"The World is Square"

It's all relative, the world in these games could be a very tiny sphere close to the sun, that would explain the not having polar ice caps. Also, this about the center of the square map being the north pole, and the 4 corners meeting up at the south pole. I dunno, it's all just conjecture anyway. Oh, and the Famicom version of FF2 had a sphere world map. I'm curious how they managed to get that to work on the system's hardware.

Now that you mention the polar caps, everything begins to be quite logical.

Yes, the world is Square, it is kind of a publicity...