I’m going to wager that the cutscenes are all XA audio/video DMA’d from the disc. Opening the disc kills the DMA and the error recovery is just to end the cutscene and continue. The program is in RAM, so a little interruption on reading doesn’t hurt unless you need to time it to avoid an error reading the file for the next section of gameplay.

That’s a solid guess. And if that’s the case, that’s actually pretty good error handling!

I recall that handling disc eject was an explicit part of the Tech Requirements Doc (things the console manufacturer requires you to comply with). They'd typically check while playing, while loading and while streaming.

This is a significantly better handling than the previous game (final fantasy viii). My disk 1 (it had four disks) got scratched over time (I was a child after all), and the failure mode was just to crash - thus the game was unplayable. The game had a lot of cutscenes.

> Never knew why that worked.

I'm guessing the game probably streams FMV cutscenes of the disc as they play, and the fallback behaviour if it can't find them is to skip rather than crash.