Life is Strange

Kate died on my run.

Same. It was really sad. I f'cked up quoting the Bible. Because everyone knows the Bible by heart and would know exactly which verse would... well I guess that's the point. Can't save everyone and make all the right choices.

Browsing the Steam forums yielded similar opinions. I liked Chloe, but I did feel around Episode 4 that Max's admonishment of her was pretty exaggerated, ironic even. She keeps describing Chloe as this fearless, amazing person, but throughout the game Chloe is mostly brazen and confrontational. Scenes like when they get caught by Nathan, and when they had to go talk to Frank show Chloe very afraid. She might have the guts to fight back, but still, how Max sees her as fearless is pretty inaccurate. Maybe that's intentional. The paradox is intentional.

I don't think they ignored her character flaws.

I mean, there's that. Max ignores her flaws, but, as said above, I think that's intentional. Chloe explicitly acknowledges her life as not being worth everyone else's.

I'm not sure at what point they brought this up - was it a journal entry, or a line of dialogue from Max? Regardless I don't see where they would have gone with that. Max's transformation seems to be the point of the game. (Episode 1 - Chrysalis)

Definitely agreed. I figured this was because Max turned Warren down to go see a film, but in hindsight I'm thinking those choices don't affect the plot much and Max still rejects, or keeps Warren out of the loop for the most part.

However, Max's subconscious says a lot about how she perceives Warren, and I think it's reinforced by this scene, which I completely missed on my playthrough. With scenes like that I can sort of understand why Max wouldn't want him around.

Or, since you meant he was underutilized by the plot, yeah, I guess he was. Given that, I'm surprised to learn about all the shipping wars - especially Chasefield. That one baffles me.

I got most of the... well maybe half of them. I'm not sure how many dialogues there potentially would have been but it was the one where they just showed you bible quotes that drove her off the ledge.

I want to get the soundtrack and find out what type of music this is. I've heard "gentle folk-pop" but that doesn't cover all of it.

edited 12th Jan '17 6:09:59 AM by Soble

I probably would have fucked it up had I had to quote the Bible, because I didn't remember which one was her favorite quote. I managed to talk her down largely by luck.

I managed the Bible quote just fine. It was picking the wrong parent that killed Kate for me.

They... ran out of money by Episode 5, didn't they?

The ambiguity of whether the storm was stopped by sacrificing Chloe haunting. Max doesn't really know - we don't hear from her, or read her journal, and it just fades to black while she's in front of Chloe's casket with no further word on the subject. Nobody knows what happened and we don't even know what's going to happen. But there's catharsis here - at least we find out Kate's alive, Jefferson and Nathan get busted. The story was building up to this. Anybody familiar with time travel probably saw it coming a mile away, but still, it worked.

The other ending is just Max and Chloe holding hands and going for a drive. You get no report on whether saving her was worth it, except that Max has a faint smile and Chloe touches her shoulder reassuringly - take that as far as you want. There's no news report on the casualties, a single sign of death (heck, Max saves multiple people if you're careful), no telling where Max and Chloe are going. I guess it works - Max prized Chloe above everyone else, so the ending reflects that by only showing her and Chloe together, and no one else. Still, I'd hoped to at least see some of the other citizens.

Well, anyway. Time to put some tea on and go cry over some fan fiction. :(

edited 12th Jan '17 8:55:24 AM by Soble

Huh. A thought occurred.

The alt!timeline bugs me because it isn't explained why Alt!Max is different.

But, in this timeline, since Chloe was paralyzed she didn't end up in the bathroom that week. So that means that Max probably accepted Hayden's offer on Monday to hang out with the Vortex Club...

...except that the dates in her journal indicate that she was a member prior to the big week. Hanging out with them might have changed her personality but the dates wouldn't match up. Plus that would mean Alt!Max got into drinking and drugs in the course of a week. She never befriended Alyssa, or Kate, or Warren.

My impression is that William's death caused Max to be more cautious and shy, as she feels guilty about abandoning Chloe after the death of her father.

I always assumed that the move made Max close up. Moving to a new city meant she'd have to meet new people and make new friends (while also mourning William's death). Its likely she just closed herself off instead of opening up.

Staying in her hometown, she already knew everyone and opened up to people she'd known for years and ended up becoming someone new.

TLDR: The move put a reset and stunted Max's social life, while not moving allowed her to continue growing.

I might be wrong but I thought it was stated that Alt!Max still moved because she and Chloe kept in contact via letters (which main!Max never did). Alt!Max was still gone for five years and came back for Blackwell.

I think Alt!Max was made different because of Alt!Chloe. With her dad around, Alt!Chloe would be more willing to keep in contact with Alt!Max.

My biggest issue with the ending is that the final choice is whether or not to pour napalm on the flames.

The plan to stop a problem created by Max's repeated abuse of time travel is to abuse time travel harder than she's ever done before, save for that one time. The second-greatest time travel she's ever performed. Just really rip the time-space continuum to shreds. That'll fix it. Somehow.

If we really are meant to believe that the tornado exists purely because Max f*cks with time, then f*cking with time harder should solve nothing. And if we're meant to take away that going back undoes any consequences of Max's previous time jumps, then the tornado disproves itself by way of Max having never gone back in time. She's only ever arrived in the past, never left. Just as she does in the Sacrifice Chloe ending.

It's a hackneyed solution that makes negative sense in order to justify a Bittersweet Ending to a problem that, itself, is not rooted in any kind of internal logic but instead only exists in order to necessitate a Bittersweet Ending. The tornado exists because F*ck You and can only be stopped by Go Screw Yourself, basically.

And that's without getting into the issue that I've rambled on about in the past, about how sacrificing Chloe is about embracing nihilism and declaring that the universe would be better off if Max stayed in her shell and had never made any effort to reach out in the first place.

EDIT: Oh, and for added F*ck You, recall that in Episode Four, the disasters were still happening in the Alt Chloe timeline. So Episode Four actually disproves Episode Five's assertion that photograph-travelling back and changing everything will stop the tornado.

There's a fanon that goes around that the tornado was actually being caused by Chloe's survival, time travel be damned, and that reality was untangling itself in reaction to the fact that every breath Chloe took was a violation of the natural order. I feel like that probably would have worked better with the whole "Sacrificing Chloe FIXES EVERYTHING" concept, but it's not what we got.

edited 16th Jan '17 3:30:25 PM by TobiasDrake

I think the moral at the end of the day was that Max wasn't supposed to save Chloe at all. If Alternate Max is any indication Max still comes out of her shell sooner or later. Time travel helped with that, but that vine had thorns.

It's Donnie Darko/Final Destination blended together. Max gets the chance to spend a week with Chloe but time ultimately has to go back so that Chloe can die when she's supposed to. This doesn't prevent Max from breaking out of her shell, but does leave her with some heavy PTSD which is probably just as bad if not worse.

I think that's the kicker. We don't know if that's what stops the tornado. Chloe's sacrifice might be for nothing. It's left ambiguous. We never get an actual date for the funeral.

Another interpretation I read is that the tornado isn't tailored to Chloe - the tornado is just the universe's method for ensuring that Max can't or doesn't make any more alternate timelines. The experience condemns her time travel powers either way - sacrifice Chloe by going back and thus Max realizes that altering time is bad and never does it again, or let the town be destroyed and feel guilty forever, and thus Max still feels like time travel is what caused it.

Well, this I agree with.

I never quite looked at it that way. But I'm honestly still a little too depressed by the lack of closure to look at the ending objectively.

Perhaps. That's the tragedy of it. Though another way to look at it - Max interfered and Chloe still lived. Chloe living is the problem. Even if she survived a car accident she was still supposed to die at a time of the universe's choosing. Or maybe it had nothing to do with her at all.

...make me rewrite my whole post why don't ya? I'm pretty sure that was the implication of sacrificing Chloe... like, the entire implication. This game is Donnie Darko for Max and Final Destination for Chloe. Max gets a week to reconnect with her friend that nobody other than her will remember/know about, Chloe is being stalked by "death."

My problem with the ending is just a lack of closure. We get photographs changing in the Bae ending - Jefferson and Nathan are caught, Max consoles Chloe's parents, Max's time with Chloe is changed to Max just... sitting there, looking at photos - and we know that others came to Chloe's funeral. Max's expression is vacant and there's no telling what she does next, no journal entry, and we end on a fade to black.

That sh't haunts me.

And the other ending? Max and Chloe drive off. I think symbolically this makes sense, but that sh't haunts me even more, because the fate of the cast is left in the air. Max looks miserable but at least... at least Chloe's there, right? Did they even attempt to look for survivors? There's so much up in the air there and they could've provided more photographs, or a few more seconds just to pad it out and show the devastation. But... they didn't.

I can only hope LIS 2 actually returns to Max, or provides some kind of "epilogue." I don't like where this one ended.

edited 16th Jan '17 3:48:49 PM by Soble

As I've also mentioned in the past, I really like the tornado ending.

The tornado ending, to me, feels like it's about consequence. Actions have consequences. Sometimes wholly unintended consequences, sometimes terrible consequences that arose from the best of intentions. But the fear of terrible consequences should never be a paralytic; we act, we take the consequences as they come, we do our best to weather them, and then we move forward.

Throughout the game, Max has countless opportunities to make choices and some of those choices are to help people. In the lead-up to the tornado, Max is given one last opportunity to reach out and help the people she runs into to bunker down and survive as best they can.

And in the ending itself, we never really see what becomes of them. We don't get to know. We never see a single person in the town, but we never see a body either. Consequences are what happened, and it's left to the audience to interpret for themselves how bad those consequences wound up being, based on what they know they did beforehand.

And, like, in the Sacrifice ending, the idea that the tornado is caused by something something quantum physics something something time travel ultimately detracts from the actual choice: Chloe, live or die? Time travel is used as a scapegoat reasoning and it's dumb because the real choice is whether Chloe is supposed to survive beyond her death.

But in the tornado ending, that screwed up rationalized explanation ultimately doesn't matter. It doesn't matter why the tornado is here. It doesn't matter what, exactly, Max did to cause it or if it's even her fault to begin with. The only thing that matters is that it IS here, and now everyone has to do what they must so they and the people they care for can survive it.

And anyone who survives will continue in the world that they and Max made together with the choices they've made in the week leading up to it. In the Sacrifice ending, every single choice Max ever made is revoked. Every time she ever touched a life, that's gone. A different Max lived this week and made different choices and then that Max was promptly annihilated by Our Max returning from her time travel and reasserting herself in her mind.^Hey! That principle, incidentally, is called Time Bastard. I will never stop loving that temporal mechanic.

But in the tornado, it all still happened. David's life is still changed by Max's involvement in it. So is Frank's. Warren's. Chloe's, of course. Every choice mattered to everyone who makes it through to the other side.

edited 16th Jan '17 4:01:16 PM by TobiasDrake

If the tornado was caused by Max saving Chloe, then why does Max have powers? That the game never answers this question is my biggest problem, because it ties very heavily into the plot and themes the game wants me to take at least somewhat seriously.

edited 16th Jan '17 4:15:57 PM by VeryMelon

Yeah... Max's powers show up just as Chloe dies, but she cannot in any way use them. And then using them to a greater extent than she's ever used them before is what apparently solves the problem.

On top of that, I see a logical flaw in this. The game objects to Max using her powers to save Chloe because it disrupts the natural flow of time. The action is unnatural. But, isn't Max doing nothing at all thus unnatural to the timeline? Especially since her 'natural' reaction to the situation was what created the powers in the first place? So, time is punishing Max for following the natural flow of time in the first place??? Why is Max stopping the event from occurring in a 'natural' (non-Time Paradox creating) way off the table?

For further WTF, Max's powers actually predate Chloe's death, albeit briefly. Max's first ever use of time travel is the vision she receives at the start of the game, the first time she sees the tornado that's about to hit Arcadia Bay.

Which means the tornado was coming before Max ever even discovered her powers. And yet can somehow be resolved by Max letting Chloe die.

The f*ck. This makes no sense on either the "Time travel made the tornado" or "Chloe's survival made the tornado" lines of thinking.

EDIT: Also, quantum physics something something weather messed up might explain most of the weird occurrences, but the appearance of two separate moons in the sky? Really? Quantum physics acting upon the weather cloned the moon?

edited 16th Jan '17 4:50:13 PM by TobiasDrake

The premonition is the biggest clue that Max always had powers, so I was a little bummed that nothing came of it.

Yeah. All and all, I feel like they were going somewhere different but something happened. Money ran out, ideas ran out, someone vetoed an important plot point, something. The tornado feels like a let-down when everything, especially the twin moons, felt like it was building to something grander.

Like, the entire nightmare sequence? That feels like it was meant to be something different. Like time itself is supposed to be breaking down around Max. Not just a series of random wacky happenstances that occurred in the land of dreams to fill time.

edited 16th Jan '17 5:08:56 PM by TobiasDrake

That nightmare definitely felt like it was going to be a very different thing until the budget ran out.

...might I ask at what point exactly?

When you confront that second Max near the end of it, that told me this sequence was meant to reflect time breaking in some fashion, instead of being a nightmare.

these are pretty much the reasons why i can't see myself ever recommending the game to someone. it has some strong points, but the game just does not deliver for some of the most important aspects.

The twin moons also support the idea of time breaking down. It's the piece that doesn't make a lick of sense in either the "Time travel something something quantum physics something weather patterns" explanation or the alternate "reality recoiling from Chloe's survival" theory. Why were there two moons? HOW were there two moons?

It points to the idea that time itself is beginning to break down, because the only explanation I've ever heard for the two moons that makes any amount of sense is that the sky is fracturing and what you are seeing is the moon at two separate points in time. One is the moon that is supposed to be there and the other is the moon a few hours into either the past or future, and you can see it because you're looking through a temporal fracture.

edited 17th Jan '17 9:05:28 AM by TobiasDrake

Right? There's no other reason for there to be two moons if the other explanations have nothing to do with time breaking down on itself.

To be fair here, I don't think most people would see the time travel related occurrences as the most important thing about Life is Strange. They'd focus more on the coming of age stuff, and Max and Chloe's friendship/romance.

edited 17th Jan '17 9:33:12 AM by VeryMelon

well... yeah. that's what I'm talking about too.

I'm not saying that it's bad, I'm saying that the game didn't leave me satisfied with the characters, plot, or really anything by the end.