The world is donut shaped
Since I will be leaving you all for an inordinant amount of time, I present to you my finest moment; a time of visual clarity and eurekaness. I speak of my theory regarding the shape of FF's (and indeed, the large majority of RPG's) world. As we all know, the overworld maps of many worlds act on the somewhat sound principal that travelling to the edge of the map will result in you looping to the other side. From east to west or vice versa, this is perfectly sound and in line with our own planet (to a degree). However the main problem occurs towards the poles. As you should know, our world is spherical. What this means is that it bows out nearer the equator, and comes to a point near the poles. If one is to head directly north or south from any latitude on the planet, one would eventually find oneself in the same position. The circumferance distance (the distance taken to traverse the circumferance of the world, in other words from left to right or right to left) also changes depending on how far away you are from the poles. A person at the North or South pole could literally walk right across this distance in a manner of seconds.
In RPG worlds, however, this is not the case. Directly upon entering the northern or southern parts of the world, a character traditional appears at the same place except at the other end of the world. This, of course, cannot occur on a spherical planet, as going north or south would result in the same point being reached each time. As such, this means that the world must be set up in such a way that, upon entering the top half you reappear at the bottom half, and vice versa.
The only way this can occur is through a donut-shape, as I will explain below.
Imagine if you will your traditional RPG map (Fig 1). As we know travelling off the right will result in appearing at the same spot on the left. From this we can deduce that the "world" is connected lineraly on both edges (Fig 2). This achieves the effect of being able to traverse from one side of the map to the other. Now of course is the problem of getting the player to travel off the top and appear at the same latitude at the bottom. Again, for this to occur, the remaining sides (top and bottom) need to be directly attached to each other. You could technically turn the map the opposite way (and have the landmass on the inside), but since most RPG worlds demonstrate a constant lightsource, we can assume that the landmass is on the outside. This of course means that the map must bow into itself in the middle, allowing the top and bottom segments to connect to each other, thus allowing travel off the tops and the bottoms of the map (Fig 3).
All of this means that, from a logical point of view, the only shape any FF world could be is donut, otherwise the logistics of it's travelling patterns would not apply.
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Originally Posted by vorpal blade
