I find they also create a more epic feel to the game. I can't think of any game that didn't have a traversable world map that actually was about the entire world being under attack. FFI-IX all had an entire world, if I recall correctly. If FFX was actually a game about the entire world, it simply didn't feel that way to me when I looked at the world map because it wasn't a globe. It looked like a continent, much like XII. I didn't notice the lack of world map in XIII at first, but I wish that I could have done so much more on Pulse and if it had a traversable world map, that would have been fantastic.