Dev Diary - Entry 6, 19th. Feb. 2018

CAUTION: Spoilers will abound in this dev diary regarding Final Fantasy XX/Final Fantasy 20XX. If you believe yourself to be involved in playing this game, please exercise due caution. No moogles were harmed during the making of this entry.
So, today, we have something special - we have a world map. A world map too big for World Anvil to hold, mind, due to it being a work in progress and not scaled at all, but it's a world map nonetheless. Linky goodness here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wt0xdqptdd2h5p0/World%20Map%20FF.jpg?dl=0
So, we have a shell of a world map, and this will be what I use for the World of Ruin for this FF - a world post-Empire taking over and starting a Shadowrun-esque (or Blade Runner-esque if you're more of a film buff) world-spanning technomantic empire. This is, of course, if things go according to plan. Which I anticipate they won't, but hey. It wouldn't be a game if I wasn't willing for the PCs to change the plot by their actions.
But this has spawned some interesting questions regarding the use of maps in tabletop games, in FFs and just in general. Namely, what are the functional differences in both?
Turns out? Not all that much. The only real difference is one in scale, and as the PCs are buried within the selfsame scale, ideally their actions should feel heroic/tragic/epic no matter the stakes.
Consider: the original Final Fantasy is a world spanning saga crossing multiple times to defeat the embodiment of Chaos. FFs 3, 5 and 13, conversely, feature two worlds in peril (of varying sizes and/or actual world status), while the Tactics series and 12 are slightly more intimate, focussing on the Ivalician conflicts, which are limited to the actions of one country/continent. If we branch out a little bit and look at other JRPG examples, we see a similar sort of bredth - the most extreme examples here being the Ys series, which tend to focus on a country at biggest, and a single town at smallest, while something like Live A Live concerns itself with a conflict that literally spans the entirety of human history, and Kingdom Hearts is galactic in scale - though there are arguments that the implementation of this isn't hugely accurate. Things never really go larger than, at most, a series of closely related worlds. Galactic exploration, it seems, is rather out.
So, why is this? My best guess for this is simply one of audience relatability - it's difficult for us, as a race barely pushing 1 on the Kardeshev scale, to appreciate truly galactic scale conflicts. We don't even really know how such conflicts would occur. But the conflicts tend to play out rather similarly, and appeal to the same sort of engagement. This does mean, though, that an enterprising GM might be able to break in to new ground with a game of exploration of new ground, rather than heading into an already known world. I have a sneaking suspicion my game won't appeal to that sort of engagement, though - this one is more about the previously discussed struggle against a personified force of nature.
But what, I hear you ask, does this mean for the world map? Simple - that size doesn't really matter. It's entirely possible for your adventure to occur in the area around a single town, with different districts of the town acting as the different areas where one can get the scaling equipment typical of a JRPG. A single given town can have multiple adventure sites (The forest at the outskirts, the ruined aristocratic manor, the mines in the mountains, the mountains themselves, the cultist's farm that they've taken over etc.) and the force of nature needs only threaten the town (summons as well as villains - think on that for a moment) to be significant in this adventure, which makes for a slightly more personal adventure as the denizens of the town will recur enough to make even the most jaded PC care for them.
Of course, a world map that is actually a full world can work as well, but don't feel compelled to create a full world - especially if a party is just starting out. FF7 had a good eight hours in two districts of a single city, after all.
Thank you for your time, stay safe, all, and I'll talk to you all next week.