future of Rhom from the second is the jungle planet of Yaesha, inhabited by the goatlike and xenophobic Pan. You actually get to follow the story of the world's downfall from game to game, starting with the Hero from Chronos slaying the world's Guardian deity, all the way to the jungle being overrun and corrupted by the alien Root in Remnant II.
• Nar Shadaa, "The Vertical City", is a location that Kyle Katarn visits in every game in the Dark Forces Saga. Thanks to its Wretched Hive status, it's generally home to informants that have information that Kyle needs. Its notorious No OSHA Compliance allows for some platforming and puzzles to traverse the levels.
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • The Carteneau Flats are a PVP-only area, but it is reused for a job quest with the Summoner class and it's also where the last quest in the Heavensward story takes place.
  • Halatali is an optional dungeon from 2.0 that is later reused for a solo duty during 3.0 where you rescue Raubahn before his execution.
  • The Vault from near the end of 3.0 is similarly reused for a solo duty to rescue hostages in 3.1.
• GoldenEye (1997): The surface of Severnaya and the underground bunker within are revisited midway through the game.
• 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.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Olympus Coliseum is the Trope Codifier, having appeared in all games in the franchise except Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]. And even then, one of the worlds featured in that game, Country of the Musketeers, reuses the Road to a Hero soundtrack to serve as the Musketeer theme^*The same theme is also reused in San Fransokyo. It's reached the point where the expansion of that world, simply called Olympus, serves as the tutorial world in Kingdom Hearts III. And of the two songs from the franchise that played at the Opening Ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, both were related to Olympus Coliseum.
  • Agrabah is the runner up, appearing in six games, including the mobile game Kingdom Hearts χ. Wonderland takes the bronze prize with five appearances across the series, while Halloween Town and Neverland are tied with four visits. Neverland and Olympus Coliseum, in particular, are the only Disney worlds to be visited by all six of the main playable protagonists: Sora, Riku, Roxas, and Terra, Ventus, and Aqua.
  • As for original worlds, Radiant Garden/Hollow Bastion has appeared in every game in the series save for Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, although Dream Drop Distance and Kingdom Hearts III only show it in cutscenes.
• 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 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.
• 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).
• Nintendo has started using Wuhu Island as a location associated with its cross-game Mii characters; it appears in Wii Fit, Wii Sports Resort, Pilotwings Resort, Mario Kart 7, and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (both done as part of a Pilotwings stage and as a stage in itself).
• The main Pokémon games always have a variation of Victory Road. In particular, Pokémon Gold and Silver recycles Victory Road from Pokémon Red and Blue, and Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 recycles the back half of Victory Road from Pokémon Black and White.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Metropolis (Aleero City) is the platformer counterpart to Olympus Coliseum, being featured in three games, Ratchet & Clank (2002), Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (as the tutorial level). The city is also a DLC battle arena in Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault. It even represents the franchise in PlayStation Move Heroes and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.
  • Possibly due to the third game in the series essentially being a return to the galaxy of the first installment, Veldin, Rilgar, and Aridia appear in both games. Though in the case of Aridia, different outposts being visited: X11 as a very early location in the first game, X12 as a late-game location in the third.
  • The Blargian planet Orxon from the first game also reappears as arena in Deadlocked, still as polluted as ever, although it appears the Blarg are working to atone for Drek's actions by this point.
  • Meridian City, the capital of the Polaris Galaxy, appears in Tools of Destruction as Tachyon and the newly summoned Cragmites wage genocide against the inhabitants. The city is mentioned a few times afterwards, and then reappears in Into the Nexus.
• 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. Likewise, Zone themes like casino/carnival, tropical, desert, underwater ruins, etc. are reused many times.
  • Shadow Generations: Radical Highway may as well be Shadow's Green Hill, but it's taken up a notch here. Unlike Green Hill, it's the last level of the game instead of the first; however, before making it to the level proper, Black Doom will appear in the middle of certain levels to transport Shadow to the Doom Zone, which resembles a distorted Radical Highway, to test his abilities. The level was also in the original Sonic Generations, as the level representing Sonic Adventure 2 instead of the console/PC version's City Escape.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The franchise mostly avoids this, the only places to feature consistently in the series being the Mushroom Kingdom, the main setting, and of course Bowser's Castle. Levels and areas often have recurring themes (such as Lethal Lava Land or Slippy-Slidey Ice World), but they're never indicated to be one and the same. There appears to be an exception to this in the form of Dry Dry Desert, a Shifting Sand Land that has featured with this exact name in at least four games of the franchise (Mario & Wario, Mario Kart 64, Paper Mario 64, and Mario Kart: Double Dash!!; plus three more appearances if you count its returns as a Classic Course in Mario Kart 7, Mario Kart 8, and Mario Kart Tour). The Mario Kart 64 version was translated into English as "Kalimari Desert", but it uses the same name ("Karakara Sabaku") in the original Japanese versions.
  • The Mario Kart games have track thematics that reappear in every game: alongside the traditionals Mario Circuit, Bowser Castle and Rainbow Road, almost every game has a beach track, a haunted course, a snow/ice track, a candy course, a desert track, a jungle course, a port town track, and an arena course. Some characters are also more easily associated with certain thematics: for example, Donkey Kong is almost always the representant for jungle themed tracks (or snow mountain levels), while Wario either has his name on a stadium or a "hardcore" course which is reminiscent of this thematic (for example, Mount Wario from Mario Kart 8 is an Obstacle Ski Course where you don't loop the track even once, but start at the top of the mountain and only go down while surviving the various obstacles it has to offer).
• Super Monkey Ball: Every game had at least one Space Zone and/or Eternal Engine stage. Also, Monkey Island has been the first world in all but two of the games in the series.
• The Tales Series has players go to the tree of Mana, Yggdrasil, in several of its games.
• Floor 60 of The Tower of Druaga.

Non-Video Game examples:

• The Biers pub is mentioned a lot in Discworld.
• Star Wars (canon): The desert planet Tatooine is quite ubiquitous, to say the least.
  • It's in six out of the nine Episode films — A New Hope, Return of the Jedi, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith and The Rise of Skywalker. And then there's The Force Awakens which, while not having Tatooine, does still have a Suspiciously Similar Substitute Wretched Hive desert world in the form of Jakku. And Jedha from Rogue One also looks fairly similar to Tatooine (sandy streets), if only with higher mountains and canyons.
  • The Mandalorian fell guilty to this as well with the main character going to the planet in both seasons and for different reasons each time, and then there's The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, which are obligatorily tied to the planet due to being the location where the protagonists were left in their previous installments. Andor mercifully avoided to feature the planet.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The whole point of the pilot movie was Anakin and his new apprentice Ahsoka trying to return Jabba the Hutt's kidnapped son.
• In Star Wars Legends works as well, Tatooine appears all the time, even in places you wouldn't expect it. To wit:
  • The X-Wing Series: Gavin's from there. Also, the Rogues are invited to a party to honor the late Biggs Darklighter.
  • Darksaber: Luke and Han are trying to investigate the Hutts.
  • Star Wars: Legacy: Cade actually visits the Lars moisture farm, and gets a Vision Quest courtesy of his ancestor.
  • Junior Jedi Knights: Tahiri's from there.
  • New Jedi Order: The Vong attack Tatooine.
  • The Star Wars Customizable Card Game: Tatooine has more sites than any other planet.
  • The Thrawn Trilogy: Han, with Wedge and Page as backups, is meeting with a smuggler.
  • Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy: Two levels in the first set of missions are set on Tatooine, one in one of the spaceports of Mos Eisley and another closer to open desert.
  • Shadows of the Empire: When the group splits up, Luke returns to Tatooine to build a new lightsaber. Given the story is an interquel between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the full group comes back again at the end to plan Han's rescue.