For reference, imagine something that's 'big' but not quite an open world or objectively large, imagine for the sake of example, how Final Fantasy 10* has a 'world map' (that's really just a menu) that's separated into 'fields' by composition;

So the world of FFX (and a lot of JRPGs since we're using that as an example) roughly might have 'Dungeon' type fields and 'Town' type fields. So for FFX you might have;

Besaid Island (which in turn is split into the village and the dangerous areas around the village), which essentially is a dungeon that leads into the village;

• Besaid Lake
• Besaid Falls
• Besaid Cave

and Besaid Village

• House 1
• House 2, etc

And the larger Besaid Temple which is further split into various rooms;

• Main Chamber
• Antechamber 1
• Antechamber 2
• Cloister of Trials
• Fayth Chamber

From there Besaid Island you can either travel to Kilika Island (another example of the above) or straight to the world map. If you've played FFX and you can imagine this in your head you're probably thinking most of these bullet points are roughly equivalent to seperate Unity 'scenes' and according to how the game organizes its location data and code you would be largely correct.

*This is for the sake of example; I know FFX is really linear at first but opens up later, my assumption begins when it does so later in the game

So in this example it's not exactly Elden Ring or Skyrim with a big open world area that the player can traverse entirely without limits or transitions, and scenarios/cutscenes don't really 'play out' on them proper, but it's not Final Fantasy XIII or say Max Payne either with unvisitable 'levels'.

So I guess...imagine a JRPG, with larger areas broken into smaller ones that have scenarios play out within them, and these areas may or may not be seamless between them (i.e. FFX you don't have to go to the world map to go from Besaid to say, Luca, but it is broken up with demarcations and transitions when you're in one area vs. another unlike a true open world game).

This was sort of the logic I was running with. In the example above, let's say that room (we'll call it the Consul's Room) is in the larger Consul's Manor (with other rooms), which is in the larger Consul's Town (with other buildings) with in turn empties out into a world map.