They should feel like they’ve been there the whole time.
Final Fantasy like random encounters are annoying and boring, don’t be like Final Fantasy.
Even though you, the GM, have randomly determined an encounter, the result of that encounter is now a permanent fixture in your world. If it was a monster that your PCs have killed, it’s corpse now stays in the location where it fell, and could lead to further complications in your game world.
Don’t make monsters just jump on the players at random intervals, make it seem like the monsters were just on their way and were going to cross that area all along, and the player characters just happened to run into them.
Wilderness encounters should not be like dungeon encounters. When I make wilderness encounters, they are a full dungeon or of a scale such that they cannot be resolved with a single RP instance or combat round. You can call my wilderness encounters “wandering dungeons.”
If you don’t want to do that, and want little wandering encounters in the wilderness, then make multiple encounters per day. The AD&D DMG has a very tight method of rolling an encounter check multiple times per day, depending on area terrain type and population density. Any other method can be used as well, for example rolling a check, selecting an encounter from a table, and then rolling another die to choose the number of encounters. Space these encounters out during the day or place them apart in distance, and then describe how the players travel into them. Your map does not need to be that precise in scale, as long as you can believably narrate your players traveling from one encounter to another until they make it out of the hex.
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