One of the major reasons JRPGs lost me a little during the last generation was the stripping away of one of the genre's most defining features: the explorable world map, which was taken out of many games in favor of less resource-intensive travel options. Now, I'm still a little conflicted about this; on one hand, I do like the intuitive menu-based exploration of games like Persona, and I've repeatedly learned (especially this fall with Opoona) that making a player traverse large expanses of land is an excellent way to pointlessly stretch out a game for dozens of hours. On the other hand, including a Super Mario World-ish map in an RPG always felt a little cheap and cop-outey to me; when I saw this choice show up in Final Fantasy X, I assumed that Square had signed some sort of contract with The Devil himself (little did I know they had done this a few months prior with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). It seems that the whole world map issue is entirely about fooling players into thinking your game world is more than a bunch of "rooms" stuck together, all while making sure not to bore them with interminable traveling.
It's a tricky balance.
My preferred take on the RPG world map--and one you don't see very often--is when the "outside world" of the game is on the exact same scale as the rest of the areas you explore (towns, caves, towers, etc.). Obviously, if you're trying to make your game world a complete, explorable "planet," which is the choice with 99% of all RPGs, this is quite a tall order. Some of the more successful examples of this school of design are Earthbound, a game that felt much more colossal than the standard, epic, medieval RPGs of its era, and Dragon Quest VIII, which to this day feels like the only fully-realized RPG of the PS2 generation--and the fact that everything in the game is on the same "scale," so to speak, may have something to do with that. In fact, the game sort of brags about its epic scope with an early mission where a character asks you to retrieve something from under a red tree off in the distance; he doesn't tell you how to get there, and the entire trip involves careful exploration with nary a loading screen to be found. Very effective.
So, what's the verdict from the rest of you guys on world maps: an important element of the JRPG, or yet another thing I'm blowing way out of proportion?
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