Ordinal Geometry Complements Reconstruction: Diagnosing Planning with Compressed Value Functions

Goal-conditioned planning requires compressing value functions into low-dimensional representations, yet which property of the compression best predicts planning quality remains unclear. We show that reconstruction accuracy and ordinal fidelity---how faithfully the ranking of successor states by value is preserved---are two projections of the same approximation error: in smooth geometry they couple tightly and $L^2$ is a sufficient summary; when topology creates dense small-gap regions they decouple, and the ordinal projection carries complementary planning-relevant information beyond $L^2$. Through experiments on gridworld, continuous navigation (640 runs, 8 environments), and Maze2D (240 runs, 3 D4RL layouts), we establish three results. First, neighbor-restricted ordinal fidelity ($\tau^{\mathrm{nbr}}$) adds $\Delta R^2 = 0.106$ of incremental explanatory power beyond $L^2$ after environment fixed effects. Second, monotone recalibration degrades $L^2$ by up to $\sim\!400\times$ while preserving $\tau^{\mathrm{nbr}}$ and planning success. Third, in matched-pair comparisons controlling for $L^2$, higher $\tau^{\mathrm{nbr}}$ predicts better planning 76\% of the time. We provide theoretical grounding via a gap-weighted Bellman-excess decomposition that links reconstruction error, local ordinal inversions, and planning regret.