Pulls the unthinkable in a Final Fantasy game in relegating the world narrative and all its spectacular cutscenes to radio chatter, to things happening beyond the horizon. What we do does not matter: this is the eternal road trip before the end of the world. The camping and sleeping mechanics enforce a camaraderie that matches that of the Dragon Quest series, while the save mechanic, requiring us to look through photographs taken by an in-game character before bed, sentimentalises things even further, and even works as a testament to freedom in emergence. In this world where time does not move, where we repeat the same routines, the photograph is evidence of life's infinite difference, of the world always becoming other. The way we are pressured into relinquishing agency so another in-game character can drive us places is also fascinating for the way it underscores the negotiation of human and nonhuman actants in gaming generally. Mostly it's in service of the game's sweet eternity, a gentle melancholy that renders every settlement a pit stop, a Route 66 simulacrum where the landscape's littered by ghost towns that, oddly enough, look more alive than these ones.

The 'closed' half is the most fatalistic these things have ever been. Genuinely upsetting stuff.