From
Three Fairies' Hoppin' Flappin' Great Journey!. After an encounter with a boss at the end of Chapter 2, the party was warped to 'Subspace', which was a region consisting of """9""" map tiles that, predictably, did connect in any reasonable fashion.
My first attempt at mapping this nightmare. You can see to the right of the middle tile where I drew in an extra space to account for the fact that, while the map showed me in the central tile, it was not the same. The directional arrow was to indicate what I thought was a one-way path back when I thought the order of room entry and exits might be a factor.
The central characteristic of Subspace is that some paths will take you to a tile you've "already" been to, as indicated by the in-game map, but in reality it's not the same at all. This foiled my initial attempt to map the maze shown above. The enemies here weren't particularly strong, so there wasn't much chance of dying, but it was very easy to get lost. I would get progressively more nervous the longer I found myself unable to find my way back to the save point. The starting map tile had a warp point, but it didn't allow access to the rest of the world, so I was truly stuck here until I could find my way out.
"'From every room, there are an odd number of paths.' ...This seems somehow important."
This was the clue that cracked the code after I stumbled into it on what I later came to call Layer 3. Now I knew to go back and check all the rooms with only two apparent exits for a third. Mapping after that was relatively swift. Whenever a path took me to a tile I had already been to but with different characteristics, I would record it as a new "layer", start a new map, and carefully record how it connected to the previous layer. I also took great care to clearly mark all exits.
I decided to mark paths to new layers with L<Layer Number><Tile Number, in numpad order>. The little box drawings are opened treasure chests, recorded to help verify whether a tile was on a new layer.
This isn't my final Layer 2 map, but I can't find the finished one. I think I accidentally deleted it or closed it without saving. Good thing I don't have any reason to come back here.
EDIT:
I found my layer 2 map! The mark to the right of tile 9 was because there was a small peninsula jutting out of nothing to the right of the room, visible but not reachable. I wasn't sure what it meant, so I put it on the map just in case.
The smudge on tile 6 was meant to be a flower. It was so out of place that I couldn't help but feel it must be important. I was glad I recorded it, for later I remembered that I had a sidequest to take a picture of a flower in Subspace.
SHOP ended up being the exit, which I had suspected, even initially labeling it EXIT, but I decided to double back and finish exploring all the layers before confirming.
And it's good that I did, for layer 5 was absolutely loaded with treasure. It's hard to tell in my crude drawing, but tile 8 actually had two chests.
Honestly, I hated Subspace at first, but the satisfaction of solving it completely overwrote that feeling.
