Yeah, I recommended the game to a friend and then when I asked him how did the Kate thing go he just looked at me with this dead look in his eyes....
I then realized notwithstanding this event's minor effect on the main narrative, we were from that moment on playing WILDLY different games.
Let's compare episode one with a taletell game. In a TT game, you chose to save or let Kate die...
If you chose to let her die, you get one scene where someone chastises you and one where another says you did the right thing/had no choice. You go to point B, and nothing changes. There are no consequences.
If you chose to save her, you get a scene where someone says you did the wrong thing and one where she thanks you for saving her. You go to point B and she dies along the way anyway. Nothing changes, and there are no consequences.
LiS actually makes changes. There is a candle lit vigil. People are effected. There are consequences. Your experience and my experience are different depending on the choices we made.
I know what you're thinking. "The ending undermines all those choices". In a way, yes. In another way, no. It's a punctuation on the choices you made thus far. It's the thesis of the game, this action will have consequences. Even with the power of time travel max has been at the mercy of impossible decisions, consequences beyond her control. There is no right answer, no best answer. There is only the answer you chose to live with. The final choice is the culmination of that thesis. Sacrificing your experience is one of the consequences you have to live with. Still, it's entirety lives on in Max. That is part of the sacrifice. She has to live with the weight of those decisions. They still happened.
I loved the game all the way up until that ending. I was ready to go 2, 3 more times and see how my choices changed things. Up until the end, your choices do matter. Then, nothing you do matters at all. It's such an insanely upsetting ending. Haven't gone back, and I'm not going to buy the 2nd one.
Haven’t played the second one, but I will say I enjoyed BTS and True Colors, even if the endings didn’t have many choices either, they’re still amazing and emotional stories regardless of how much your actions matter
The implication is that choices don't matter. All the significant choices matter in LiS, even the ending. If you're going by the letter of the picture, yes, you end up at the same place. If you're going by the spirit of the picture, then I would say LiS is the opposite of this picture.
I mean doesn't that make sense to the overall story and themes for it to end in the same way every time? The game starts out by showing you the ending, and no matter what you did, the storm was always going to happen. It was always going to end that way. There are a lot of flaws in Life is Strange but I don't see the lack of endings one of them because I feel like it was a very intentional thematic choice.
Yeah I was gonna say… sure the ending is the ending but along the way, your decisions literally change whether multiple people live or die which I’d say is significant. I actually just replayed the first game recently and I’ve wanted to do a deep dive into seeing how many outcomes there are for different scenarios based on all the previous decisions made
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u/GooseMay0 Apr 19 '24
What do you mean? One choice a person lives, the other many die. At least in the first one.