After the last mini boss goes down and as you’re about to begin the final encounter in Final Fantasy XV, the game presents its most difficult challenge.

It’s not a fight. It’s not a series of button inputs. It’s a choice.

And when the music swells, the strings kick in and the vocals start going, that choice gets even harder. But you have to choose. You have to press on. This is what the game is all about. It was leading to it.

That precise moment.

A scrapbook tells a story through photos. It relies on very little outside of pictures to get a narrative across. It’s all dependent on memory and what story the picture itself is telling. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? In that case, the story the of XV is as long as you want to make it. Between zero and 200,000.

XV places an enormous weight on photography and you’re encouraged through the course of your journey, it’s roughly 40 to 50 hours to reach that precise moment, to take up to 200 photos. But now, scrolling back through however many you took, you are asked to choose one.  

Just one. Out of a possible 200 photos, you get one. Make it count. It’s the most important decision in the game.

See, the story of Final Fantasy XV isn’t about imperialism, betrayal, military might, regicide, monsters and disease or even young tragic lovers getting caught up in the mix just days before their wedding. The game wishes it was. It tries to tell that story, but it comes up just a little short. However, it serves as an excellent backdrop for what the real story is – brotherhood and friendship.

But that story is told in an indirect method, primarily through gameplay and ambient dialogue that many players might brush off as fun details and quirky asides. A few cutscenes here and there help tell the story of friendship, but those are mostly dedicated to what the game thinks its main story is.

Unlike other games in the Final Fantasy series where you start off with a character or two and recruit others along the way, XV hands you three from the get-go alongside the main character and those are the only ones you get, besides a temporary character here and there who don’t matter at all. And those three characters – Ignis, Gladiolus and Prompto – and their relationship with the main character you play as, Noctis, is the indirect story that’s being told.

Each time you attempt to do virtually anything in XV, you’re met with a quip from one of those three characters. Whether that’s in combat, or travel, or minigames, or anything else, there’s a lot of banter, optional dialogue and side stories that drives home the idea that these four people know, like and respect each other.

You could rush through the main story quests that continue the plot of XV, but then you’d be missing out on developing the indirect story. This is a game that wants you to stop and smell the roses and it tells you to slow it down through a few different ways.  

In XV’s world of Eos, nighttime is a bad time. Daemons (just ignore the ‘a’ for how to pronounce that word) roam the landscape when the sun goes down. It’s dangerous to be out and that fact is presented over and over and over to the player each time it gets dark. Though you can continue playing, the game really, really wants you to stop for a few minutes. You can call it a night by either camping in the wilds or rolling into town and staying in a room.

At first glance, it feels like an arbitrary way of making the game feel alive. It doesn’t even really do that – it just determines if certain monsters spawn or not. But it’s part of the narrative process.

Each time you decide to camp, you choose a meal for Ignis to prepare for the group, which gives them incredibly helpful status-enhancements for the next day’s adventure. That leads into what is essentially a score screen, tallying your actions for the day and giving you access to your experience points to progress your characters like any other RPG does.

During all that though, a cutscene plays behind those ever-increasing numbers, showing the four companions chowing down and presumably chatting about the day. You can’t hear what they’re saying, but you’re encouraged to imagine it. There’s head bobbing, lip-syncing, clear indications of laughter and other emotions.

Staying in other lodgings, like pricy hotels in larger areas or dumpy campers in smaller settlements, leads to similar outcome. While you’re not preparing a meal, additional dialogue occurs before the tally kicks in – sometimes it’s a challenge to an in-world video game that leads to a brief scene of the boys tapping rapidly on their mobile devices. Other times it’s relief that they can finally take a bath or lay on real beds for change. Staying in hotels and the like also might lead to a scene of the four playing cards around a small table, usually ending in one of them throwing their cards down, likely revealing they had a winning hand and standing up in victory while the others can’t believe what just happened, burying their heads or falling back on the bed in defeat.

You cannot level up in XV without doing one of these two options. You must experience this in order to use your experience points. You can’t level up without spending the night with your friends. And there’s no beating the game otherwise, unless you’re doing some crazy challenge run.

This all happens very often. Intentionally often. You might do this 100 times before you beat the game. And at first, it feels detrimental to the gameplay experience. It feels forced. Why not just give the player their experience and levels during normal gameplay? There’s a reason for this process. It’s telling a story without telling you. You’ve heard the expression that the journey is more important than the destination, yeah? That is precisely what kind of game XV is. And it’s terrifically fitting that the game is initially framed around a road trip the four fellows are taking.

See, the last thing you do for the night before you progress to the next day is look through photos that are being taken along the journey, around 10 or 15 per in-game day. Armed with both a gun and a camera, Prompto is taking photos automatically without any player input during the game. There’s an option for manual shots, but even if you yourself don’t take any (I took like four?) you’re still presented with viewing these automatic snapshots. And you’re encouraged to save some during the journey. Up to 200. In my experience, around three or four are worth holding onto each time you take a look.

The photos can range in their content. There are some scripted photos that are always taken, like a pose between two characters you didn’t see happen, but can imagine did occur during the course of the day. Maybe a close-up of a new character that was introduced. Very often they are combat shots. Sometimes they look great, sometimes it looks rough. Other times while you’re adventuring, Prompto recommends a group picture at a particular area. You can see and save those too.

If all this sounds like it’s slow, it’s because it is. it takes a while to get going in XV. Between the frequent need to call it a night at lower levels because those daemons can really wreck you and the lack of a fast-travel option when you’re driving around in your car until you’ve been to your destination at least once the slow way, it’s almost frustrating until you’re getting into a fight.

The combat in XV is snappy and fluid, with an emphasis on quick movement, a complete turnaround from the pokey pace of its explorative side. Noctis can warp across the battlefield, heaving his sword into an enemy and then appearing behind it for a follow-up attack or dodge enemy fire by deftly maneuvering and rolling around. It feels good. And during battle, your friends are shouting strategies or talking about how they’re in over their heads or apologizing for getting hit or noticing that someone has been poisoned.

This dichotomy between combat and exploration presents a non-verbal agreement to players of XV – to keep them interested in the “fun” part of the game so they’ll keep seeing the slower parts.

XV maintains its slow, semi-open, explorable world before sending the player on-rails, hurtling towards the game’s finale, a clear feeling of where the game was rushed. It’s during this time that the game speeds up significantly in its storytelling of the main plot. Things begin happening at a frantic pace, bad things, and it’s difficult to maintain a sense of how much time is passing.

In this part, there aren’t many photos being taken. There’s no camping. You kind of wish the game would go back to being slow. But it continues that way for a good, long while before it comes to a screeching halt and the game slows down again – at about the game’s 90-percent-done mark.

But just before the story sends you off at that pace, Noctis is told point blank that he needs to remember that Ignis, Gladiolus and Prompto aren’t his bodyguards, they’re his brothers.

That’s important because Noctis isn’t exactly a likeable character for most of his development. He makes mistakes. He doesn’t know when he’s made a mistake. He has trouble expressing his feelings. Has trouble saying sorry. And for a lot of the game, the trio did feel like bodyguards.

Objectively terrible things have happened to Noctis and his friends before the game slows back down. The game’s plot, while it isn’t great at telling its story, does give the characters motivation. They’re stressed because of X, they do Y because of Z. They get at each other’s throats. They say things they don’t mean. They snap. Gladio barks at Noctis that when he can’t think, he does it for him. That’s his job and he takes it seriously. And he lets you know that.

The boys split up and sometimes don’t come back for a while. You’re left as a trio when you’re normally a quartet. It feels weird when that happens. Which is good. It should. At one point, you’re entirely alone as Noctis for hours. It sucks. You get taunted about having to take care of yourself. “That’s new to you, isn’t it, Noctis?” Something along those lines. The taunting happens a lot. That part of the game isn’t fun. At all.

It’s so unfun that developer Square Enix updated it so you can take an alternate, shorter path as two of the other characters in the party. But you really should take Noctis’ solo path for a spin. It’s hard, pretty hard actually, and while it isn’t fun, it is continuing the indirect story of friendship and brotherhood while trying to offer background and let you care about the main plot too.

Right after that solo adventure, when XV stops shoving you towards the end of the game and you’re just at the end of the game, Noctis and his companions reconvene after a long, long period of time away from each other for plot reasons. You can wander around this incredibly small settlement, but you’re at the end of the game. Before you can progress to what is essentially the final dungeon leading to the main boss, you camp one last time.

But you only choose the meal. There’s no fun cutscene to see. It’s a black screen and you just appear in the dungeon, ready to go. The four of you haven’t seen much of each other since you split up. There’s talk about how things have been and how they’ve not lost a beat fighting together despite the time apart. How Gladio “almost forgot” about this terrible name that Prompto gave a series of timed inputs from the player – it’s called a cross chain.

There’s still bad guys to fight. Lots of them. And the quick combat still holds true in its fun. After battling hordes of daemons and doing side quests and spending the night in these little protective shelters to level up in, you’re at the precipice of the final confrontation with the big bad guy.

You’ve beaten the last mini boss. Suddenly, you’re there.

That precise moment.

Just before Noctis opens the door to begin the final encounter, the boys say something along the lines of “well, this is it, huh?” That stirs Noctis, and he asks Prompto if he can see his pictures. He wants to take one. Only one. You probably aren’t sure why as the player.

The game crawls to a halt as you’re asked to relive your entire journey through the photos you’ve been saving. It opens up with the main orchestral theme and when the music swells and the boys are giving suggestions while you scroll through the selections – “a shot of us in combat might look cool” – you realize that this journey is just about over.

Just one photo out of 200? I had 196 to choose from at that precise moment in my most recent playthrough. Which one do you choose? Something humorous to lighten the mood? Levity is a good way to handle grief. A combat shot that shows some nice graphics? Some of these particle effects are nice. A photo of happier times with everyone? Lots of people have died.

It’s a difficult decision to make. And that’s a good thing. It feels terrible. It should be.

Giving these photos a meaning is the central crux of the indirect story that XV is telling: friendship is a complicated thing. Brotherhood is important. Relationships matter. Trusting and getting to know people is hard to do.

If it was easy to boil down what this journey meant to Noctis, and hopefully the player as well through their empathy, then the moment holds no weight. And randomly choosing one just to finish the game completely whiffs the whole idea that XV offers to its players.

Suddenly these photos are given a new light. They encompass everything that has led to this point and now have a deeper meaning besides “oh, I remember that time we fought a behemoth, that’s a cool picture.”

Now it’s “I remember when they used to look like that. When they wore those clothes. I remember that sword Gladiolus used, that thing looked cool. How along go was that? Oh look, it’s that character. I remember that scene. That was the last time I saw him. This is when I made a mistake. This is when I should have said I’m sorry. This is us at one of our lowest points. This is our reconciliation. This is us having each other’s backs. This is us.”

But you have to choose a photo. And then the game continues on when you do. More fun combat. And you beat the game. And when do you beat the game and the things happen and the credits roll and “Stand by Me,” the main theme song of XV has played, you get to watch that last camping scene.

This time though, you can hear what they’re saying.

And it’s just agonizing.

The rest of the game has been told chronologically until this scene. This is the only out-of-sequence part. It features Noctis, for the first time, realizing what his brothers, not his bodyguards, mean to him.

A lot of time has passed. Things have been said and done, things have been unsaid and left undone. So much has been lost. Time, people, lovers, friends. The speed of the game that sent the player in this incredibly convoluted story arc suddenly crashes into Noctis.

Like it did for the player, it went too fast for him as well.