Life is Strange

Well put, that was the feeling I was trying to describe (except that I didn't hate Chloe, beyond her moments of selfishness).

In what way does the Bay ending reverse Max's character development? She still remembers the events of the game, they still happened to her.

edit - page topper

edited 11th May '16 12:12:15 AM by artfulscruff

True, but not all decisions are ones that matter that they happened to Max. In the sense that some of them don't really lead to Max's character development. One could argue that the decisions of being nice and befriending Victoria would be character development on Max's side, but decisions like having the one kid draw your picture or talking to Dana about her pregnancy don't develop Max as a character, but Dana and the other kid's relationship with Max which then becomes undone and kind of irrelevant if Chloe is sacrificed.

Yeah, you're not wrong there, but there's still the potential for Max to rebuild those relationships, which I think is kinda cool (though it is a bit creepy/manipulative to use future knowledge to make friends with someone).

Because Sacrifice Chloe is about embracing the person Max was in the beginning: stuck in her shell, reluctant to reach out and make her own mark on the world. Max becomes stronger as a person over the course of the story because she learns to trust in her own judgment and becomes willing to step up for what she wants and what she believes is the right thing.

In some ways, Life is Strange is a coming-of-age story for Max. It reflects the transition from childhood to adulthood, the move from doing what you're supposed to, to deciding for yourself what should be done and reaching for it even when others tell you that you're wrong. Max becomes a conscious, deliberate actor upon the world around her rather than a passive recipient of other people's choices.

And then the tornado happens, because even when you mean well, even when you do the best you can at every turn, sometimes bad things happen despite or even because of your choices.

Accepting the tornado means accepting the consequences for Max's actions; that she did the best she could but now the storm is here and all she can do is try and weather it, then rebuild.

Sacrificing Chloe, on the other hand, means embracing nihilism and declaring that the world would be a better place if Max had never made the effort to reach out in the first place. It means rejecting the transition from childhood to adulthood and choosing to remain as a passive recipient of life.

@Tobias: I can't say that your interpretation of the ending is wrong because, you know, interpretation, but it's definitely not the only possible one. My personal interpretation is as far from yours as it's possible.

Max remembers what happened. She knows that, if she just spends a little effort, she can connect with people, she can learn to like others and be liked from them, she can act and change things and whatever. What she cannot do, not without extreme consequences, is changing something that already happened. Her Character Development isn't negated at all in my interpretation. She did grow up and will apply the lessons and the personal skills she has learned during the game in her actual, future life. It's basically "Hey Max, if you break out of your shell you can connect with others and be liked and popular for what you are and all these positive things... buuut that does not mean that you can fix everything or make everything go as you want". In my eyes, the life of the Max that went through the game and chose the Sacrifice Chloe ending will be extremely different from the life of an hypotetical Max that never went through the game in the first place.

edited 11th May '16 10:16:36 AM by Cozzer

I was going to respond with pretty much that. I can't outright refute anything said, it's a solid interpretation, but I still don't think that Max's character development has been undone. She still experienced those five days, those things still happened to her, she hasn't lost those memories. The world might have been reset, but she hasn't.

I'm just going to stop, I can't find a way to say it better than Cozzer did :P

I spent most of Memorial Day Weekend playing with my 7-year-old nephew and 4-year-old niece, and finally found some time to play a game by and for myself. I played Life Is Strange. Of course my nephew walked in, but he took surprising interest in the game, asking me questions, asking me to make choices, and later asking me to play the game again. I was surprised that he was so interested. I started explaining the story (including, yes, how Mark Jefferson is the bad guy) and he asked me to play the last episode so he could see.

He watched me play most of episode 1, which means he was exposed to Chloe's drug use, Chloe being slapped by her stepdad and threatening him with arrest (I showed him all four possible outcomes to that scene), Nathan coming out to threaten Max and beat up Warren, and the principal not believe Max's story about Nathan having a gun. I guess that's a bit much for a 7-year-old to be exposed to perhaps. I was still impressed that he was so interested in the game.

He said that his favorite part was seeing everything go backwards when I rewound time.

You'd be surprised at how much kids can actually handle and absorb. It also depends on the kid, some are more ready than others to tackle such deep subject matter that Life is Strange offers.

Well my ex-girlfriend play the game, she didnt know you can be girlfriend of chole and chose Warren.....

Them she chose Chloe over the town because she feel bad for already killing chloe Twice.....

I laught a lot about that

Wow. I feel like I have a hangover from finishing this game. A++ would recommend to a friend, just be prepared to feel it. I'm normally very critical of video game stories, as I feel most games rely on tropes that are dead horses in every serious medium of storytelling and too many gamers who clamor for story should pick up a library card. But this game is something else, I am seriously impressed.

My interpretation is that the game itself is, in a way, Max's entry into the Everyday Heroes contest. It shows two heroes: her real hero, Chloe, and the man she thought was her hero, Jefferson.

Ultimately I felt like the game was a portrait of Chloe. We "are" Max but we learn only so much about her - but we learn all about Chloe's life, meet the people who matter to her, hear her dreams and regrets. I can't help but feel like Chloe comes from someone's personal experience.

I did feel like the final wrap up was a cop out, which makes me almost resent that it was so brutally effective. I expected...I don't know, something more to explain the tornado in the final chapter. Something strange. Not just the cold hands of fate reaching out to rip Chloe away once and for all. However, I must admit that the simple existence of the ending choices gives the game its lasting impact. The concept that the game was all for nothing, that you were seriously better off not even playing and undoing the fact that you did - indeed, you cannot even resort to the meta-game time hacking that most games allow, which is replaying the game with the knowledge of experience, because the ending is still the same - that Chloe is damned by fate, is unthinkably unjust and yet frustratingly true to life.

I secretly wish there'd been a happy ending though. Max burned a path through space and time for Chloe, she ripped the fabric of the universe apart to be with her, I don't even like love stories and yet I was rooting for them. Well done, LIS.

edited 5th Jul '16 12:36:21 AM by lvthn13

For the most part I love the game, but the explanation for the storm was lame. It feels like they wanted the choice between saving Chloe and Arcadia, but they couldn't think of a good way to connect the two so they went with vague connection between Max's powers and the storm. The worse part is that I would have bought it if wasn't for the eclipse and the two moons. If it was just the snow, the dying animals, and the tornado because atmospheric phenomena is probabilistic so a single small change could make crazy stuff happen.

The setup for the final choice was very weak.

Yeah, I'd be willing to buy atmospheric phenomena messed up by the constant rewinds, but there is no conceivable way Max's powers caused the moon to behave erratically and briefly clone itself. And even if that did make sense, the idea of solving the crisis created by abusing time travel via abusing time travel some more is gibberish.

Even chapter five felt like it was supposed to be going somewhere else. The trippy dream sequence capped off by a confrontation between Max and a temporally-aborted Max made it seem like there was something more to all of this. But nope. Filler.

Personally, I was expecting the problem to be a bit more Final Destination. Chloe was meant to die, she didn't die, and now reality is bending around itself trying to rectify the issue and kill her. The one constant throughout the game that seems to come back up every time you turn around is that Chloe's life is always in danger.

It was even a major plot point in chapter four that turning back the clock to unwrite a tragic death can have drastic consequences. Max having to make the choice to let Chloe's father die seems to be foreshadowing an endgame all about the fact that there's a time and a place when everyone is supposed to go, and now reality is off its hinges because Max cheated death on Chloe's behalf.

edited 18th Jul '16 8:40:54 AM by TobiasDrake

An interesting idea, but I'm not sure it holds up, as characters like Kate and Frank can live or die based on your choices, with no noticeable problems.

edited 18th Jul '16 9:09:38 AM by KarkatTheDalek

Your ability to turn back time is disabled for the duration of rescuing Kate. You cannot rewind time to save her.

Frank's possible death, meanwhile, is a direct consequence of Chloe's survival. His death happens during a fight with Chloe and Max. Had Max never saved Chloe, Frank's life wouldn't even be in question.

edited 18th Jul '16 10:42:56 AM by TobiasDrake

Sez you

x4

I attributed the Double Moon to being a time problem. One moon is at the position of where it should be sans Max rewinding all the time. i.e. Where the moon should be had it continued to move during Max's rewinds and NOT being paused by time. Then the second moon would be in the position of where it should be based on the actual time of day. i.e. The moon's position if it was frozen by Max's time powers like everything else.

Or that's the only explanation I can think of.

The game is ambiguous about the problem. I can't tell if the problem is that Max's rewinding is causing problems or if its Chloe's survival that is causing issues. The game REALLY seems to push that Max's powers are what created the storm and the dead birds and everything. At which point, I can't see any flaws with the idea of going back in time to Day 1 and doing everything over with the foreknowledge that Max cannot use her powers, but she still knows what will happen.

Wait, so are you saying that when Max rewinds, she's, like, only rewinding the Earth, not time itself?

Don't you think astronomers all over the planet would have noticed that and flipped their shit?

Well, not exactly. My suggestion is that there's a conflict in the game between what 'should be' and what 'shouldn't be' in terms of what Max has created with her powers. So, if the Storm exists because Max has been using her powers period, then it makes sense to me that the double moon is simply a 'should' and 'shouldn't be'.

I would like to point out that its MORE than implied that not just Astronomers but scientists of all fields everywhere are losing their shit over the sudden snow, the animals dying, and finally the double moon. Presumably they'd have reacted the same to the tornado too.

Two flaws.

1. It's just yet another use of time travel to change the past. What makes this use of time travel cease to be time travel?
2. Max doesn't actually have the ability to do that. When she snapshot-flashbacks, she can't stay there. She can only make changes within the confines of the immediate area around the snapshot, and then she returns to the present where her changes have taken effect.

1) That's kind of a problem the game has in general. Once you've introduced time travel, you can't un-introduce it. Just going back to stop time travel is STILL time travel. If the solution to 'Don't use time travel to change the past' and you have to use time travel to prevent it, solve the problem, and save the goddamn day, then there's a big contradiction here. Even if we argue that she can't change the past in the ending, she doesn't repeat the same actions anyway. She doesn't come out from behind the stalls like she did the first time. So, what does or doesn't constitute as 'changing the past' is kind of ambiguous here. This is proven again when we have the scene where 10YearOld!Max burned the photo. She changed the past there and, as far as we can tell, that never got corrected.

2) And that makes things just as confusing. How much does Max know when she rebounds the timeline? Earlier in Episode 5 suggests that Max will remember nothing for the duration that Future!Max took over. But, uh, how is Past!Max going to rationalize 'I did nothing when Chloe died'? Because Max still goes on from the time that we jump into her younger self to the time point that we rebound back to.

Basically, what I'm trying to get at is doing the snapshot thing could create DRASTIC differences in Max's character between the point we jumped to and the point we returned to and that just doesn't make much sense to me.

I think I'm starting to realize a few of the flaws people had with the ending...

edited 18th Jul '16 4:57:35 PM by InkDagger

It probably would create drastic differences but, as seen when she stopped Chloe's father from dying, those differences get unwritten the moment Past Max catches up and Max Prime resumes control of her life.

The Time Bastard^Listen! By changing an event in your past, you create a separate version of yourself who lives a different life that you would have lived up until the point at which they catch up with you. At which point, that person is erased from reality. They suddenly cease to exist, everything they ever were abruptly ends, and you - the Time Bastard - go on in their place. principle is very much in effect. Which is precisely what Dream Max's beef with Max Prime was.

edited 18th Jul '16 5:19:07 PM by TobiasDrake

Its hard to believe those differences could be so easily unwritten.

So, say we went back to Day One and it played out as Max did in the first place WITHOUT going back in time. Nathan just shot Chloe and Max runs out to interfere. Uh, that might cause problems. Nathan is volatile and still has a gun. What's to say he doesn't just shoot her? Where does that put "Time Bastard" Max?

Or would it be impossible to think that Max would walk out of that horribly depressed and having survivor's guilt for several days and her parents might discuss removing her from Blackwell or getting her a Therapist or having a bunch of other important conversations that would be really hard to argue 'Oh, I just forgot about that'?

What happens if Max theoretically creates a situation where she would have died in the intrum? Or where her behavior would be so vastly different from the "original" that everyone would notice (ala what happens in Episode 4)? It wasn't a big deal in Episode 4 where we were there for all of an hour or so, but in a situation where we can't use time travel to fix the solution???

It's a consequence of time travel. The Max who went back in time and then returns to the present is not the Max of the new timeline, so when she returns to the present, Max Prime is basically reasserting her identity, temporally-murdering New Max in the process.

That's why it's called Time Bastard. In any model that includes Time Bastard, you are constantly at risk of being spontaneously erased from existence by some other version of yourself, that bastard.

He didn't know she was in there and he'd already left by the time Max Prime released control of her past self. We actually see the changes. Nathan freaks out, flees the scene, and is shortly after arrested by David and his campus security. He's interrogated and - because he's a scared, dumbf*ck kid and not an evil mastermind - he immediately rolls over on Mr. Jefferson, who is consequently arrested as well. Rachel Amber and Chloe both receive posthumous justice without Max ever doing a thing.

This is basically the way things were supposed to play out had she never discovered time travel and used it to save Chloe. By letting Chloe die, Max allows the original timeline to reassert itself, then returns to the present just in time to attend Chloe's funeral.

It's also why my position on this ending is that it's embracing nihilism. "Everything would have been better off if Max stayed in her shell and didn't try to help anyone. Help can cause problems, so never try."

Time travel always has risks. And yes, it is theoretically possible to temporally assassinate yourself. Max is fortunate that she never ran afoul of that. Of course, one can argue that she was temporally assassinating herself every time she used time travel 'cause Time Bastard, but that's not quite the same thing - even if it is exactly what Dream Max was upset about.

edited 19th Jul '16 7:24:39 AM by TobiasDrake

Not exactly. The first time Max does this in Episode 1, She steps out from behind the stalls and shouts 'No!'. Chloe is still falling to the floor. The gun has left Nathan's hands. Nathan is still there. THEN everything rewinds. If that had played out without the time travel... Uh, things could get messy.