Poorly scheduled Life Is Strange talk thread: I hate Warren. (Off-Topic)

by Funkmon , Tuesday, October 27, 2015, 07:53 (3322 days ago)

I know only like 3 of us have bothered holding off talking about it until this week, but still. It was scheduled, on the day of Halo 5's release. Nice job, self. As a result, I expect, at most two replies to this.

To me, the most important thing in episode 5 was killing Warren. I needed him to die. I absolutely hate that guy. Here is a series of clips of me hating him (and one of me loving him, skip to 2:10) during the second half of episode 5, where I was recording myself. You probably shouldn't watch it, as while making the clips, I started to hate myself.

Luckily, the final choice allowed me to kill him, and also to kill Arcadia Bay, by saving Chloë, which, IMO, was the point. I've seen clips of the funeral scene, the one that happens when you allow Chloe to be killed, and it's longer and seems to have been the one favoured by the developers. However it doesn't seem to be the one favoured by the story.

Max dreams there's a storm. She goes to the bathroom. Chloe dies. NOW Max gets rewind powers. It's clear to me that Max gets a premonition because the universe has decided she needs to save Chloe. Note that she didn't change anything to require the storm to be there. It was already happening before she even used her power, despite the crap they keep talking in this episode. Max is always stressed out because she thinks she caused the storm, Warren, the imbecile, confirms this for her, and indeed Chloe and the game also seem to do this. So when Chloe dies, the storm is fine? Yeah, okay. That makes sense and is internally consistent.

There are some other problems I have with the story of this game not making any sense to me. For example, what's up with the deer that shows up during important story moments? Who even is that? Is that Rachel Amber? What does it mean? Speaking of Rachel Amber, why did we even need her? The stuff about the dark room and Nathan we could have gotten through Kate and stuff. The story didn't need the Rachel Amber plotline, so when nothing happened at all with it in this episode, I was surprised. That said, it did work well for what it did. I just assumed more would come of it .
And I also assumed more would happen in episode 5 itself. Episode 5 had about 10 minutes of actual story. Get saved, go talk to Warren for far too long, go to the lighthouse, kill Chloe. By the way, the lighthouse is the only safe place? REALLY? Right at the beginning of the episode we see it crash onto the ground, and in the dream it crushes Max. Why would Max think it's safe? Surely you'd want to be in a basement, or, IDK. IN EUGENE. SOME OTHER CITY. I guarantee it would be faster than walking up a fucking MOUNTAIN to get to an EXPOSED AREA on a CLIFF in a WIND STORM. And then Chloe goes back on what she said earlier? Lame.

Anyway, episode 5 was mostly just dumb puzzles and people repeating choices you made in the other episodes. "Thanks for saving me." the trucker says. That's the fucking payoff? I stole the handicapped fund money, so I get some line in the nightmare about it? It doesn't even change dialogue, it just changes lines people say. It's like NOTHING matters.

And frankly, it doesn't. The end scenes are in 30 FPS. They're videos. Those will always be those. The end choice will always be the end choice. I could have gone through the entire game making every anti-Chloe decision I could, siding with David, answering Kate's call, saying no to stealing, and she'd still tell me she'd be with me forever.

Now, nobody could reasonably expect a bunch of endings...but you could expect them to not be unchanging videos. Maybe different people there. Some kind of small pay off. An example of a game that did it right is the Telltale Borderlands game. I ain't got no screenshots since I played it on Xbox. There were different characters at the end that were available to you, and they had their own stories and lines depending on who you chose. That would be nice, even though the main outcome is the same.

I really wanted hot dog man to come into play.

As far as I can tell, there are two main types of these choose your own adventure games. Telltale does a thing where they give you the illusion of choice, so you think you're making choices, but it doesn't change much, if anything. Life Is Strange gives you tons of choices, and they are real choices, like helping Alyssa or not, with a change in story, but they just don't matter at all. The two games are different in plenty of other ways, like LIS being less a conversation simulator and more of a game, but that's the primary thing I see that's different.

So, episode 5, in my opinion, sucked. It seemed like DONTNOD simply got a checklist of decisions we made in other games, and rehashed them for 2 hours. The vast majority of this episode was replaying, or talking about, stuff we did in the past, and not even through the amusing time travel thing. Just showing it to us again. One thing the nightmare sequence did, though, is give me nostalgia.

Weird, for a game only a few months old. It made me think "man, that time walking along the railroad tracks was a good time." or that "jamming out with weed, shaka brah, was a good time." I felt nostalgia playing those scenes originally, remembering being in high school myself having those moments, but now, I feel it for the game.
Barring the hilariously bad dialogue in the nightmare sequence, which I think was a high point, I don't want to remember episode 5. When think back on LIS, I will think about episodes 1-4. In fact, my headcanon ends in the pool party. Chloe's fine, Arcadia Bay's fine, Warren's family and pets killed themselves in front of him and blamed him in the suicide notes, and Max is fine. Episode 5 was not like the first part of the game, so I hope to not think about it in the future.

Anyway, that's it. I hope someone who wasn't planning on playing the game but reads this does pick it up. The best part of the game isn't knowing how it all turns out, but the little things. It's worth it. Except this episode, which sucked.

But at least Warren died.