I'm not sure I understand the trope correctly, but the description made me think of the main Mario series, particularly the 3D installments.
Super Mario 64 featured literal worlds-within-paintings with complete emptiness beyond their borders. That might have been a rather clever way of writing around the game's tech limitations, and the next games (Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy) had more fleshed-out settings that felt like pieces of a larger world/universe. Shigeru Miyamoto has gone on record saying that he feels Mario games are best left plotless, and lately he's made efforts to revert the trend with Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Super Mario 3 D Land: there is no acknowldgement of continuity, no characters besides Mario/Peach/Bowser, and every place visited is a floating landmass suspended in a void.
Thoughts?
This trope was originally launched as Nothingness Outside The Plot.
YKTTW archive can be found here
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Would Utena be an example of this trope, albeit a strange one? Yes, there is a world outside the Ohtori school. But it is rarely seen and those not present at the school are quickly forgotten... Also, there's all those implications that Akio has created the school as his own pocket world...
Big O should qualify for this one, I think. Considering the entire world wasn't even real, and memories are a Macguffin-esque joke where possibly nothing ever did exist outside of the story of Roger Smith...
Would the world of Custom Robo (The Gamecube release) be in this trope? The world is rather limited as a plot point.
The Journey is more important than the End or the Start.