Final Fantasy VIII’s story isn’t winning an award anytime soon, but there’s something to be said about how it lays out subtle story beats in the visual details. Learning from the blocky animations of FFVII, FFVIII was when Square Enix figured out how to utilize the full potential for visual storytelling on the PS1, and it shows. If you pay attention to the story and the cutscenes, you’ll be able to uncover some neat subtleties they put between the lines.

[Story spoilers for FFVIII follow]

One example that’s often missed comes from Laguna’s flashback to filming a movie at the beginning of Disk 3. It’s a lighthearted scene about him acting in a poorly budgeted movie about an ancient Sorceress and her Knight to gain some extra travelling money on his quest to rescue Ellone from Esthar. The comedic element of it feels pretty out of place after some pretty heavy revelations in Squall’s timeline.

While most of Laguna’s flashbacks do feel like a useless diversion from the story until the significance is explained, this one feels particularly pointless: it has barely any character development or plot exposition, and features a slightly frustrating minigame wherein Laguna fends off a Ruby Dragon with a fake gunblade.

Astute observers, however, will notice that his gunblade stance is identical to the rather unique battle animations of Seifer Almasy. While this can seem like budget-saving animation recycling, it’s actually a deliberate choice to reveal a peripheral but important character detail.

Earlier in the game, Seifer mentions his “romantic dream” to become a Sorceress’s Knight, a dream that motivates his betrayal of Garden and crusade against the protagonists. Given that by all accounts this movie would have been released when Seifer was a child, it’s more or less confirmed that he watched the film as a young orphan and started to build his identity around his idolization of Laguna’s character.

It’s a tiny detail that doesn’t add much to the main plot, but provides some character exposition instead. While more or less insignificant, it does show a very neat example of how the jump to 3D that generation allowed for a wider range of unspoken visual storytelling— and of how Square Enix began to gain a grasp on it.

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