Cocoon was horribly put together imo. There was no geographical reference for where you are at any given point, and no indication of how most areas connect to each other. Compared to Spira or (especially) Ivalice, it was a massive disappointment.
When playing the game, I thought the same thing regarding the lack of connections, but was almost ready to take the lack of geographical reference as a positive.
Remember, Cocoon is the inside of a small (by planet standards) sphere. People who've lived all their lives on such a surface aren't going to be attached to the cardinal directions like we are -- they can get to any location by going in any direction, particularly if the destination is at the polar opposite of your current location.
So while I first found the automatic rotation of the maps, and the complete lack of N/S/E/W orientation really annoying, I was ready to see it from the perspective of the people in that world.
And then when they get to Gran Pulse, a genuine planet
surface where direction matters, they can't handle it because they've literally never experienced such an environment, so the in-game maps still auto-rotate.
I honestly vacillated between that and just thinking that the developers hadn't put any deep in-universe thought into it at all and just had the map rotate because there's really only one path through the areas, and you might as well make that direction always be "forward".
If the Matsuno/Ito/Minaba/etc. Vagrant Story/FF12 team had dome something like that, I would almost certainly have concluded the former, but since it's Toriyama and his happy band of imcompetents, I can't help but assume the latter.
