i’d notice if you were gone.

Alright, where do I even begin.

For starters, the best I can describe Reunion is that it’s a game at war with itself. You can absolutely tell that it was cobbled together by whatever skeleton crew was left at Deck Nine after the layoffs following Double Exposure and was promptly rushed out the door by SE. On its own? I think the game is fine. Unremarkable, but fine. As a sequel to Double Exposure though? It’s pretty bad. As a sequel to the original? It’s somehow even worse.

But let’s start with the positives:

—Chloe is back and I’m actually really happy with how she’s characterized here.

—The plot itself is a lot tighter and doesn’t completely fall apart by the end like pretty much every Deck Nine game before it. It’s a pretty fucking lame plot, but it at least gets the job done.

—We got to see Max actually teach a class!

—The choices actually kinda matter for once (at least for a Deck Nine game) and the stakes are quite high compared to say, True Colors.

—Abraxas was expanded on after being kind of a nothing group in DE, even though certain story decisions with them felt quite out of left field and not consistent with how they were portrayed in the previous game.

—The moments between Max and Chloe are genuinely some of the best in the series.

—Backtalk thankfully wasn’t as cringy as it was in BtS.

—Chloe’s journal was surpsingly really well done.

—Music was good as usual.

Now onto the negatives:

—Crosstalk is just…gone now?

—SO many reused locations from DE and we don’t even get to explore certain locations from that game again such as the FAB, North Quad, bowling alley or Overlook (outside of cutscenes).

—Rewind mechanic was nowhere near as fun or well utilized as it was in LiS1.

—Backtalk was extremely underutilized.

—DE cast were either sidelined, flattened, or straight up removed (Diamond, Gwen).

—The actual mystery was again, lame as hell.

—Huge downgrade in mocap/animations compared to DE.

—Pretty much everything DE set up was either forgotten about or straight up retconned in the most laziest way possible.

—SO many visual bugs

—Romance options from DE are completely thrown out and you are only given the choice to romance Chloe.

—New characters like Ren and Owen were extremely shallow and, much like the DE cast, did not get enough proper attention for me to feel anything towards them.

—What happened to the pride flag in the Snapping Turtle?

Now I really just want to hone in on my biggest issue with Reunion that I mentioned before, and that’s how the DE cast were absolutely done dirty here.

Listen, it’s no secret that the DE cast was unpopular. Barely anyone was making fan content of them just months after that game released, and the general consensus seemed to be that they were largely unlikable/shallow characters by the community. For me though? I fell somewhere in the middle when it came to the consensus on them. I personally believed that the main issue with a lot of the characters in DE was that they were all (with the exception of Vinh ofc) heavily underutilized and lacked the appropriate amount of screentime they deserved. Loretta at first seems like she’s going to be a pretty important character, but then completely disappears after chapter 2. Safi is suppose to be Max’s new best friend but we barely spend anytime with her for large parts of the game. Amanda is suppose to be a major love interest for Max yet is completely irrelevant to the game’s entire plot. You get my point, they’re just not handled in the best way.

Even with that though, I still felt as if a lot of them had potential to be great from a lot of the interactions we saw of them on Crosstalk (which was easily one of the best aspects of DE). The different relationships and dynamics they all had with each other was SO cool and interesting to me, and it’s why I was genuinely looking forward to a sequel to DE in the hopes that they would get expanded on and continue to develop as characters. What we got in Reunion though? Was absolute bullshit.

See, good writers would be able to take a character that seems unimpressive in a previous installment and make them, perhaps not a fan favorite, but at the very least a more interesting character. A good example of this is Garrus from Mass Effect 1. In that game he’s…pretty fucking boring, honestly. The best aspects of him are his amazing design and voice, as well as the lore he brings regarding the Turians and their relationship with humanity. Outside of that though…he’s pretty bland in ME1. Same with Tali, they’re both just walking codex entries for their respective species. That’s not to say these two didn’t have fans back in the day (they absolutely did!), but it’s no secret that Mass Effect 2 drastically improved their characters and gave them a lot more to do, making them some of the best characters in all of gaming.

Reunion however, does not take this type of approach with the DE characters. If anything, they are even worse versions of themselves, which didn’t even seem possible to me at first but it looks like Deck Nine managed to somehow do it! For one, the game retcons all of the characters learning about Max’s powers at the end of DE and explains it away as “storm amnesia” which is genuinely so fucking dumb and lazy it’s absoultely baffling to me. It robs the characters of potentially so many interesting dynamics with Max and essentially brings all of their relationships with her back to square 1. It makes the entire last chapter of Double Exposure and all of the moments Max had with these characters completely pointless.

Outside of that, all of them have been completely flattened as characters and pushed to the wayside, stripping them of whatever made them interesting in DE. Getting into specific cases, Reggie has lost whatever intrigue he once had regarding his depression/religious trauma that was alluded to in DE and is now just a flanderized version of himself (yet he somehow became the new Abraxas president despite barely being a member in the last game???). Moses (despite how much I love him) is now just used to exposit timeline bullshit to the audience and we learn absolutely nothing new about him as person. Amanda is somehow even more irrelevant here than she was in DE (and spends more time with Chloe than Max?). Vinh is….god where do I even start with Vinh lol. On paper I think his actions in this game make sense with his character from DE, but it’s also just….not the direction I would have taken his character period.

See, I wanted to see Vinh continue to grow and move past his more deceptive antics from DE. I wanted more introspective conversations between him and Max about their relationship with Safi. I wanted Vinh to actually help Max (and potentially Chloe) in solving whatever crazy mystery she finds herself in next! Instead, they focused on arguably the least interesting aspect of his character (his relationship with Yasmin). Him and Max’s dynamic is frustratingly back to where it were at the beginning of DE, except even less interesting. They don’t flirt with each other anymore, there’s no witty or interesting banter between them, it’s all just so…bland. And when they’re not acting like planks of wood they’re back to being extremely cagey and standoffish towards each other, which they should be past by this point. Even Max’s reaction to Vinh potentially dying is so…muted. We don’t learn anything interesting or new about Vinh (outside of his middle name which is admittedly pretty adorable), he’s just back to the status quo from the last game. I wanted to learn more about his family, delve deeper into his backstory, anything! But nope, just more of the same.

And like, at the end of the game Safi can literally come back to Caledon and is with everyone at the Snapping Turtle, and I’m really suppose to believe Vinh wouldn’t comment on that…at all? The woman he was infatuated with for years and broke his heart?? It’s like the writers completely forgot about his past relationship with her.

Vinh and Amanda’s treatment in this game is so clearly a response to the backlash they received from Pricefielders, and it’s just so…frustrating. I’m just gonna say what I posted on twitter about this whole situation here now; I really don’t give a fuck how unpopular Vinh and Amanda were as romance options, Reunion having them break up with Max offscreen by the beginning of the game and not even giving you the option to get back with them at the end is rancid and cheap as hell.

“Oh but Deck Nine broke Max and Chloe up the same way in DE!” yeah that was lazy as fuck then and it’s lazy as fuck now lol. Them doing the same thing to Amanda and Vinh doesn’t change how badly written both scenarios are. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

But also, it’s just basic video game romance 101 to not pull the rug out from under people. It’s the reason why Jacob Taylor’s romance in Mass Effect 2 is so awful because there’s no follow through in Mass Effect 3, he just gets another girl pregnant while Femshep is in jail and dumps you.

Like fine, keep the contrived offscreen breakup for both Vinh and Amanda so that Max is single at the beginning of the game so you can make way for Chloe. Hell even keep them sidelined for majority of the game like they already are. But there SHOULD have been an option to get back with them at the end of the game if you didn’t romance Chloe. Why restrict player agency and choice in a CHOICE BASED GAME? It’s also just a terrible look that the only two non-white romance options in the series are the only ones that the player can’t actually get with in the end lmao.

As for the other characters, Diamond got completely removed from the story because the new writers clearly didn’t know what to do with her after abandoning Safi’s plan to look for other people with powers. They might be trying to setup a sequel with her based off the optional phone call you can have with her at the end, but I honestly doubt that will ever see the light of day.

Ultimately, I think they did the best they could with Safi’s character and connecting her to Chloe, but she also suffered from obvious rewrites of what her original role was likely going to be. As it stands, her role in Reunion feels very…sad, lonely, and underwhelming.

As a whole, I’d say Loretta was the only character from DE who was actually somewhat elevated here. So, there’s that I guess.

At the end of the day though, Reunion is a game for and only Pricefielders. And as much as I love (or use to love) Pricefield, that’s not the only thing I come for when buying a Life is Strange game. As a sequel to Double Exposure, I came in hoping/expecting the characters to be expanded on and for my choices from that game to actually be respected. Reunion didn’t do either of these things.

There’s other issues I could go on about, like how Deck Nine clearly don’t understand how Max’s powers work (specifically photo jumping), or how Arcadia Bay and Chloe being back for everyone completely undermines the first game’s themes and ending, but then I’ll just be here all day at that point lol.

In short, despite how critical this has been, I do think Reunion is pretty decent. It has some great moments, a decent climax, and it definitely puts the series back in a positive direction after DE’s ending (if it actually continues on after this). But personally? As a duology, Double Exposure and Reunion are so conflicting with each other and the first Life is Strange that it’s better for my own sanity to simply not consider either of them canon. Play them only if you want more Max (and eventually Chloe), but that’s it. If DE was like, a 6/10 for me, Reunion is a a solid 7/10.