Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
You're assuming that they deliberately chose against (or forgot to consider) making the cutscenes skippable in some circumstances, but I think it's more likely that they can't.

When the unskippable cutscenes were brought in, they also affected the playback in the Unending Journey cutscene viewer.

That suggests to me that the game only has one version of the cutscene stored, probably with the "do not allow skipping" instruction unalterably programmed into it, and it plays the same way regardless of how you access it.

I think it's quite possible that they would have liked to only enforce the cutscenes when playing via DF, and give players a choice in other circumstances - but their own (infamously clunky) system doesn't allow for that to be a variable option.

This may literally be the only way within their pre-existing framework that they can make it be unskippable in any form.
This is correct. The next live letter after they implemented this Yoshi spoke about the unskippable scenes in the Unending Journey and he said they can't put in multiple versions of the same cutscene to allow for skippable cutscenes under certain circumstances. Its an all or nothing decision. Of course, he also stated they didn't want to do this but felt it was better for the newer players experience to do it this way. For something that was the capstone of the story up to that point, it was important for players to see it as it was meant to be seen and that wasn't possible with the way the veteran players treated the roulette.

I think Yoshi was going to be damned no matter what he decided to do with the MSQ so he went with the simplest solution of making the cutscenes unskippable. Personally I'm not sure he was wrong in that decision.