Life is Strange

I'm confused how going through the week knowing what we do and NOT using time travel to do so isn't a legitimate option?

Just go back to the start and make decisions without using time travel. Since that's essentially what the 'Sacrafice Chloe' ending is anyway, I don't see the problem?

She can't go back to the start. She can just visit. When using a snapshot, she can't leave the immediate area surrounding the snapshot. She can just make some changes and then snap back to the present. She doesn't relive the time between then and now; instead, once she leaves the snapshot, the Max of the past is reasserted and lives out her life up until she reaches the present, then is promptly annihilated by the time-traveling Max returning to the present and seizing permanent ownership of her body - a phenomenon known as Time Bastard.

The ending implies that in the new timeline, Max might not even ever discover she has time travel. Because she misses the freakout reaction to the gunshot that awakens her powers, she wakes up from the time-possession in a room with a corpse. Nathan is arrested for Chloe's murder. Nathan promptly rolls over on Jefferson because he's a dumbass kid in over his head. Jefferson is taken into custody, and all this happens without Max ever doing anything, growing as a person, or influencing anyone's life in any way.

The problem with the series' internal logic is that all this comes about because Max used some more time travel. If the use of time travel can unwrite the use of time travel then the tornado never should have happened because every time Max went back in time, she unwrote the act of going back in time. There exists no point in time where Max actually travelled back in time because she always undid the events that resulted in her going back in time. Temporally, she has only ever arrived, never left, and if that's good enough for the Sacrifice Chloe ending then it should have been good enough for every other usage.

The game asserts that the tornado was created by time travel and can only be stopped by abusing time even harder.

edited 29th Mar '16 7:18:20 AM by TobiasDrake

You're forgetting that protagonist Max still has her time powers in the timeline that Chloe's dad is still alive, even if that universe's Max does not.

That universe's Max never "unlocked" her time powers by seeing Chloe get shot, but protagonist Max did, so it doesn't matter if it happens or not, Max already went through it.

edited 29th Mar '16 9:16:47 AM by RunoEddie

In what way am I forgetting that?

Never mind, I misunderstood what you meant.

Ignoring all the time tornado bullshit, I still think Max should have tried to undo the accident that alt Chloe got into, it would have been the best of both worlds.

Couldn't she presumably grab one of her photos from around the time of the accident, call her and try to bullshit some reason for Chloe not to go out in her car?

edited 29th Mar '16 9:26:39 AM by RunoEddie

As long as she can find a photo from around that time with both herself and a phone nearby - as the butterfly photo aptly demonstrates, she doesn't have to be in the shot for it to work, just close enough that she has a target to possess - that might have actually worked. Just calling her would be enough of a reason not to go out; a non-cynical Chloe would be thrilled to hear from her and would probably be willing to talk for hours.

She seems to have a very limited period of time inside the photo, but that's fine. If she releases the Past Max in the middle of a conversation with her old friend, she'll probably be a bit confused but continue it of her own volition.

edited 29th Mar '16 9:29:25 AM by TobiasDrake

But Max DOES go back to the start. In the scene where Chloe dies, none of the black photo splotches that usually go with a snapshot rewind (shown vaguely in the end of Episode 3 and they become more pronounced as the series went on) are shown in that ending and the scene plays exactly the same as it did all the way back in Episode 1.

All of that suggested to me that she didn't momentarily snapshot back but instead went through the week like normal with no use of her powers.

That's not something she can do. She has never had the power to permanently remain in a snapshot past, even at times when it would be useful such as most of Episode 5. That facet of her powers has consistently been depicted as rubber-banding her back to the present when she's done making her changes.

If they meant to suggest that she permanently remained in the snapshot, it would be an Ass Pull on top of the other problems with that ending because she does not have that power and never has.

EDIT: In fact, if she could do that, it would sidestep the entire conflict. If Max could actually go back into the snapshot permanently, there's no reason she couldn't stay there, make all the right choices, save Chloe, and never use her time travel again to avoid the tornado. The only reason not to go for a Golden Ending is because Max doesn't have the ability to do that.

edited 30th Mar '16 7:44:58 AM by TobiasDrake

A Lthough she could probably write a note telling her what to do after she goes back to the present

• FUTURE MAX: Dear Past Me. I'm using my time travel powers to communicate with you. Here's the things you need to do.
• PAST MAX: I have time travel powers? Sweet! I'm going to abuse the hell out of these!
• (Tornado)

Game Theory compares the final choice of the game to the Trolley problem when examining why players made the choices they did.

Huh, I was about to ask if the majority who played the game saved the Bay or saved the bae, but I guess answered my question.

Weird, I was almost certain everyone would forsake Arcadia Bay for Chloe...

I'm not surprised more people sacrificed Chloe then the Bay. Besides her being a Base Breaker for a lot of players, I also saw a lot of people who felt that sacrificing the Bay would be way worse morally then letting Chloe die. Personally, I think they're both really hard decisions to make.

edited 9th May '16 4:16:41 PM by ScottPilgrim2013

I really didn't want to, but I couldn't justify letting hundreds of people die for the sake of one girl (for the record, Max and Chloe didn't fall in love in my game, I never got that vibe from their relationship at all, but maybe it develops different on other paths). For me personally, I don't think I could call it a hard decision, really, not in terms of actually choosing. I decided almost immediately that I couldn't sacrifice the Bay, but if by 'hard' you mean seeing the consequences, then yeah, that fucking sucked.

As someone else here put it at the time, had I chosen to save Chloe, I/Max couldn't have lived with myself knowing that I let people, including Chloe's own family, to be with her (romantically or otherwise).

I'm talking about people dying here, but was it ever explicit said that the entire population was killed? It seems unlikely to me that literally everyone would die. Surely some would be only injured, for example. Almost certainly everyone would lose their home though.

This is basically what I had meant in my last post. A lot of people's reasoning for letting Chloe die is that it'd be worse to let dozens of other people die just for Chloe to live.

Personally, I'm not a fan of either decision. I may be Bae over Bay, but even then, I still have problems beyond the usual "letting all those people die for one person".

I can see the reasons behind either decision; the only thing that bugs me is when people say it's an easy decision. No matter what you chose, if the choice itself didn't trouble you at all, then you weren't doing it right.

#imjustsayin

Well it was kind of an easy decision for me though, I liked the entire supporting cast way more than Chloe.

Doesn't mean I liked choosing it.

edited 10th May '16 2:49:08 PM by RunoEddie

I found it an easy decision to make based on several meta factors, and if I were to play the game again I'd still find the final choice easy to make regardless of which I choose.

Well... it was an easy decision for me, but I could see how it was an extremely hard decision for Max and empathize with her.

I wasn't a fan of Chloe so it wasn't exactly hard for me, either. I can appreciate the choice itself and how difficult it is for others, though.

It certainly was hard for me due to liking both Chloe and the supporting cast. And yet I still don't like the feeling of giving up the Bay. But I also don't want to give up Chloe either. As you can see, I ain't a fan of the ending.

I'm with Runo Eddie. I like some of the supporting characters more than Chloe. Had they not been there, I would have thrown the town under the bus for Chloe.

I think the reason the choice was so hard for me was because I'd grown to love all the characters so much and Max's varying relations with them. I really felt that these were people, so the final decision made me super sad, especially for Max. That final choice was either a blast to the conscience, or heartbreaking.

It's deliberately ambiguous. In the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending, you see the destroyed buildings but you never see a single person alive or dead. The audience is left to decide for themselves how extensive the damage was.

For me, the conflict is one of Doyle versus Watson. Sacrificing Chloe is the morally right decision, but narratively unconscionable because it erases the entire story from existence, reverses all of Max's Character Development, and presents the Family-Unfriendly Aesop that you shouldn't help people because you'll just make their lives worse, so never try.

edited 10th May '16 7:41:40 PM by TobiasDrake