[POLL] WORLD MAPS VS AREA MAPS

I was gonna be all "either way can work fine, it depends on the themes and motifs of your game and the scale of the adventure your heroes are on" and voted accordingly

but then I remembered I actually am totally sick of RPGs that are ridiculously huge scale and involve exploring the entire continent/world, because honestly it just shatters my suspension of disbelief to walk hundreds of miles from one location to the next, or to claim that an adventure is taking place on a worldwide scale but then only have one or two cities per country and only ten houses per city

One problem I'm encountering is when a game takes place in a small area of a continent and there's no logical reason why the party can't walk over the edge of the map.

You attempt to walk west into the Pyrisian Plains. The sinister magic of 'The Plot' drives you back.

You could always do the characters telling you off thing. It can be another valuable moment to show off the character personalities and interaction, if you play it right.

"We can't go this way."
vs
"Dude, where are you going? The tower's to the East remember? We'll reach Camelot if we go that way."
"Oh, yeah. Sorry, this map's really old. We should get a new one in the next town."
"Hey! I'll have you know I made that map and it is one hundred percent accurate, thank you very much! It's the map reader at fault."
"I know how to read a map! This piece of rag is practically falling apart! What's this stain? Blood?"
"There'll be more than just those few drops on it if you keep bad-mouthing my skills like that!"
"Whoa, okay guys, calm down. Let's just get our bearings and head East, okay? We need to get there before the sun sets or we'll be swarmed by monsters."
"Yeah, fine. Let's go before he leads us into the middle of a lake or something."
"..."

Hell, this way you can reference other places that they'll visit later on without having to just resort to books, and show that they know of the world they live in too. And if you don't want the conversation on the actual world map itself, teleport them to a mini map (like with the Yuffie events in FF7) and have it play out there.

At the end of the day it's not what type of travel you pick but how you choose to use it that matters. I prefer world maps/no encounters myself, but I'm not averse to travelling through connected areas. Unless it's like FFX because that I hated.

I choose either or because I can be perfectly fine with traveling across an expansive map to reach the next city, and moving linear isn't always so bad either. My issue comes in when the World Map has you traveling a long distance until your next destination, and the encounter rate is a battle every seven steps. Likewise, I can't stand when using area to area and each map is just dull/boring/nothing to do/isn't interactive besides walking. Finally I share a problem for both sides when means of travel is zero throughout the entire game. After moving fifteen areas over, I don't honestly feel like travelling back by foot. Hand me an airship/teleportation module of some kind or something.

Those issues aside, I have no particular preference of one over the other.

I like Zelda's connected maps too. Even though I don't mind back tracking with Zelda, the series makes sure to reduce backtracking by warping. (So do a lot of games with big worlds.)