Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth leads felt it would be a "disservice" to the original if it didn't resurrect the world map: "You can't really have an RPG without a world map"

gamesradar.com:

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is resurrecting the series' staple world map for the first time since Final Fantasy 9, over 23 years ago.

Issue 362 of Game Informer features a huge preview of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, interviewing development figureheads like co-director Naoki Hamaguchi, creative director Tetsuya Nomuyra, and producer Yoshinori Kitase. One feature the preview focuses on is Rebirth's new world map, which is drawing from Final Fantasy's past with a fully open-world map.

Reflecting on the past, Kitase says that the original Final Fantasy featured a fully open-world map, and this continued all the way to Final Fantasy 9 in 2000. "But starting with Final Fantasy 10, when we entered into this real-time 3D world, this is when map development ceased or halted to some degree," Kitase says, adding with 10, players simply chose where they wanted to go and traveled there.

"In that sense, the feeling was that, since it's real-time 3D, it's not quite possible to create this full world map anymore," the producer continued. Kitase assumed that Hamaguchi would want to continue the trend of recent Final Fantasy maps in Rebirth - a map that isn't fully open-world, but instead lets the player explore smaller separate areas.

Both Kitase and Hamaguchi felt like it would be a "disservice" to the original Final Fantasy 7 if Rebirth didn't include an interconnected game map. Other team members like Nomura were happy to hear the world map was back for Rebirth, and the creative director added that it was "always strange" that Final Fantasy did away with the open-world map for a time.

"I thought that you can't really have an RPG without a world map, and specifically for Final Fantasy 7, to fully experience this world, we must have a world