What the junction system introduces in customisability, it performs in sacrilege to the idea of characters progressing toward mastery. Having to 'draw' spells makes every individual just the sum of what is available to them on the threshold of an action; a compound or assemblage that comes into being moment-by-moment. Nobody is innately anything, they're all just ordinary. I can understand why this upsets some, not because it is a bad system in itself, but because the game is already so cold and strange. The human proportions given to the character models, and then the way they're rendered in sharp fragments, makes it all feel strangely distanced. The cutscenes as well work less to pull us into the world and impress us (as other Final Fantasy titles do), and more to establish that there is something already going on with these people, something we have to work to catch up on. The most compelling animations set the tone, with emphasis given to either moments of intimacy like holding hands or dancing, or just settling on the yearning across the cast's faces. There is something inscrutable about the closeups, but then looking itself is the action in the style of Sirkian melodrama. The emotion isn't given to us directly, instead we're left with a solemn affect that's basically classical; read across bodies and faces; gestural, but always restrained. It is well known that Erik Satie's three Gymnopédies appear across countless JRPGs throughout the 1990s, and here Nobuo Uematsu resists quotation to instead mine the composition's distinctive warm melancholy. Like a sunshower on a Sunday afternoon. The pre-rendered backgrounds blend familiar architecture with the speculative, which keeps it grounded in an ambiguous temporal and geographic register. Final Fantasy VIII is a high school soap opera and messed up science fiction thing with wormholes, amnesia, and a very literal interpretation of Marx's "annihilation of time by space", all in this gloriously austere package. Less broken than kind of aloof, and to me at least a genre masterpiece.