poroshin on 25/8/2017 at 01:17

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Wowser!

I missed this game when it first came out and just finished it. I don't think a video game has ever made me cry before, but here we are... It's not a perfect game but it's an incredible accomplishment, despite the ending, and really most of the fifth episode (that nightmarish nightmare sequence!). And I agree wholeheartedly with Kolya's points above. I think any ending you choose is a quote-unquote bad ending. Here's a great alternate fan-made ending:

[video=youtube;c3kZ138J_1M]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3kZ138J_1M[/video]

It's not perfect but it makes the most sense to me (and actually made me cry as well, fuck). You go back to the beginning, save Chloe in the bathroom, and that's it. Sacrificing Chloe to me was not an option, but sacrificing the town is not an option either, even though that's what I chose in my playthrough. Partly, because I was shipping Max and Chloe but also because the choices I had made throughout the game are not wiped out. I'm really looking forward to the prequel and I'm really curious how they'll pull off Life Is Strange 2.

Sulphur on 12/7/2020 at 11:07

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I've been playing Life Is Strange 2 over the past two weeks or so. It's a hard one to reduce to an instant sentiment or a score, because it's one of those games that's full of clumsy moments but shows a lot of heart at the same time. In other words, it shares a lot with LIS 1 -- but the key here is a different context that's much harder to make work.

When you move from LIS 1's teenage intimacy to LIS 2's road trip/brotherhood simulation, there's a lot more that needs to go into characterisation. Arguably, the brothers are given more nuance here than LIS 1 where Chloe was the standout and Max was mostly an empty cipher for the player... and yet, that's only half the equation. Daniel's a 9 year old, and he is fucking annoying, which is almost certainly the point because you play his older brother so it's about right on the relationship spectrum. That doesn't mean the majority of the early episodes make the interaction with him interesting or particularly enlightening in terms of child psychology. The game does a pretty cool thing similar to TWD S1 where your guidance shapes a character under your wing - but a lot of it is moral choices and expected outcomes, with nothing particularly challenging in terms of how you as the player feel you need to act to shape Daniel's personality. There's a lot of navigating personality, but there are too few moments of actual, shared learning and bonding that deepen their relationship.

And I swear to god, there were moments where I wanted to slap the little shit so hard because he was being a frustrating brat. Realistic? Yes. Fun and interesting? No. Still, that tapers off by episode 4 when you've done your best and reap the rewards (or punishments) of what your big brother style was. This is good: it shows long-term consequence, or the illusion of it at the very least, because I'm sure there are soft resets to make the consequences less judgemental of you as a player. This part was managed as well as could be expected, with no particularly big surprises because of its design. Fair enough. So, what about the rest?

This is where the other half of the experience is an utter failure, as far as I'm concerned. While the art and music is always on point (especially pleasing given the fact that the breadth of locations across the episodes is fairly wide), the road trip structure means each episode works like a standalone point on an arc, where you meet different characters during your journey and each introduces you to a new dynamic. Good thing, right?

Here's a list of themes this game deals with: police violence, child kidnapping, constant racism and race-related abuse, rigid suburban conservatism, homelessness, parental abuse, parental neglect and absence, hippie commune dynamics, gay relationships, transparent religious zealotry, gay intolerance, and more abuse perpetrated because of racism. Just one of these topics is loaded, to say the least. To feature all of them across 5 episodes that last 2-3 hours each, never mind dealing with Daniel's developing personality and building your own potential relationships, is in a word hopelessly naive. Some of these are given just a look-in, and some of these are given more time; but all of them are examined in ways that are mediocre to poor in execution despite good intentions.

The biggest failing, though, is that almost all of these encounters are so wretchedly mundane. Drama is about characters, and extracting remarkable moments from them, both quiet and loud. Almost none of the supporting characters in Life Is Strange 2 have anything beyond a broad stereotype given the most perfunctory of character wrinkles. Controlling religious grandmother? Ah, but she's got a soft heart if you do the right things. Stoner bro with dreads and eyeroll-inducing tattoos? Ah, but he's gay. Manipulative religious pastor? Okay, there's really nothing more to her. (I cannot judge if the game's treatment of Mexican Americans is accurate, so I will leave that to our Mexican/Mexican American friends to weigh in on. My impression is that Dontnod did their research, and it was well-intentioned enough that Sean and Daniel's characters almost got there, but the portrayal was still missing the complete picture.)

Everyone outside of the main duo is a walking cliché. Witness the two gay hippie characters you meet - one wears a tie-dyed shirt, and the other has a string of beads around his neck. And everyone talks, and talks, and not a moment of poetry between any of these lines. Even an important character who writes poetry - when you read them, every poem trades in empty imagery like scraps of napkin rhyme lifted off empty picnic tables by the wind. You meet a lot of people in Life Is Strange 2, and despite taking too long with each of them, none of them is given enough room to breathe and be little more than their own stereotype.

It is, in a word, tedious. So much of it is just too broad, just a little too clumsy, even many of the bits that work. It is a game of humdrum tedium and manufactured conflict, yet it is bookended by a premise about brotherhood that knew what it was doing. And that's why I can't shoot this game down, in the final analysis.

It's a common truth that the journey is more important than the destination, but the ending I got struck home that my high morality decisions had but one logical conclusion, and there was no promise of a resolution where everything was going to be sunshine and rainbows. If anything, it told me something I've unconsciously known being the youngest in my family: being the older brother is a job no one asked for, but they have to do it, and sometimes they have to pay the price of being a parent because there was no one else to do it. It is drastically unfair and at the same time the biggest truth that this game somehow, in a long and winding and irritating and oft-tortuously boring road, managed to land on with a quietly profound empathy.

I don't know if the journey was worth it, but the destination reminded me to perhaps be kinder to the brothers we have, and that's a worthwhile sentiment in the end. Life really is the fucking strangest.

https://i.imgur.com/iacXxcC.jpg

Sulphur on 12/7/2020 at 12:07

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I've tried to keep much of the criticism general, but yes, good idea if you don't want the broad strokes spoiled for you.

Sulphur on 13/7/2020 at 11:40

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Thank you, Fox. :)

Sulphur on 13/7/2020 at 12:20

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It might be a consequence of our playstyles - I tried to do the right thing but remain easygoing at the same time in the beginning, and while Daniel listened to me more often than not, he'd get into an argument and be a wilful brat at certain points, the nadir of which is what happens in Episode 3's heist, especially if you choose to tell Finn to shove it. It might also be you have a higher tolerance level for petulance, I certainly don't have the patience of a saint. :D