Oh yeahhhh that's true. I knew I seen it the second time before but didn't know where. Good catch on that lol.
Curious though, Type-0 had the Overworld concept which I thought it was one of the grandest things for adventure potential and expanse so wondering if this next one they had in mind is something similar or not at all. Reason for that is because you are placed in a mini version of yourself in a huge world map with "tons of towns and dungeons". When you enter a town you are placed in a short loading screen, and when that loading screen is done you return to default size and it turns out to be the biggest town you've ever seen with amazing graphics (at the time). Since we are on 2017, imagine if they pull this off now with today's latest builds and engine would probably look amazing.
Course, it's more of a pipe dream. I don't mind open world vastness and I can see why very few didn't like being small on a world map, but those types of things were tolerable and were definitely overlooked. Back in the day, FF4-9 was never a huge complaint for it since the systems back then just couldn't handle true open world logic in play, but a huge lengthy play with tons of story quests to do was just so adventurous and potential flying around to different regions in an airship with each locations having over 15 towns and dungeons full of adventure (at least for me that is).
Type-0 overworld map was freaking amazing (it doesn't matter how bad it looked), especially with this epic "military" version of the chocobo theme (played it a lot in XV lol).
Though I'm pretty sure they used this concept because of the PSP limitations.
I still like mini-characters in huge maps filled with towns and dungeons, with random encounters after a few steps and everything... not to mention the mini-characters on a mini-chocobo lololol. Also, this still the only way to properly control an airship in a FF game, liked how you could only enter the Agito Tower with it.
X and XII had airships but you didn't control them because, of course, there wasn't an overworld, there's still the Regalia in XV, but the controls are so bad it's not even worth using it.
Don't know if they'll use the same concept eventually, I would definitely like to see how it can work with the latest builds and engines, and I hope they'll at least try to implement it to see how it can look. However as you said, most people won't like it nowadays, which is understandable indeed, and something tells me they'll just continue with the XV "open world" route (not that I don't like it, that's for sure).
