RPG Maker Forums

Most JRPGs rely on visiting certain locations to get information or achieve certain objectives. In old-school RPGs, the amount of stuff to do in any given town tends to be proportional to the size of the map itself.

Example: Pokemon's Pallet Town is, in all its game incarnations, essentially just an enclosed rectangle with 3 buildings: your house (start of game), rival's house (get the map), and professor's lab (get your first pokemon). There are a few NPCs, but I have no idea where they're supposed to live because they don't seem to have their own houses. Do Professor Oak's aides just crash in his attic? lol

Then there's FFIV's Baron town/city, which has: 1 inn, 1 store, 1 permanently inaccessible house (for flair, I guess), 2 accessible houses (Rosa's and Cid's), 1 treasure hidden in the water, and 1 temporarily inaccessible building that comes into play later. Nothing else.

I can appreciate the sheer functionality of Pallet Town and Baron, but sometimes the jaded, Skyrim-coddled adult in me comes into play and I get to thinking how impractical these maps are; there's no way this place is a community... it's just a quest-hub. But the question is, is that a problem? To what point must newer JRPGs emulate a vast sense of scope in their towns and cities?

Playstation RPGs (like FFVII and Legend of Dragoon) got around this by painting on inaccessible "horizons" in the distance, but aside from window-dressing, this didn't really improve the game-play for me and really didn't help the illusion too much.

Even recent JRPG offerings like Octopath Traveler seem deliberately restrained in design, but worse somehow, with a plethora of inaccessible buildings per town just to make them feel like large spaces whilst doing little to benefit the gameplay or the game's pace. Yet again, more window-dressing.

What is your preference? The illusion of vastness or the compact old-school style where every building has a specific purpose, be it information, a quest, an item, etc.?