[SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!]
You know, explaining this game to a friend is like, SUPER hard.
I was explaining this game and what started as "Oh, this game has multiple routes?" devolved into a discussion on how quantum mechanics would apply to a world that exists in the form of story and song. And how two songs playing over eachother could feasibly exist at the same time to form a whole. Allowing for events to both happen and not.
Allowing two states, one where the protagonist lives on in ignorance and one where he goes mad with grief and sells his soul, he sells his soul to bring his lover back, his lover sells hers to bring his back, thus putting the world into a time loop where the reality where he lives in peace as she wished exists alongside the reality where he's sold his soul. The overlapping timelines creating a sort of Polyphony where both timelines both do and don't exist. and eventually i just looked at them and realized I had just given this poor guy a headache.
Like, when you break down the lore of this game, it becomes damn near as hard to explain as the fate timeline, and all of it is optional. I still get woozy mapping it out. That's not even getting into the King of Nothing Shenanigans on the wiki and in game, or Base64, the fact you have to cross reference wiki pages with characters and item descriptions for full context.
it's pure insanity, absolute manic energy over here.