Exactly. What the heck are you talking about, Bolivar? The world is so big so you can spend 150-200 hours combing every inch of it in a single playthrough.
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I only played about an hour of Skyrim. I actually kind of hated it. I was talking most games in general. Currently I'm playing through Fire Emblem Awakening on Lunatic mode, and I have spent well over 200 hours just grinding stats, skills, Support conversations, etcetera. In a game that basically consists of 35 battles each about an hour long, tops (and Chrom has not yet married in my current play through). In FFVII I grind out a Master Materia set for each character, and acquire all Limits, etcetera. In Persona 3 I nabbed an Omnipotent Orb for each party member, including Shinjiro (which was probably a hundred hours of resets right there), and fused a "perfect" version of every Persona in the Compendium.
In RPGs, I do everything. 200 hours would be one like FFXII that I got bored with and never finished.
I grind stats in the Gelnika and get three sets of Master Materia in VII and I've never topped 96 hours. Similarly, I've Order of Ambrosia'd XII twice and never topped ~120 hours.
But, nonetheless, I respect your dedication to grinding, because I play the same way. I must just do so more efficiently and/or less dedicatedly than you. :)
I never thought of the world maps as being to scale, so flying around them in a matter of seconds never bothered me. Also, I never expect the game to have realtime-time either.
Final Fantasy VIII's final disk was the death knell of the World Map, and I hate it for that every day.
I prefer seeing the whole world, but I'm not bothered with the alternative if the story is good. I prefer smaller worlds to the more vast open-worlds we get in RPGs like Skyrim, to tell you the truth. I enjoy a lot of the overhead maps from various Final Fantasy games and were never bothered by their size. I'm sure some planets in the galaxy would be small too. Dwarf planets!