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Ready for the Mosh Pit, Shaka Brah! General Life is Strange Discussion

Issun

Issun

(He/Him)
So this happened:


As someone who has always chosen bae over bay, as well as each games' story being kind of self-contained while being in the same universe, I am very conflicted about this. It would be a big risk making one ending cannon over the other, but it's also possible, with the parallel realities angle, that Chloe figures in somehow and DeckNine is jut holding he back as a future reveal? I'm holding back any real opinion for now, but I do wish that this was the graphical upgrade that the original game's remaster had gotten.
 
Doing a retrospective playthrough of all the games before DE comes out. The first game is still one of my most beloved games ever, no surprise there. What is surprising is how much better I'm finding Before the Storm to be pn a second playthrough. Rachel is there because she has to be given the timeframe, but I'm seeing this time how well the game serves Chloe. The pain of her father dying and Max abandoning her at the same time really comes through, and you get why she gloms on to Rachel Amber even though it's clearly an unhealthy relationship. I wrote it off originally as a story that didn't need to be told but getting Chloe's perspective on things really does flesh out her and Max's relationship. Plus we got Steph Gingrich.
 
The Farewell episode of Before the Storm just wrecked me this time around. It also made me want to someday play the series in chronological rather than release order.

Captain Spirit is still a neat little vignette lead in to the sequel, and I found a couple of neat moments that I hadn't before. It does have the problem of trying to tackle an incredibly weighty subject in a short, fluffy teaser episode, and IIRC Chris's story gets pretty short shrift in LiS2. Kind of a misstep I think.
 
After replaying all of the Life is Strange games to date (and finally getting around to Wavelengths, the True Colors DLC), I really am struck by how special this series is, a uneven and cringey as it can sometimes be. There is something to be said for games using gameness and ambiguity for storytelling, and Souls and Ueda games do this brilliantly, but for being cinematic while still having the interactivity being essential to the storytelling mechanism, this series doe it better than anyone. Add to that an ever-growing slate of compelling characters and a consistently well-curated soundtrack and, even given its faults, the Life is Strange series has already cemented itself among the greats of the medium. Here's hoping Double Exposure does the legacy proud.

I want to do a longer piece about what the series means to me after playing and thinking about the new game next month, but it'll be a while, and very long. Might even make a separate thread for it.
 
So with the first two chapters of Double Exposure out, I got spoiled on one thing but it was a thing I suspected anyways. Knives are out in certain corners of Reddit and Twitter over the decision, and I can say I'm not the happiest about it, but there's still over half of the game that people have not played so who knows what happens with that down the line? Plus the writers and the company don't owe us the story we want. The game itself sounds like it's pretty good though, so I'm still looking forward to playing it.

If you want to know the particular spoiler: If you chose Sacrifice Arcadia Bay, Max and Chloe have broken up
 
So far LiS Double Exposure is really good. I'm considering it only one of many possible continuations of Max and Chloe's story, and it's not the one I'd choose personally for them, but it works in the context of what Deck Nine is doing here.

It's also theraputic. Some things happened in my life a year ago that I haven't talked about on here and still am not ready to, but a story about trying to rebuild one's life after a relationship that was supposed to last forever that just... didn't is helping me process some things.

It also has positive trans representation, so that's pretty awesome
 
So here are my final thoughts on Life Is Strange: Reunion if anyone is interested:

The new writing team is head and shoulders above Double Exposure's. They had to salvage a mess and they did better than anyone could have predicted. Obviously it's impossible for them to have portrayed Max and Chloe 100% accurately but they did better than expected and the relationship between them is about as authentic as you can get without DontNod and Ashly Burch.

It's not perfect. The story gets away from itself sometimes, and there are some visual bugs and because of what the previous game did, this one had to make choices that are very much at odds with the original, but to turn this whole thing around in a year and a half the way they did is impressive.

So on the whole, while I do have some major gripes with it, the devs took on a herculean task and mostly succeded and for any fan of the series this game feels like reuniting with a couple of old friends.
 
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