Quote Originally Posted by Big D View Post
Random encounters can hurt the immerson or suspension of disbelief sometimes. Say, you're in a clearly empty cave or abandoned house, minding your own business, rummaging through a crate, then... surprise! You find yourself doing battle with a fifty-foot, fire-breathing turtle dragon god demon that you somehow overlooked on your way in. If these things are wandering around all over the place, you'd think our heroes might notice them from time to time.
If that was the case, I'd also get bugged about my characters being the size of a city on the FFVII world map. And yet, I absolutely love world maps in every RPG that has them. It's just a way to abstract aspects of the game, improve the focus and gameplay themes.

In FFXIII, I was constantly moving around thinking about the encounters. How to avoid the enemies while moving around the corridor.

In a game like FFVII, I just explore. The enemies attack when they want to attack, and I just fight them. I don't have to worry about specifically encountering or avoiding them, because the game handles that. I can focus on exploring the dungeon, looking for hidden spots with dropped Materia or other treasure. Instead of "oh, look, a huge enemy in front of a treasure chest".

Heck, in Pokemon, static encounters would be a hell of a lot more frustrating than random encounters. Which is saying something, given how annoying the random encounters can be in that game sometimes.