Lost Odyssey had it in an interesting way: For the on-foot story, it plays out like FF10, where characters walk off screen in one location and arrive in another, with a list-like map for revisiting locations. Once you unlock forms of travel such as an airship or a submarine, you get access to a traditional world map you can drive around, exploring old and all-new locations in a fashion as non-linear as you like.
By restricting the world map stuff to vehicles only, you can keep a sense of scale in that you avoid gigantic town-sized avatar characters walking around. In LO the vehicles are (more or less) to scale to the world, and you leave the vehicle by 'docking' into a town, dungeon or other location, thus avoiding that world map look that Nomura cited as something of a challenge for Versus. It also made vehicles feel incredibly special in LO, because suddenly you could revisit everywhere easily and you could also find all-new hidden optional areas.
I really like this approach, and I feel it could work well for FF7's remake. The only issue is it would dampen the impact of the Midgar escape moment; but you could add a smaller closer-scale overworld area you explore direct from Midgar to Kalm for that, I guess.
