#lis:de

On April 5th, 2024, the Deck Nine exposé came out. I was disappointed to hear about the culture at the company, and about the continued employment of a certain Nazi and senior environmental artist (we know who he is, and before anyone asks, as of this writing, despite the second round of layoffs in 2024, yes, he is still employed at the company... the rumors of him being related to someone high up are unconfirmed but boy do they sound plausible...) (UPDATE: as of mid-2025 he is out) and I remember thinking, well, this will definitely affect my choice to buy the next game or not. Now we just need to see what they're cooking up, and if I think it could be worth it in spite of this.

And on June 9th, I awoke from a nap (I had forgotten the Xbox event was that day LOL I woulda watched live otherwise believe you me) to see that a new LIS had been announced! Oh, how exciting! I went to watch the trailer, and when I heard Hannah's voice, I screamed.

Not with joy and excitement, like so many people on YouTube.

No, I screamed from pure rage.

They did it. Those fuckers did it. They did the exact thing I feared they would. They brought back Max. The exact wrong choice.

Not every problem in Double Exposure goes back to Max returning. Even if she was replaced with some nearly identical new character who said and did most of the same stuff, the game would still be shit.

But in the end, this is still its greatest crime.

I know not everyone will agree with me about this, but know, that if you do not, I do not understand you on a fundamental level. I believe, very strongly, that when an artist says that their story is over, that should be respected, and no corporation should be able to come in and hire some other asshole to continue it against their wishes. I wanna be clear, I feel this way even when the new product is good. The quality is irrelevant: it should not exist. I did not think the HBO Watchmen series was good (I thought it was quite bad actually, but that's a post for another day), but many others did, it was very critically acclaimed, but I still feel that does not matter: Alan Moore has said too many times that he never wanted to make more Watchmen, he refused to make a sequel so many times despite being asked and having the rights to his work dangled over him as leverage. He retained his artistic integrity, stuck to his principles, and told DC to fuck right the hell off with that shit: Watchmen is done. And I have nothing but respect for him for this. And I feel the same for DON'T NOD, who clearly did the same.

We don't know precisely what transpired between DN and Square Enix, and I don't claim to have insider info, but it's pretty clear what basically happened regardless: Squeenix demanded that DN bring back Max, they refused, so Squeenix said "well, we'll just make Deck Nine do it then," and DN said, "fine, it has nothing to do with us anymore" and fucked off. When asked why they left their partnership with Squeenix DN mentioned the obvious financial reasons (DN have moved into publishing, why bother making a game for another publisher that you have to split the money with when you can make a new game and publish it yourself and keep all the money?) but they also mentioned creative differences, and it seems quite clear that this is the creative difference in question.

And I'll admit, you know, I'll admit I probably go harder on this than other people: I won't even read the rest of the Millennium (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) series past the original trilogy because, while Stieg Larsson wanted Blomkvist and Lisbeth's adventures to continue, he was unfortunately unable to continue them himself due to dropping dead one day. I totally understand why the publisher and his estate (run by his brother and father who he was apparently on bad terms with, this is what happens when you don't marry your extremely long-term girlfriend or remember to put her as the executor in your will) chose to hire other people to continue the books. But I'm just not interested in seeing what another writer decides happens next. I'm sure the other writers are good, I bet the books are fine, but they cannot capture Larsson's singular voice. If it's not him, it's not Blomkvist and Lisbeth to me.

So I'm going to admit straight up just how biased I was going in here. I was a doomer from the moment the trailer dropped. Max coming back was proof of what I already suspected: that Squeenix hadn't learned, that they were just desperately trying to recreate the first game in futile hopes of also recreating its success, that they focus grouped their way into making dogshit, and that the executives who make these decisions are entirely creatively bankrupt.

It brings me no pleasure to say I was right.

I would, before we start going over the problems, like to say something very quickly though: I do not blame the devs for all of this. While there are decisions here that suck and are bad and I hate them that are clearly more up to them than Squeenix, I think it's still clear that Squeenix had the final word on things, and that we wouldn't even be in the position for those problems to exist if Squeenix had let D9 have the freedom to make a game they actually wanted to make instead of forcing them to make it all about Max. My heart truly goes out to everyone who worked on the game, and especially everyone who was laid off. I hope they all find new jobs working on better games for companies that know what they're doing soon.

Well, let's get into this. *rolls up sleeves*

Like my Before the Storm autopsy, we're starting with issues and inconsistencies that are the result of attempting to tie back with the first game:

I feel like the number one thing tbh is it's really funny how this game is supposed to be about moving on and forward and letting the past go and shit when the very act of bringing Max back in the first fucking place contradicts that entirely. We're supposed to move on, but also we know you're stuck in the past so here's the original protagonist? I liked it better when Brody told Sean he had to move forward as they looked out over Arcadia Bay. Makes more sense to say that when we're ACTUALLY trying to move on with a new protagonist of a new story.

I don't think I need to even say anything about Chloe. What could I say that hasn't been said a thousand times? We all know the decision to break them up was bad, and even if you wanted to argue it made sense in theory it at least doesn't make sense the way they went about it, and it was all just an excuse to get Chloe out of the game because making a game about Max that follows both endings makes no sense and is impossible but Squeenix demanded it anyway, so Max has to be exactly as lonely and sad no matter what ending you picked.

In particular though I think it's really crazy that Chloe like, accuses Max of rewinding to make their relationship better... like I should think it would go without saying that Max would never try that shit ever again? For anything? EVER? But then Max offers to rewind for something minor if you pick that you and Chloe were just friends... just, absolutely bizarre and out of character behavior for both either way.

Also it's insane that Max doesn't respond to Chloe's text at the end. Like, not even a, "yeah I'm fine, thanks for checking in"? At least that much should be fucking expected in that situation!

But, what not a lot of people are talking about is, the Bay ending also gets shafted! According to DE, the day after Chloe's funeral, Max takes Chloe's truck that Joyce gave her (which, you couldn't pay me to drive that death trap, sentimental value be damned, but okay...) and skips town, driving down to LA and then... I guess traveling just like Bae Max? Like, I guess Max just drops out of school, since she mentions getting a GED! And she's not in contact with anyone from Blackwell other than Victoria, for some reason? I would simply like to say: this is BULLSHIT. I did not let Chloe die so Max could go have a pity party in LA, drop out of school, and isolate herself from everyone. When I let Chloe die, it was with the understanding that Max would lean on the people around her, the people who attended a funeral for a girl they didn't know very well (if at all) because they wanted to be there for her, that she would finish her education and hopefully go to college and continue to study her passion, and live the fulfilling life Chloe would have wanted her to live! And what do you MEAN Max isn't still in contact with Warren and Kate, but is with Victoria? Like, I think Max and Victoria would become friends after the events of the game, but it would be because Max and Victoria would lean on each other, having both just lost someone very important to them in a horrible incident! Max can't do that if she fucked off immediately!

I also would just like to extend a hearty "fuck you" to whoever wrote Max getting a text from "Warren" in the nightmare sequence and had her think that she's "past responding to Warren's texts" in such a way that you can hear her rolling her eyes. Max would never be past responding to Warren's texts, and she would never think about him with such disdain, because he is her friend! I know a lot of players don't like Warren, but Max does, at the very least as a friend! That is non-negotiable! And Max looks at the texts from "Kate" and thinks "You deserved better friends ... than me"? I saved Kate's life, I know damn well I was a good friend to her! To have Max apparently ghost them, having apparently learned literally nothing from the first game... it's so disrespectful! Did they really just not wanna write a few more fake social media posts or texts? I just... that is not the girl I played as in that first game. It just isn't.

Also, while we're talking Bay and Bae I actually just wanna take a second to defend that one ex-dev who made that thread that everyone uses that screencap of the first tweet of to "prove" that the devs HATE Chloe and think the Bae ending and everyone who loves it is EVIL? If any of you had actually bothered to read the fucking thread before he was harassed into deleting it (though the first tweet was admittedly a bit inflammatory, I saw it and thought "oh no people are gonna just read this and he's gonna get crucified for it even though the thread itself is normal and reasonable") you'd see he literally said he and the devs did NOT think the Bae ending was evil and that his theory was that which ending people picked tended to just reflect different values that they held as the result of their different life experiences. I didn't necessarily agree entirely (he suggested the Bae ending was preferred by people who have experienced a lot of being wronged by other people such as being bullied or marginalized and thus somewhat understandably tend to say fuck the world I just care about the people who are good to me, but my neurodivergent ass was bullied pretty fucking badly and I still pick Bay every time) but people didn't even read his fucking thread or actually engage with what he was trying to say before harassing him, so I think we should all put that to fucking bed. If you're making a direct sequel to LIS1, you've gotta talk about the endings and look at them from multiple angles, including the utilitarian "sacrificing an entire town just to save one girl is objectively evil" angle. His whole thread was basically about how they talked about how to best rebut that angle. The final tweet in it reads, "In the end I think it's much more complicated than right or wrong, I think our moral compass is going to be skewed hard by our lives and how we've been treated through them. Passing judgement on others based on that choice overlooks a huge portion of who we are as people." They did not HATE the Bae ending, or Chloe, or think the Bae ending was evil, and thus conspire to ruin them for everyone who liked them, they clearly were simply hamstrung by the parameters Squeenix gave them, and even if they did secretly all hate the Bae ending (statistically unlikely given the consistent ~50/50 split that has remained such through the last decade), this thread isn't proof of that. Let's put that shit to fucking rest.

Max's powers... I disagree with the writers that this is a "natural" evolution of them. What bothers me more though is the inconsistency: we're told that Max cannot rewind anymore, but if you fuck up the stealth segment where you're avoiding Alderman, her rewind powers automatically activate and send you back in time to before he saw you (and move you back to the last safe place... which her powers shouldn't be able to do). This is obviously kinda lame, like, I get it, but it doesn't stop it from sucking. And then, Max CAN go back into a photo, but the way that works is all wrong! When Max goes back into the photo in chapter 5, there are no boundaries, and there doesn't seem to be any time limit! Max should not be able to get to the overlook, she should be blocked by a weird wall of photo negative weirdness, and it would take too long! What the heck!!!

Not to mention, she brings three things with her into that photo jump: Safi, the gun, and the storm. Now, Safi, I'll grant them, isn't outright inconsistent, since we never see Max rewind or photo jump while touching anyone, so it's not like we can say it's outright impossible... but it does feel pretty bullshit. And the gun and the storm? Makes ZERO sense!!! Photo travel is PURELY MENTAL, Max does not physically do anything, her present mind is simply transported back into her body at the moment the photo was taken! It makes no sense for her or Safi to bring a physical object like a GUN with them! But I guess we need an explanation for why a gun isn't there at the scene of Safi's death despite her being killed with one, and magic time gun is the best they could come up with? The gun is so lazy and bad but we'll get back to that. And as for the storm... if the storm followed Max into this photo here, why wasn't it present in the photo of Max pointing the gun at Safi? But it WAS present when Max went back to THAT moment, despite it not showing up on film? I don't understand, it doesn't make sense that the storm followed her into the photo, because the storm in the first game didn't follow Max into literally any of the many photos she jumped into while it was going on there! I guess it's just to add drama? But really it's just confusing and stupid and I hate it!!!

Speaking of the storm... why is there one? The storm occurs in the first game because Max fucked with the fabric of reality, but here one starts because... Safi is really mad??? The storm is not about powers going out of control, otherwise Daniel would've caused some back in episodes 1 and 3 of 2, or Alex would've caused one when she beat the shit out of Mac in True Colors! The storm was specifically the consequence of altering reality itself, a thing Safi is explicitly not capable of doing! And, the storm in the original did not simply appear all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there were a bunch of ill omens leading up to it! The snow at the end of episode 1, the eclipse at the end of episode 2, the dead birds throughout and beached whales at the end of episode 3, the double moons near the end of episode 4... all warnings to Max to put that thing back where it came from or so help me! But here, Safi gets pissy and all of a sudden, boom, instant storm! It doesn't make any sense!

And then, we just... walk into the storm? Ignoring the fact that they were literally on a cliff, so how did they not die of fell off cliff, and also wasn't there a railing there? but it's not there suddenly for this part, they walk into the storm and everyone is in there and it's like a nightmare sequence like in the first game except it's all technically really literally happening in some sort of real physical space that doesn't behave like real physical space??? Max says "I've been through something like this before. Reality gets unreliable," but like, no it doesn't? That was literally just a nightmare sequence, it was not a real literal thing that was happening, it was just happening in Max's head while Chloe dragged her unconscious ass up to the lighthouse! And Max has to remove the pieces of Safi that she left in everyone she turned into (which doesn't make sense with how she explained her powers work, and also you don't even do it with everyone she turned into, like, you don't take a photo of Loretta, or Amanda, and she said Moses is off-limits for shapeshifting but you do have to remove a piece from him, so like, what determines who Safi left a piece of herself in cause it doesn't seem to be turning into the person?) and somehow you do that by taking double exposed Polaroids??? So that was the solution all along? To just jump off the cliff into the tornado and take a bunch of photos??????? Wow, Arcadia Bay or Chloe really got fucked, the solution was right there all along! How fucking stupid.

And then the timelines are just... merged, at the end of the storm? There's no explanation given for this, and I can't figure out one that makes sense, it just... happens. Not even some Elizabeth BioShock Infinite merge the timelines thing, not even you created a time paradox so the dead timeline was erased from existence, the timelines specifically merge and it just sorta happens without Max seemingly even trying! And everyone is slightly confused by having two sets of memories for the last few days but just sorta rolling with it! Sure! Fuck it! Makes as much sense as anything else, which is to say, no sense at fucking all!

And another thing about Max's new powers: why is there no other Max? When Max returns home in the living world, she thinks that nobody's been there in a minute, and when Safi is waiting for Max to have lunch with her mom and Max at the Turtle, living world Max never shows! Why is there only one Max between both timelines? And the only thing weirder than there only being one Max is that Max never wonders where her other self went! When she first sees Safi disguised as her, you assume this is the her of the living world, but, after we establish it isn't other Max and is in fact Safi, we never bother to interrogate that question of "okay but wait where IS this world's Max?" And like, to be clear, I feel like if they tried to come up with an explanation for why there's only one Max between timelines, it would probably be kinda stupid, but I'd take kinda stupid over literally nothing!

And where is the original Max? Normally, what happens when you do a photo jump is you change something, and the universe changes as a result, and the time between the photo being taken and the present is filled by auto!Max, a Max that doesn't know about the photo jump but just kinda does whatever Max would do anyway… and then when the present is reached, real!Max returns. But here, I guess we PLAY AS auto!Max, and auto!Max's actions are so wildly different from the actions real!Max took that they… erase real!Max from existence? Real!Max never returns, even when it seems like presumably we've gotten to the present she went back from… That is NOT how that is supposed to work!

Why does Safi get nosebleeds using her power? Like, I'm not against bringing back the psychic nosebleeds in theory, but you can't just suddenly say "oh nosebleeds are a part of having powers" after two whole games of that not being the case (Daniel and Alex never have nosebleeds, even at moments where it kinda feels like maybe they should)...

Why does Max call her parents by their first names? In the first game she just called them mom and dad, and it doesn't feel like she should have any reason to change that... I dunno about some people but I sure haven't stopped calling my parents mom and dad since I got older... It also feels weird that Max claims they are harassing her about when she'll give them grandkids? They just never seemed like the type, to me. That's just not something I associate with like, presumably liberal white parents of their presumed age. But I dunno, maybe I'm wrong. Are you in your late 20s-early 30s and are your parents white late boomer/early gen X shitlibs? Do they bother you about grandkids? Mine sure as fuck don't but maybe they are very unusual? Sound off in the comments!

In the Bay ending a text from Max's parents says Joyce put up a new sign (I guess at the Two Whales?) in Arcadia Bay... but David's call in LIS2 suggests Joyce has moved to California! He says he hopes to see her cat (I assume, he asks what the vet said, I guess it could be a dog but Joyce seems like a cat person, they had a cat before) next time he's in Santa Rosa!

Also, in the Bay ending (literally if you take even just one thing away from this post let it be that "but it's a good follow-up to the Bay ending" is a lie) Max says in her journal entry from the day of Chloe's funeral "I started a new journal because the old one is full of lies now," but like, what lies? You mean the events of the game? That's not in her journal! That was all erased when Max went back! Her journal entries from the week should all be either by the auto!Max who operates between the time of the photo jumped back to and the present, or blank because maybe she was too sad to write anything! If Max wants to have a record of that stuff she's gonna have to write it all down again herself!

Another Bay inconsistency: when you take the photo of the record player in Gwen's office, Victoria comments, "Classic Max. Still going into people's rooms without asking." But Max never went into Victoria's room in this timeline!

Bae inconsistency this time: Victoria laments that she no longer has any photos of her childhood holidays thanks to the storm. But, aren't Victoria's parents based out of Seattle? Shouldn't her family photos all be there, safe and sound? I highly doubt she'd have brought that many with her to Blackwell... I guess I could buy her parents having a second house in the Bay or something, but surely even then the bulk of the family photos would still be safe back up in Seattle?

Even Max's peanut butter preference is wrong: why does Max have a jar of chunky peanut butter when the original stated she prefers smooth? If there's any type of taste that doesn't tend to change, it's that! I'll tell ya right now I will refuse to eat chunky peanut butter until the day I DIE!

Okay this is a very dumb petty complaint but I have to complain about it anyway because it matters TO ME... but in chapter 2 Max can look at a poster and she will think to herself "God, I'll never understand anime," except... yes she does? Max is a known weeaboo! She mentions watching FMA on Warren's flash drive in her journal, cites AKIRA as being among the cool quality shit he has on there, and says Final Fantasy: Spirits fucking Within is one of her favorite movies! She may not be a hardcore, keeping up with seasonals while also watching vintage Gundam weeb like I am but she is without a doubt counted among the ranks of weebkind! So why is it that when Moses makes an AKIRA joke Max doesn't know what he's referring to? She's seen AKIRA! She said so in the first game! And part of me knows this is an extremely dumb complaint, and can I really expect the writers of the new game to comb through the first game for any mentions of one anime movie, but also, if someone suggested that I, at 28 years old, had not seen AKIRA, I would sue them for slander, so I have to complain!

LMAO OKAY SO UPDATE THEY PATCHED THIS I DIDN'T REALIZE UNTIL I WENT TO PLAY THE GAME FOR MYSELF BUT MY BITCHING ON TWITTER BACK NEAR RELEASE MUST HAVE CAUGHT THE DEVS' ATTENTION (DESPITE THE GAME DIRECTOR BLOCKING ME) BECAUSE THEY CHANGED THIS AND I HAVE THE FUCKING RECEIPTS, BULLYING WORKS

Alright, time for the problems with the game that are not related to bringing Max back:

Once again, we have imported much of the structure of the first game, right down to "episode/chapter 4 has us return to a previously visited location that has been redecorated for a party and at the end someone gets shot" and "episode/chapter 5 has an extended surreal nightmare sequence" and I'm even more disappointed about it here than I was in TC. I guess you could argue that by doing it while bringing Max back they were going for a sort of "cinematic parallels" thing but I don't think it was very successful, it just felt lazy and forced by Squeenix again...

And again, locations are so much more limited in this game than in the first two. Like Haven Springs, Caledon feels incredibly small and by the time you've completed chapter 2 you've basically been everywhere. We don't get to see any other character's living space. Everywhere feels too nice and pretty and organized and well-maintained to be real. I'm pretty disappointed that these are among the TC complaints I had that carried over to this game, I really hoped they would do a better job on all that next time.

Especially frustrating about the lack of other characters' living spaces is how I can perfectly imagine a really great way to do one: Max needs to investigate dead!Safi's room/apartment (is she dorming? living with her mom? in an apartment in town alone? unclear), but it's taped off by the cops because duh, so she goes to alive!Safi's place, or maybe takes advantage of already going over there anyway, and Max pretends to go to the bathroom, switches timelines, and investigates dead!Safi's room. I guess they couldn't do this, because the mystery they constructed sucks ass and isn't actually about investigating Safi's murder, but imagine if it had been, and there had been a bit like that, and you had to like, keep pulsing to make sure Safi wasn't getting too worried about you taking too long or something... coulda done something there. Alas.

To a certain extent, with this game specifically, this does feel at least partially like a technical limitation: having to make two versions of each area and have both loaded at once was undoubtedly a lot of work, so I do feel like I have to acknowledge that. But it's still disappointing.

I feel like I have to specifically call out chapter 4 for taking place almost entirely at the Turtle. Unforgivable. This leads into...

The game is, once again, far too short. Chapter 4 in particular is far too short, playthroughs of it on YouTube basically never crack 2 hours. The first 3 chapters are actually a decent length, so what happened to make 4 and 5 so short?

Another thing I'm particularly disappointed in is the lack of meaningful choices. Many choices presented as major decisions, such as anything relating to Alderman or whether you want to talk Safi down or tackle her to stop her from shooting Yasmin, straight up DON'T MATTER. It DOES NOT MATTER, no matter what you do Alderman is retconned from existence so nothing about him matters and Safi shoots Yasmin no matter what! And the achievements for this game encourage multiple playthroughs! What a mistake! It only makes it easier to see the seams! And it's really bullshit how the ending choices page will show things like "did you look at this thing" as like, a choice. Are we really so hard up for choices and consequences that we have to count that shit?

And of course, there's functionally only one ending. Whether you side with Safi or not, it's the same: she fucks off and Max is like "guess I'll wait for her to come back eventually", like it literally does not matter! All to set up a stupid fucking sequel!

Also, speaking of choices, what's up with the timed dialogue options? We get a whole little tutorial about them in chapter 1, but they never show up again after like, chapter 3? Maybe chapter 2! What was the point? Either have timed choices or don't, don't just have like, less than ten all near the start of the game!

This game also imports the problem of no minor NPCs that you really interact with, just ones that you eavesdrop on. I'm wondering if this is a product of D9 going so hard on the mocap thing, like they're worried that any conversations between Max and minor NPCs that would have to be just regular animated would be too jarring of a difference? If that's their concern I think that's a major miscalculation on their part but it's also just my baseless speculation so I'm likely wrong. Regardless of the reason, I still remember every classmate of Max's from the original, but not much about any of the random townspeople from TC or students and faculty from DE, largely because they were mostly unnamed (or when they were, it was in dialogue or on social media, while their nametags in the subtitles said generic descriptors) and we hardly ever spoke to them directly (so even when there was a name, it was basically impossible to put the name to a face, especially without even social media profile pics).

Also, when you eavesdrop on these NPCs, there's these breaks in their conversations, like, multiple times, they make them sound very unnatural. Like, I would think the characters were done talking and start to walk away, but then they would keep talking and I'd have to stop. It was very strange, I don't know why this happens.

Let's go over the characters (spoilers they are mostly bland)

I wanna start by saying I have basically no complaints about Gwen or Moses. I liked them a lot actually and wished they did more!

Love interest game this time around was... well once again we get a guy love interest who is actually at least kinda connected to everything that is happening but is kinda playing second fiddle to the girl love interest who is just kinda here to be the girl love interest! Amanda's worst crime is, like Steph, she doesn't actually have much to do with anything and she herself is not particularly interesting. Her aspiring comedian thing doesn't really do anything or go anywhere and feels like a tacked on trait to make her look more interesting than she is, and she's so understanding and respectful of boundaries and shit that it comes off as kind of unrealistic and fake... and it also makes it so much worse how Max essentially goes behind her back to romance her in the other timeline! It's such a beyond fucked up move that on the one hand I'm glad the game calls it out as such but on the other hand why was that even an option in the first place? That feels like something Max would not be doing! She should know better! And then Vinh... I saw someone compare him to Nathan Prescott, a guy who did something bad that really hurt (understatement for Nathan LOL) both the girl who died (Maya/Rachel) and her best friend (Safi/Chloe), and feels really guilty about it, but where Nathan was a rich asshole Vinh is a poor just-pretending-to-be-an-asshole, but if the intent was to make him a foil to Nathan like that, mission fucking failed, because all the really truly awful stuff Nathan did and said is what made him interesting and sanding all the edges down like that just leaves you with someone bland again! Vinh does rise a bit above that blandness by being unbelievably horny and constantly coming on to you and everyone else, but that just makes him not bland in a bad way, not a good one! It would be one thing if he acted that way, and Max told him off for being an inappropriate creep, and then he did some character development and then you could romance him, that could actually work, but there's no time for such a thing, so we just get a weird romance where Max is somehow charmed by the horniest man alive doing workplace sexual harassment at her and I hate it.

I will say real quick though that I have seen people get real racist about the both of them (and Safi) and I am NOT fucking here for that!!! I'm glad to see this series finally get some Native rep and some love interests of color! Let's keep that energy going at least in future installments!

Reggie and Diamond get a D+ for attempting to give them each at least one character trait (Reggie is anxious and Diamond is ambitious) but they still leave exactly zero impression. They contribute so little you could write them out with very little effort. I struggle to think of things about them. I cannot hate them, but I cannot like them. There is nothing to feel about.

Maya is bootleg Rachel Amber, Temu Rachel Amber, the Rachel Amber we have at home. The plot kind of revolves around her, actually, but where Rachel Amber is a presence from the first scene of the original (her name etched into a desk in the classroom, and then on missing posters filling the hall) and a constant topic of discussion amongst the characters, giving you an impression of who she was to each of them, letting you put a picture together of what she was like more generally, Maya's relevance only really becomes apparent in chapter 3, and we only hear about how much she mattered to Safi. Nobody else in the main cast says much about her beyond that she was close with Safi and was a great writer and how it's a real shame she killed herself. She has no other traits, beyond the vague immigrant angst that fuels her book, which Lucas even notes is generic enough that he can just find/replace Japan with Chile and nothing changes, I mean one would hope the book would get into her specific struggles but it's not like we get to read it or see or hear what they are any other way, and any intrigue that could have been built up regarding the reason for her suicide evaporates the moment you find her manuscript and realize Lucas plagiarized her and that's the only reason. There's just nothing there to make her feel like a real character, she doesn't even really haunt the narrative (which sorta figures, SAFI should be haunting the narrative, though even she isn't really doing a great job of that even in the dead world)... In the end, I just don't know anything about her. she's nothing.

Lucas... I remember the moment one of the promo videos mentioned he had one massive smash hit critically acclaimed book and he hadn't done anything really since (well, the video claimed he wrote another novel and some personal essays that weren't well-received, but in the game "Loretta" asks him if he'll ever write a follow-up, so... who knows which it is?), I immediately clocked that his first book was stolen. I had assumed from Safi, and that that related to her death somehow. The truth was of course dumber. In general he fails as a compelling antagonist. He comes off as Jefferson-lite, slightly more nuance (he has an actual motive with his inferiority complex with his dad, he sincerely loves his son) but in being more nuanced he loses the sauce that made Jefferson entertaining. Again, he fails to leave all that much of an impression, especially compared to Jefferson, and you have to compare him to Jefferson because he's doing Jefferson's lines in the nightmare sequence because god forbid we pay the original (union, I'm pretty sure) actor! Also LMAO at Max saying, "you can't get any lower than plagiarizing your student's work," like girl yes you can and YOU OF ALL PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW THAT

Loretta is easily the character I was most disappointed by. As a true crime podcaster they had a chance to use her to make some real commentary on the current state of true crime media, have her be a total vulture, maybe one Max already hates for bothering her about Rachel Amber and Jefferson (and Chloe's death, in the Bay timeline) (isn't it kinda weird that Loretta, for as bad and inappropriately nosy as she's meant to be, NEVER brings that up?)! Have her have one of those podcasts with a super glib and inappropriately light tone! Someone who cares not about harassing witnesses and the friends and families of victims and perpetrators or inciting others to do so, intentionally or not! But instead Loretta doesn't do much of anything, at all, and doesn't even get to be part of the meeting at the Turtle at the end no matter what you do??? That part is really weird, like, you'd think of ALL FUCKING PEOPLE it would be Miss True Crime Podcast Aspiring Reporter who'd be there to get answers about what just happened! And in the nightmare bowling alley if you talk to her you can promise to explain everything later! That would be the time to do it! It's such a bizarre choice to not have her even be ABLE to be there! She's just such a waste!

No character beats Alderman for uselessness though. Like, holy shit, there was quite literally no point to him. No choice you make relating to him matters, because he fucking dies no matter what! I mean, am I supposed to think that Moses maybe having a little gray streak in his hair is a major consequence to a major choice??? Fuck OUTTA here! Not to mention, what the fuck happened to him? He sees his weird time double (which, contrary to what some people seem to think, was NOT him from the alive universe because he doesn't appear there, it's some sort of time double imitating his actions from the day before) and then they touch and he just... vanishes from existence? And this is only laid out through TEXT? I can only assume he was a casualty of the many rewrites this game clearly went through, because I struggle to think of anything he did other than act as a minor obstacle to waste time.

Yasmin is supposed to be like this overbearing mom I guess but she never really comes off that way? She comes off as prioritizing the school above all else, I'll give her that, but I feel like we're supposed to think she's worse than that and they really failed to convey it.

And of course there's Safi. Oh Safi... Safi makes me sad because I do feel like I get what they were going for with her, but she, like so much of this game, doesn't quite get there. She works in theory but not in practice. I wonder if it was one of those cases of like, the writers know her so well but they forgot we don't so they forgot to communicate her well? I think the biggest problem with Safi is that we don't really spend a lot of time with her. After the start of chapter 2 and for all of chapter 3 she's totally AWOL (except when she's pretending to be Vinh and Amanda, and Max at the end there, and that one scene where she tells you to fuck off, but that doesn't exactly count as spending time with her). All this leads to so much of her character feeling very tell not show.

I wanna give an entire bullet point to this specific complaint actually: the most tell not show thing about Safi is her whole backstory. She tells us her backstory in chapter 4, how her parents divorced and her mom ruined her life by putting too much pressure on her and keeping her from seeing her dad (don't know how her mom did that, like, doesn't dad get a say? but whatever) and she so wished to be somebody, anybody else to escape the Model Minority pressure, that she got the ability to do it. And like, to be clear, that's not a terrible idea for a character... but I DESPISE how this information is conveyed to us just by TELLING us instead of SHOWING. We never needed to be TOLD that Max's powers are a metaphor for her indecisive and anxious nature, we never needed to be TOLD that Daniel's powers were a metaphor for being forced to grow up too fast and shoulder a lot of responsibility really early, even True Colors didn't outright TELL us Alex's powers are the result of being the peacemaker growing up and having to be extra tuned into people's emotions to avoid making waves in the foster system, we just intuitively understand that! TC admittedly came close by laying it on real thick there with the backstory dump at the end, but they never outright stated "this is what the powers are a metaphor for" and it's a real shame that they went such a fucking lazy route this time.

But most things about Safi are ultimately tell not show, even her bad relationship with her mother is something we hear about more than see, and when we do see it it doesn't seem that bad, certainly not "this book cancellation is the last straw so I am going to SHOOT MY MOM" bad! It seems more just like, Chloe and Joyce bad, and Chloe would never in a million years shoot Joyce. It feels like a totally insane escalation! Safi says at the end of episode 4 that her mom "has been doing this my whole life," and like, okay, sure, woulda been nice to see literally any of that! At all!

Abraxas is just the Vortex Club: used to be counterculture, now rich kid bacchanalia. Except we at least got to go to a Vortex Club party in the original, and the Vortex Club didn't claim to be a secret society. I've seen people accuse Abraxas of being stupid because it's not a secret so how is it a secret society, but really the problem is college secret societies are a real known thing, like Skull and Bones or Scroll and Key at Yale, but they're not secret because no one knows about them, guys (they have public addresses), they're secret because you're not allowed to talk about what you even do in there. But everybody talks about Abraxas and what they do there all the time! And these real secret societies churn out important people (both George Bushes and John Kerry are some notable Skull and Bones alums) and part of that is that the schools that have them churn out important people but there are literally conspiracy theories about these societies because of this! Abraxas is just parties and pranks and a dumb box that doesn't do anything!

Max directly compares Abraxas and the Vortex Club in the nightmare sequence, saying, "Abraxas, the Vortex Club... always someone trying to be on top, and getting hurt for it." But like, who got hurt for Abraxas? I guess Diamond hurt Vinh's feelings a bit when she confronted him about Maya in the dead world, but I don't think any of that is anywhere near on the level of how the Vortex Club hurt Kate by filming her and spreading it around.

Interestingly, the whole plot cul-de-sac where Diamond wants to take over Abraxas and make it for marginalized people to make subversive art like it supposedly used to be (which makes no sense, these secret societies are and always have been largely for wealthy white guys who are members of entrenched power structures) is like, the exact reverse of the Before the Storm thing where Victoria mentions that once she takes over the Vortex Club she'll make it into an exclusive rich kid club or whatever. D9 seems to have a thing about the new head of an organization single-handedly changing its entire character.

The plagiarism plot... is really fucking stupid. On multiple levels.

Number 1, why the fuck would the university go along with it? I guess we're supposed to think it's because having an award-winning author as a professor will make the school look good, which, yeah okay, but so would an award-winning author alum, especially one who wrote the book while studying there, so I don't think there's that much more to gain from Lucas being the supposed author of the book compared to if Maya gets the credit. Like, surely when you consider the potential risks of the truth eventually coming out, it wouldn't be fucking worth it to keep Lucas around instead of instantly firing him the moment they realized his book was plagiarized? Surely they would realize how much worse it would be for them to cover it up and then for it to come out years later? I genuinely cannot imagine a school making this decision. I understand that it's meant to be a story of "this stuffy old historically white and male institution, despite being ostensibly progressive and led by a woman of color, is still willing to throw a woman of color under the bus to protect a mediocre man," but is the institution really SO incapable of even the most basic risk assessment that they wouldn't just choose to throw the mediocre man of color away instead?

Number 2, holy shit why does Lucas still have Maya's original draft? Why does he keep it in his office in the world's ugliest and largest trophy (what a weird trophy like what trophy has a drawer that locks???)? WHY DID HE NOT BURN IT THE SECOND HE NO LONGER HAD A USE FOR IT????? HOLY SHIT THIS IS LIKE THE SECOND SINGLE STUPIDEST ACTION ANYONE TAKES IN THE ENTIRE GAME (AND IT IS VERY CLOSE TO NUMBER 1)

Number 3, when we decide to expose Lucas, why do we decide to do it in real life public? Why not just leak the evidence online? TC had a similar issue of why give the USB to the cops instead of sending the files to WikiLeaks or whatever, like, why go through all these hoops? I mean I guess the answer is it's more dramatic this way but if you want drama shouldn't it be at like a bigger event, I mean there are like about 30 people in this bar! Most of whom don't even appear to be paying attention, judging by the constant sound of people talking in the background, even after the event starts! Would make a bigger splash if this wasn't a local bar but like an auditorium full of people, including important literature and publishing people! I guess they couldn't due to technical limitations? But still, what a bummer, THAT would've been cool. And instead of having to distract Reggie and break-but-not-really-break the projector it would be about having to get the actual projectionist out of the projector room and then like barricade yourself in there... Man now I'm sad thinking how that could've worked.

Number 4, why didn't Maya and/or Safi try to expose him publicly earlier? Surely y'all coulda kicked up a big stink on the internet! It sounds like the book came out around like, #MeToo, I think people woulda been primed to listen! Especially if Safi, say, shapeshifted into Lucas and filmed "Lucas" confessing to the act! I'm kind of shocked this wasn't her first thought? If you're worried no one will believe him confessing straight to camera (especially if you couldn't hack his official accounts to post it from there), get Maya in on it and "secretly" film a fake confrontation with "Lucas" where he admits it? Lucas could deny it was him all he wants, but Gwen denied it was her on the video too and she still got fired!

Number 5, after Lucas gets upset and leaves the stage, we're all "yay, we did it!" but like, okay, we exposed him to a bar of, again, like, 30 people... so what? What about everyone else on Earth? Are we posting this online??? It didn't look like anyone was filming it??? How will the word get out?? And shouldn't we be saving the "we did it!" for when he loses his publishing contract or gets fired or otherwise faces some sort of actual concrete consequences like that???

Also, semi-related, why does Max take a photo of the book and manuscript next to each other with her POLAROID? Girl you KNOW the quality on that is not high enough to be reading that tiny-ass text, pull out your goddamn DSLR!

So, about the phone call from the publisher that starts this whole mess... why are they calling NOW? It's like, at least 9:00 at night, by the looks of it? Most publishers are based out of New York, it's the same time zone, everyone should have gone home for the night? And even if they hadn't, like, this is absolutely a "wait until tomorrow" kind of call? I was always told growing up it's very rude to call someone after 9 PM unless it's a super emergency that can't wait. If you call me that late, a PERSON had better be dead or dying, not a BOOK!

And now we get to the thing the game is supposed to be about... Safi's murder. The circumstances make literally no sense. Like, I guess I'm supposed to think OG!unseen (except for maybe the Polaroids?) timeline!Max went back into the owl photo, killed Safi like Safi asked, and then the magic time gun magically vanished because it being there is a time paradox (that breaks all established rules of the world), but then also Max went back to where she was standing when she took the photo (except she can't have done that because there are no footprints in the snow indicating that, which we know because the game specifically points the camera at Safi's footprints) and THEN our!Max woke up and went back up to find Safi, except when you go back up to find Safi, Safi is clearly fine, and then you hear the gunshot, but then you see Safi again and she's clearly fine again, but then you get to her and she's dead of gunshot, so... what the fuck???????? They called it an impossible murder in the marketing and impossible is fucking right! Even what little explanation we do get quite literally makes zero sense!

I guess the intent is to like, write this (or at least, some of this) off as being like, the overlook being weird or something? Like I guess it's like a haunted or spiritual spot or something because tons of weird-ass shit that never gets explained even a little bit be happening there (this, Reggie's doppelganger, the flowers blooming in the shape of Safi's body, Power Bear mug tree, bullet candy, the mysterious phone call, Alderman, that one fucking lamp) but that's really fucking frustrating and unsatisfying! Maybe they were trying to make all these things the foreshadowing of the storm, like it actually is a timestorm caused by Max... somehow, and those are the ill omens like the eclipse and the dead birds, but these omens aren't as obviously ill, and why would they be SO localized to the overlook? It feels like they were trying to make the overlook like, this game's version of the lighthouse from the first game, but like, there wasn't anything concretely supernatural about the lighthouse, it's just the only place out of the way enough to avoid the storm so you go there at the end! Nothing else happens there, at least, not that isn't happening anywhere else (you happen to be there when the snow happens in episode 1 and Chloe watches the eclipse from there in episode 2 but those are townwide events, as we see in the montages). There's a vibe up there, but it's nothing more than that, at least not explicitly like this!

Max having a basement darkroom that she has zero problems going down into is kinda insane to me. I mean, I'll grant that the Dark Room from the first game is more of a photography studio than a literal darkroom so maybe actual darkrooms wouldn't as much of a problem as you might think, but really? No problem with being in a windowless basement lit in red??? I wouldn't blame her for being wary of basements in general to be honest!

So what is the point of the mysterious Polaroids? Are they from the third, technically first timeline, the timeline where Max had to go back and kill Safi from? And whether they're from there or elsewhere, why do they appear here? Doesn't make any sense!

Speaking of the Polaroid timeline, why is Safi's revenge different there than here? Like, why does Vinh throw the cow skull here, but seemingly not there? Why does Safi slash Gwen's tires there but frame her for dealing here? Why does Lucas's office get trashed there but his SON get fucked with here? I can't see any reason why Safi should be doing anything different?

In her journal entry complaining about Loretta, Max says she "thinks she's Geraldo" but people my (which is to say, Max's) age consider him, when we know who he is in the first place, a Fox News fuckface first and foremost, and a Jerry Springer wannabe before that. If he ever did an ounce of actual journalism in his life, I've never heard about it. Perhaps one could argue Loretta is closer to his sensationalism, but isn't Max trying to say Loretta THINKS she's a great journalist? Shouldn't her example then be like, Woodward & Bernstein, or the Spotlight team, or Ronan Farrow?

The skull through the car thing... what was the point? It really didn't go anywhere. Like, Vinh did it, to distract Safi's rage... but it didn't even really do that, so... it just ends up feeling like another time waster.

Making Max go all the way to the other timeline for a stepladder that she stores up her ass when she's in a bar full of stools and chairs she could stand on is really stupid and I'm not the first person to point this out but I will repeat it anyway because it remains stupid.

Also stupid is that I can't return the stepladder or bathroom key to their proper timelines. So rude, I wanted to put them back! The dead timeline needs a bathroom key!!! Also, I couldn't help but think about it in like, BioShock Infinite terms, like, wait, could this cause problems? Like, in that game, the more you and Elizabeth (and Comstock and the Luteces) mess with Tears, the more Tears and anomalies appear. As Rosalind says in a Voxophone in Elizabeth's tower re: her finger, "the universe doesn't like its peas mixed with its porridge." I would worry that moving stuff between worlds and leaving it there would somehow cause issues, especially with how mad the universe got about Max rewinding! But if the universe is mad at her, it's not about that!

The safe/Saiph thing feels so fucking 90s adventure game in like the worst way... the kind of thing that bad writers think is cleverer than it is. Like, I'm not saying it's not at all clever, but I don't think it's as clever as they think it is.

Max switches the telescopes, and then she switches the ice in episode 3... and she never makes another big item timeline switch ever again! Boo! This is like Alex taking emotions in TC, but at least there it was a choice!

And was any of that really necessary? Like, was Alderman really gonna move that cart of giant heavy telescope parts and look in that vent he probably didn't even know was there?? I kinda doubt it! They coulda just waited for his ass to leave and then Max and Moses coulda moved that shit and gotten to the camera normally!

Okay I'm gonna bring up the #1 dumbest single action anyone takes in the game: MAX, ALDERMAN, AND THE PHOTO. HOLY FUCKING SHIT. HE TURNED AWAY FROM HER. SO MANY FUCKING TIMES. FOR SO FUCKING LONG. BUT SHE DIDN'T TURN THE PHOTO OVER, OR PUT IT IN THE FRUIT BOWL, OR SHOVE IT IN A DRAWER, OR ANYTHING. WHAT THE FUCK. LITERALLY HAD ME SCREAMING AT MY SCREEN. INSULTING TO MY FUCKING INTELLIGENCE, AND MAX'S!!!!!!!!!! WHY ARE YOU DOING MY GIRL LIKE THAT!!!!! Someone said recently that this was originally going to be like a QTE or something, like you could succeed in hiding the photo or not but then they removed it, but WHY REMOVE IT???

Also, why does Alderman act like Max must've had something to do with what happened in Arcadia Bay? Like, thinking she's connected to the storm in Bae is obviously a ludicrous leap of logic, but so is thinking she's connected to Chloe and Rachel's deaths, outside of being a witness to Chloe's? And very weird for him to be all "Are you unlucky or is it just everyone that's ever met you?" like bitch I never even met Rachel and the police records and public info about this case should reflect that!

The imaginary concert with Amanda thing is cute but it feels like a ripoff of the fighting game scene from The Last Of Us: Left Behind... just sayin.

The area under the bridge that you chase Safi-pretending-to-be-Max to (Snowmont, the sign says the Abraxas kids who party there call it) feels awfully wasted? Like I wonder if they originally planned to do more with this environment but the rewrites got it or something?

Safi's shapeshifting is stated to be a matter of affecting people's perception of her, reaching into their brains to do it, but... how can she then show up on camera as Gwen? The camera has no brain to alter! I feel like they went with this explanation to avoid questions about like, conservation of matter if she turns into someone bigger than her, or how does she change her clothes and not just her body, but I would ignore the first question and just say she can change anything she's touching or holding, but only for as long as she is touching or holding it. To be honest, when the rumors that Safi was a shapeshifter started to come out after the early release got datamined, I assumed that was how it worked, and the photo of Max with a gun must be Safi, shapeshifting herself and some object she was holding to LOOK like Max and a gun, to frame her or something! That maybe she had even faked her death, and was posing as someone (or multiple someones?) else! Possibly Alderman, since the files showed him vanishing after episode 3, the episode where the reveal happens! I thought it was too stupid and nonsensical to make Max Safi's killer via time travel, so that had to be it! But no, it was dumber than that.

I guess the perception angle is also to explain how everybody at the Turtle/on campus starts freaking out at the end of chapter 4, but I thought that (and the already discussed instastorm) was kinda fucking stupid. It also really opens up Safi's powers, like, she's not just a shapeshifter, she's an illusionist and mind controller! Which is weird, like, with her devil-may-care attitude, she didn't figure this out before? Feels like she should've!

Also, why can Safi only shapeshift into people she's actually met? I literally cannot imagine a reason for this??? Why not have her just be able to be anyone she's seen? It's not like you need an explanation for why she doesn't turn into a celebrity or something, like, the obvious built-in explanation is "what would be the point of that in this situation?"

This is probably very like mean to say or whatever, but Safi says she got her powers after her dad leaving, like, that was her big trauma... but that is so not on the level of seeing your best friend or dad get killed in front of you. Like, I always assumed that the powers were partly catalyzed by sudden and DEEP trauma like that, as well as just possession of the X-gene or whatever (sorry Sean and Chloe, your traumas were great enough but I guess y'all just lost the genetic lottery on that one). But like, your dad leaving and mom becoming overbearing is not nearly so serious. I'm not saying it's not bad, I'm not saying that shit won't fuck somebody up, but I just dunno if it's "give you superpowers about it" fucked up, like... it's not SPECIAL. Like, DN was out here making the powers caused by a single big extremely unusual life-changing event thing, but D9 keeps giving us like, a series of slightly lesser, less sudden, more mundane traumas causing the powers (Alex's power source is unclear, was it her mother's traumatic, albeit telegraphed, death? Her dad abandoning her and Gabe to the system? A specific event at a group home? They never say and we're just kinda left to assume "all of the above," I guess) and I just don't think it works as well. Maybe that's just me though.

Safi fell into the water, but she pulls her phone out of her pocket when her mom calls her, so it's working... Did they throw that shit in some rice between first getting home and now?

Safi asks if you really think you're capable of hurting her like that... but that feels like it should be a matter of which ending you chose? Like, I let one girl die to save a town before, and I'd do it again! If I could let CHLOE die I sure as hell could let Safi die, I barely know you! And surely for Bae-ers it's like the opposite? But I guess it doesn't matter, the choice is literally pointless, like so many others.

I remember in an interview one of the writers said that the conversation between Max and Safi here was really important and had to be the most interesting conversation in the series. Well, I'm sorry to say, mission failed. And it was always gonna be! Sean and Karen at the motel is an insanely tough act to follow!

Why does Max say Lucas will be expecting a "mock trial" at Krampus? Girl it's a roast, haven't you seen one before? Those are two very different things!

I accidentally insulted Lucas by telling "Loretta" that persistence is what matters and quality is irrelevant... girl the choice said "Persistence is key." I just thought Max would just say THAT, like, if you keep working at it you'll get better, not that quality is irrelevant! Talk about a misleading fucking prompt goddamn! And I'm usually pretty good at this! "Glass him" didn't even get me in TWAU!

Why did Lucas bring a gun with him to this event? And better yet, why did he LEAVE IT IN HIS JACKET??? WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT?????

Third dumbest single action: why do Max and Safi take the gun whyyyyyyyyy you should both be steering so clear of guns forever!!!! Certainly not deciding to keep one on your person!!!!!

I hate that I can't really see the slides, I wanted to see :(

Others have pointed this out but yeah Max is a little too trusting letting Safi and Lucas go talk in private, like even if she has a gun (hell, especially if she has a gun) this is a bad idea!

Also, why does Lucas know that Yasmin cancelled Safi's book deal? Fuck, how does he know about the book deal at all? Did Yasmin tell him? Why???

So, when Safi takes the photo of Max pointing the gun at her in episode 5, she's standing, but when Max went back into the photo in episode 3, she was sitting... and Max is facing the opposite direction, like the background for the photo will now be completely different! What's the deal?

Also... why does Safi insist that MAX kill her? Why can't she just kill herself if she wants to die so bad? Like, that's a really awful thing to put on someone else if there isn't a good reason to beyond "I'm scared" or whatever!

It's kinda funny that the Blackwell bathroom reenactment casts Max as Nathan and Safi as Chloe, considering who was just waving a gun around like a crazy person screaming about how sick they were of someone controlling them!

Max tells Reggie in the nightmare bowling alley that the storm is like, a time vortex, but no it isn't? Unless they're trying to suggest that this is caused by Safi not being dead in the living world, but like, Safi's death is literally caused by a time paradox (magic time gun) so like, maybe the alternate timeline was created because there HAS to be a timeline where Safi lives... so she can die??? Except killing her to save the town I guess WAS changing the timeline and that DID cause the storm? But then wouldn't the storm be showing up in the dead world, not the living? If you go to the dead world, there is no storm and everything is fine! If changing history was the problem, shouldn't the storm be there in the world she changed rather than the world she didn't, and if fucking with both timelines was the problem, shouldn't it be in both? And why would Max go back and kill Safi in the first place if not to stop the storm??? Just to stop her from making everyone freak out like she was??? Bruh this shit makes no sense the original game was smart to avoid anything like this... And it's kinda hard to swallow that this is a timestorm Max made (as I said earlier, no warning signs), and it's just a total coincidence that Safi started freaking out at the exact same time??? We're obviously meant to think Safi is doing this! She has to be! And if she's not, and the storm part IS Max, shouldn't that be made clear!?

Safi's sudden turn to Magnetodom feels so sudden and jarring, like she seemed like she'd gone back to normal and was feeling bad about you know shooting her mom, but then she's all "my mom will never be different" and talking about we could be gods and shit... like girl what? And then she has the GALL to be all "why don't you use your powers?" LIKE THE FUCK YOU MEAN WHY GIRL YOU KNOW DAMN WELL WHY YOU LITERALLY JUST FUCKING SAW WHY MISS ME WITH THAT SHIT

And then she has the gall to ask me if I'll join the Brotherhood of Mutants she's gonna make like fuck outta here girl, this isn't the X-Men, this isn't the Avengers, or at least, it shouldn't be... except, I guess it is now? Or not, the writers claim she's searching for companionship and understanding, nothing more, but like, if that's the case, maybe don't have her go on a megalomaniacal rant about how they could be gods and do anything they want or whatever if you don't want people to get the wrong idea?

The post-credits scene... might have worked a little better if it was literally AT ALL foreshadowed, but no, Diamond just suddenly has powers now, I guess... Like genuinely this would not bother me nearly as much if they'd foreshadowed it with even a single line but no nothing

"MAX CAULFIELD WILL RETURN..." BITCH I DIDN'T EVEN WANT HER TO COME BACK THIS TIME WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I WANT HER TO COME BACK AGAIN? I tell ya, when I saw this leak like a few hours early I think, had me like

Misc little thingsssssssssss (but boy do they add up)

Others have said it, but the sound effect for being near a rift is really aggressive. I appreciate that on the PS5 version it comes out of the controller (I love when a game uses the controller speaker and lights), but it could be a little quieter and activate a little less further away.

Honestly the sound mixing in general is a bit off? Like, sometimes I'll barely be able to hear, say, Diamond speaking, but Max's internal monologue is loud and clear. NPC eavesdropped conversations also particularly have this problem.

I encountered a series of glitches throughout the game: "Lucas's briefcase looks already open when you go to open it" in chapter 2, "Diamond's mouth doesn't open when she talks" in chapter 4 (this only lasted like, a second, though), "floating camera at Moses's booth in both Turtles" in chapter 4, "Safi's voice isn't audible when you sit on the bench in the bowling alley" in chapter 5 and some hair lighting glitches. This isn't TOO terrible but it's the most I've experienced of any game in the series outside of the remasters, and I had to replay the first two episodes of 2 because my save got corrupted!

The Switch version... shouldn't exist. They clearly faced a ton of technical issues just getting this shit to work on modern PCs and the PS5 and current Xboxes, the Switch just can't handle this. Any of it. They shouldn't have bothered and just waited for the Switch 2 if they really wanted to port it to Nintendo. I know Nintendo-only fans would've been disappointed but the console is simply too underpowered, and I'm sure they're disappointed with the slow ugly glitchfest they got too! It's like this game's entire development, from its conception to this, was plagued with these real "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations... and I sympathize with the devs on that, but they should've just put their foot down at least on this particular thing, I think.

Oh, also why does the journal always start at page one when you go to read it? In the first game the journal always opened back up to wherever you left it...

In the Bay ending, the newspaper about Chloe's death says "Tragic murder reveals serial killer among Blackwell Academy staff," but Jefferson isn't a serial killer! He has at most maybe killed Rachel Amber! And, whether he is the one responsible or not, that wasn't even a serial killer type murder! Serial killer is actually more of a qualitative descriptor than a quantitative one, like, you do need at least three victims, but you also need things like a unique MO and a cooldown period. What happened at Blackwell is objectively not that. Serial kidnapper, sure, but not a serial killer. And I know Chloe uses the term at one point in the first game, but I don't expect her to know the specifics of that stuff, I would however expect it of a journalist who would be writing a headline like this.

I appreciate the differences between the living and dead worlds, but the entire pirate girl mural on the wall of the Snapping Turtle appears to have been redone to be sadder in the dead world in only two days??? Just to be sad about Safi??? Very odd if you think about it realistically.

The deluxe and ultimate editions are so fucking scummy I cannot believe how blatant and gross they are holy shit like at least when I paid the extra $20 for True Colors I got Wavelengths (worth an extra $10) and the remasters (which turned out not to be even worth those $10 but at least they seemed like it at the time), here all you get for paying an extra $30 is more OUTFITS and a CAT? A cat that is only in the game for all of like, FIVE MINUTES? There's not a doubt in my mind that that cat was meant to be in the full game for EVERYONE, not just be something they could cut out and sell for extra, but Squeenix made them, and that's just such a scumbag move holy shit. And of course, the early access. For a story-based fucking game. I was so disappointed by just how many people I saw falling for this shit, like guys this is the scummiest business practice I've seen a publisher pull in a while, we gotta stand as a united front and collectively refuse to entertain this bullshit in the future, okay? This is unfuckingacceptable! We cannot allow them to do it ever again!

I actually have one more big point to make, but I'm saving it for (almost) last, so now for the stuff that bothered me specifically but I don't necessarily expect to bother everyone the way it bothered me:

All the pre-release ads for this game kept advertising all the characters as "lovable" and to me that's such a red flag. First of all, I should not need y'all to TELL ME that a character is lovable, I should be able to decide that for myself! If Moses is lovable (and he is!) he will show it! Show don't tell! Second of all, I don't want too many lovable characters in my Life Is Strange! The first and second games were the best and they had the most divisive and complex characters who many players found unlikable and even hate-able, from Chloe to Nathan to David to Daniel to Finn to Karen! The only character here that remotely comes close to that level of controversial reception is Safi and I'm not sure just how intentional that is, and her reception seems generally a lot more consistently negative than the other characters listed, like all the other characters have shooters but she only has a few, and I don't think we can chalk that up ENTIRELY to racism (though lbr it's probably a factor)

It's very dumb, but I HATE every single outfit Max wears in this game. None of them feel like anything she'd wear! They all look like stuff that someone who like, cares about their appearance and puts effort into it would wear, and Max is not one of those people! You can say oh well she's older maybe her fashion sense has changed, but I am basically the same age and I still dress exactly the same as I did in high school, which is to say, exactly like Max in the first game! Graphic tees and jeans all day every day baby! We have the no fashion sense autism and that's okay! I demand more no fashion sense autism representation! Every time we're lucky enough to get an autistic girl in media she dresses stylish but in a crazy fun quirky way like Quinni from Heartbreak High, or like a totally normal girl, where are the autistic girls who dress for pure comfort and practicality? Max was that! Give her back!

Semi-related, in Max's journal she mentions Safi was wearing a Dolce and Gabbana jacket when they met, but like, how did Max know that? It doesn't sound like Safi mentioned it but Max is NOT the type of person to know what brand/designer something is by looking unless it has a really big obvious logo, and Safi is not tacky enough to wear that sort of thing. I get the reason for the detail (establish that Safi is wealthy and stylish) but it's just little off to me in that way.

If they make a next game I think Safi's dad had better show up and like prove himself to suck at least as much as her mom. The way she talks about her dad all like he never did nothing in that way I hate (I know the parent that leaves is not around to fuck up and be the bad guy all present parents need to be sometimes but I'll still NEVER understand people that put the deadbeat/absentee parent on the pedestal), I felt like maybe we were going somewhere with that, like maybe Safi would go to him or he'd come here and they'd have like a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants moment where he's replaced her and her mom with the perfect new white family, and it turns out that's what her mom wanted to protect her from there? I think that'd be interesting.

I said earlier I thought for sure once the shapeshifter angle leaked that Safi would turn out to have faked her death and impersonated someone else (Alderman, maybe, because how better to make sure people give you the info you want than by being a cop?) and I think that would've been a better, more interesting angle here. I don't know why Safi would do this, but I think it would've been more interesting.

I also thought for sure from minute one that the final choice was going to be like, either stay in the living world with Safi after you save her from the murderer, sort of a running from your grief thing, or go back to the dead world and be happy you saved the other Safi while accepting you have to go back to where you came from. And maybe there would be another goddamn storm about it if you tried to stay in living. But at least that would sorta make sense, the universe being all "WHAT DID I SAY WHAT DID I SAY WHAT DID I FUCKING SAY LAST TIME BITCH" about it.

I hate how all the text messages have no dates or timestamps. Put them back!

What was the point of double exposing photos outside of the end? I never did it! I think if they were gonna have double exposing photos be a thing, they should've made it so you could like, take the same photo of the same subject in both timelines! Double expose THAT!

Some people may not mind this but it absolutely bothers me that Max somehow uploads almost every photo she takes, whether it's with a professional grade camera or her Polaroid, to social media. How is she doing that??? It's not like she's uploading a photo of the photo, she's uploading just the photo! Makes no sense!

Speaking of photos some have argued that Max shouldn't be able to go back into the owl photo because she herself is not present in the photo but I always assumed that it counted if you took the photo… like I didn't realize until pretty recently that you can technically see Max's reflection in the butterfly photo in the first game because you never get a great look at it and the reflection is a little blurry and distorted by the bucket, so I just assumed that one counted because she took the photo… so I dunno, it doesn't actually super bother me because that's how I assumed it worked from the start but it does bother some people so I feel like mentioning it.

To be honest, I kinda don't like that Max drinks. I just sorta saw her as someone who just doesn't drink because she just doesn't like it! Maybe that's projection, but 1. I am allowed a little projection as a treat and 2. I know this is just my opinion but it's MY blog and I'm allowed to say what I want

Max's journal... I HATE it. Firstly, I hate how digital the art is, it doesn't look like journal art at all, it was so clearly done digitally, which is disappointing compared to Max's journal in the first game and Sean's sketchbook in the second, hell even Chloe's journal in BtS and Alex's notebook in TC looked better! And secondly even if the art looked more like it was done traditionally, it still doesn't look like Max's art. There's none of the scrapbooking elements of her old journal, and the art is way cartoonier than her art in the first game. I don't expect them to go through the trouble of getting Alyzian (the talented French artist who did the drawings in Max's journal AND Sean's sketchbook!) back, but surely they could've tried to hew a LITTLE closer to her style?

Not seeing Max teach is such a waste! Honestly for as much as I rag on this game for hewing too close to the original I actually kinda think opening the game with Max giving a lecture like how the first game opened with Jefferson's would've been better! Woulda been ACTUAL cinematic parallels, woulda been kinda

The closest this game gets to acknowledging COVID is Max looking at a notice about finals being postponed in the wake of Safi's death and thinking, "Just when you thought the online tests were behind us." I think this is cowardly and lame and makes this the VIRGIN Double Exposure in comparison to the CHAD Lost Records showing masks and having characters explicitly talk about it. I know not everyone feels this way, which is why it's in the personal gripe section, but personally I'm sick of people pretending it didn't happen (isn't STILL happening, really).

Diamond says "Nobody expects the head of Abraxas to be Mother Teresa," but Diamond seems like the kind of "friend that's too woke" who would know that Mother Teresa was a bad person, actually, and thus not say that. I sure don't, because I know the truth. (Sorry if this is how you're finding out, no I won't explain why she was bad because this post is long enough, you have Google.)

It bothers me that nobody says Okada correctly. To think, not even her besties Safi and Vinh do... (Protip for those who don't know: when you encounter a three syllable word in Japanese, the emphasis will be on the first, so it's OH-kah-dah, not oh-KAH-dah) And everyone other than Vinh says Lang with an ay sound rather than an ah sound like he does... if it was me, if I heard a guy say his own name, I would simply not continue to mispronounce it, but perhaps I am built different?

I miss the title screens for each episode/chapter! In 1, 2, and BtS, near the start of each episode you'd get the title screen with the game and episode title, always at a great moment that really had an impact, but in True Colors and Double Exposure, since we abandoned the episodic model, the game only gets one title screen, and we see the chapter name just against a black screen right before we start it... it's not as fun

I don't really feel like Maya's book hits the mark in terms of like, being a great work of literature worth plagiarizing. Which figures, it's really hard to make what's supposed to be great art in-universe when it's not your area of expertise (I mean, how many times have we all read a book where someone is a great musician and we read the lyrics to their song and it sucks because the writer may be good at prose but songwriting is a different skillset?) so it's not like it's unique in this. But I still feel like I had to say it.

Honestly if I had to say what the game most reminds me of, it's Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists. I've never seen it (or the original PLL) but I have seen Friendly Space Ninja's excellent video and they sure have some major things in common: it follows one of the previous protagonists as she becomes a college professor and gets involved with a murder mystery on campus, and it's way less compelling than the original because it's just copying all the same shit!

I think this game should've been about Safi, like, had her as the protagonist. And Max could be like, a side character, a professor or whatever. I genuinely wouldn't have complained about Max's return if it was just as a side character! Have your ending choice like, affect what photos are on her desk (Bae!Max has a recent photo of her and Chloe and like her Blackwell Class of 2014 class picture and/or a photo of Arcadia Bay before its destruction, Bay!Max has one of those double frames with a photo of her and Chloe as kids and a photo of Chloe from before her death and then a photo from like, a Blackwell class reunion with like Warren and Kate and Dana and stuff)! Have Max give some advice and stuff where she sorta alludes to what happened in a super vague way... it'd be way better this way!

I think Redditor DarkMageAgain really hit the nail on the head when they said: "This whole game felt like Safi's story from Max's perspective but also Safi is hardly there and we hardly learn anything about her actual life."

I also think Redditor SaturatedJellyfish also nailed it with their idea for how a Safi-led version of the game could go.

I think the series moving away from teenagers is kind of a mistake... like, I didn't complain about Alex being a young adult, because like, she went through the system, her teen years were a little different than most people's, she's having her coming of age story a little late as a result, that's fine. But like, I felt like part of the point of the series was to do teenage coming of age stories, because it's such an interesting and tumultuous time in everyone's lives and you're still figuring out who you are which makes it really good for this sorta choice based gaming and for superpowers as a metaphor for all the challenges you're facing then!

Shapeshifting in particular feels to me like a power that screams for a teenage protagonist. Being a teenager is all about trying on new hats, new identities, new selves, and what better metaphor for that than literal shapeshifting? There's so much you could comment on with it, maybe using it to run away from being yourself due to self-loathing, maybe using it to be people you're jealous of (but then you find maybe they don't have it as good as you thought), comment on social media and the masks everyone wears on it, and the pressure it tends to put on teen girls specifically... there's a LOT to work with!

And shapeshifting could be such an interesting power for a game! Having to choose who to be, and when, like what person do I think I need to be to get this information out of this person, what person do I think this person will respond best to, if I pretend to be this person I can get into this otherwise inaccessible place, you could have so many opportunities to do good things and bad things, things like what Safi did in this game, but it would be up to you how vindictive and cruel you want to be! There's so much potential there! If they wanted to do some Safi backstory game like that, I'd be lying if I said I didn't think that could be kinda interesting!

I also think the timeline shifting is a good power, I remember a few years ago I was considering possible powers for future games and that's one I thought of (shapeshifting was too, incidentally), but I feel like they didn't really use it to its full potential. When I was thinking about it I was imagining like, a divergence point far further in the past, like a decade or more, so the differences between timelines would be stuff like "in timeline 1 there's a café here but in timeline 2 there's a pharmacy" or something! Bigger stuff than just "in timeline 1 there's Christmas decorations up but in timeline 2 there aren't!" So that was a little disappointing, as was the lack of creativity in how it was used. I mean, I'll admit I struggle to think of better ways to use the power than fetch quests and getting around obstacles and locked doors, but I'm also not a professional game dev LOL

The logo is painfully boring again and I hate it. They did at least improve the choice of font for most of the in-game text this time, so that complaint doesn't carry over from TC, but the logo thing stands, Squeenix hire a real graphic designer challenge

This is maybe the single dumbest complaint I have but Loretta needs to STOP tucking her hair into her jacket and sweater that shit makes my neck itch and feel uncomfortable just fucking LOOKING at it holy fucking shit who does that??? I guess they just didn't wanna worry about animating her hair but AT WHAT COST

Alright, enough stalling. I have to get to what I think is truly the crux of the problem: a fundamental difference in philosophy of what LIS should be thematically between DON'T NOD and Deck Nine.

Life Is Strange and Life Is Strange 2 are quite clear about what the point is:

Well, I kid, perhaps it's a bit more...

Sometimes, there are no good choices. Only the ones you can most live with having made. There is always a price, you are always sacrificing something. You cannot have it all. Growing up is learning to make hard choices and stick with them.

It's obvious what you lose in LIS1: It's Chloe or the Bay. In LIS2, you can sacrifice Sean's freedom to ensure Daniel's and make sure he has a normal life and that you can be together when you get out of prison, you can choose Sean's freedom but have Daniel end up sacrificing his own to make it happen and ensure they can never be together again, you can choose to keep Sean free and the brothers together but they become criminals who can never go back to their home or the lives their father would have wanted for them, or you can pussy out at the very last second and get Sean killed for it, leaving Daniel to face life as a criminal in another country on his own. There is no way to save Chloe and the Bay, there is no way to get Sean and Daniel both free and living normal lives in America without Sean going to prison or to get them together to Mexico without making them criminals. You have to decide which ending best aligns with your values. And the characters have to decide, because that's growing up. Making the hard choice is the culmination of both Max and Sean's arcs.

There's also a major theme of "do you prioritize helping and being with this person you love and care about very deeply, even if it breaks the law and/or harms others, or do you feel that you have a duty to society at large and its rules that overrides that, even if it means hurting or otherwise making things difficult for this person you love, even to the point of being separated from them, possibly forever?" running through both games, and through many if not most of their big choices. You also are often pitted against them, with "prioritize myself vs prioritize them" choices, particularly in LIS2. And it's all situational, it's all contextual, almost no one is going to choose all one or the other all the time, but it's interesting to see where people lean, and their endings, particularly in 2, reflect that.

It's powerful, it's real (not literally what with the superpowers, but you get what I mean).

Deck Nine, on the other hand?

Well, with Before the Storm, they were hamstrung. It was a prequel, so of course there's really only one ending with an insanely low stakes final choice. To be honest, that's fine. It's far from that game's biggest problem. True Colors... has a final choice that also feels incredibly low stakes. The obvious choice, to me anyway, seemed to be to choose to stay in Haven, since Alex clearly craved community and stuff her whole life, and never expresses any particular desire to go out on the open road for the nebulous concept of "adventure" unless Steph suggests it. But it's not like she's really giving anything up either way, is she? She can always leave Haven eventually if wanderlust strikes her. She can always return if she gets sick of the road. I'm sure the people of Haven would see her off or welcome her home happily either way. And she can stay in contact with them, it's not like she can never see any of them again. It's not permanent in that way. It's just a for now choice. She can always change her mind.

And she's never asked to choose between herself or the people she cares about, or between them and society at large. There are no conflicts of interest between Alex and the community or society, between other individuals and the community or society.

And here... well, the game sure seems to be building up to the big choice: do you save Safi and sacrifice Caledon/Lakeport, or kill Safi to save them? And then, Max says, "I'm not going to make another impossible choice between two shitty futures."

Deck Nine wants to present this as "growth."

In a Twitter thread after her (unwarranted and unfair, to be clear) firing, Narrative Director Felice Kuan said "...Max realizes she’s being put through the same fate again, being asked once again to either take the life of a marginalized woman or feel guilty for letting her live. And she says no. ... In LiS: DE, we gave a queer woman the ability to refuse an untenable situation and shape it into a better one."

And that's all lovely, that's all well and good...

but it is, FUNDAMENTALLY, not Life Is Strange.

The original Life Is Strange is a game about how nobody gets a perfectly happy ending, no matter how deserved, and how superpowers themselves wouldn't help you to get it, because there would always be a cost, and trying hard is important but it is never going to get you everything you want because you are never going to get everything you want no matter what you do. That to exist is to survive unfair choices.

This is a game that says the first game was wrong, actually, that if you try hard (and use superpowers enough), you can get your deserved happy ending.

To have Max reject the impossible, unfair choice, to say "no, I WILL get everything I want, I CAN have it all," and then do it is a complete reversal of her character development from the first game. It is a step backwards. I DESPISE that this game has the gall to present it as positive growth! It goes against everything the series should stand for, its entire ethos!

And I wanna be so clear, I love stories with happy endings. I love stories where the power of belief breaks through destiny and creates a miracle! Where, when people get together and work hard and do their best and believe in themselves and each other, they make incredible, impossible things happen! I love stories like that!

But Life Is Strange is just not that story. It was never that story, and it should never be that story.

And if people wanna like, write fix-it fic, or whatever, that's fine, that's great, even! I'm not above reading fix-it fic for all sorts of stuff (or writing it, not that I'll ever post such things for anyone else to see xP)!

But fanfiction is fanfiction. Canon and official media are canon and official media. And I don't think canon and official media should be contradicting itself thematically like this.

You know, I feel like I see a lot of anti-tragedy rhetoric these days. Like, people complaining that an ending was bad because it wasn't what they wanted, because it wasn't happy. But that doesn't make it bad. Some stories are just tragedies. Some endings are just bittersweet (or fully bitter).

It's a sad song. It's a sad tale. It's a tragedy.

It's a sad song.

But we sing it anyway.

I wouldn't be happy if every story was a tragedy, of course. We need happy endings. After all, sometimes, every once in a while, things really do turn out alright. And, how can we create a better future if we cannot imagine one? We need stories that make us see how the world could be, in spite of the way that it is. I believe stories like that are important.

But I also believe stories that reflect the world as it is, messy and imperfect, tragic and unfair, are important too. We sing it anyway. And we're gonna sing it again and again!

Life Is Strange is the latter.

Near the end, after the storm, before Safi asks her for her (barely a) decision, Max says of using her powers, "There's always a price, Safi. Always." But that sure rings hollow, considering that this time, there wasn't, was there? And to be quite honest, I worry about the precedent that sets.

I almost don't want to type this, a deep fear that by doing so I'll speak it into existence. But I also feel like if I don't I'll regret it, because what if they're thinking about doing it, but then someone sees this post and hears me out and reconsiders? (delusional) Or at the very least, what if it happens, and then I lose "I told you so" rights because I didn't tell anyone so? "I told you so" rights are very important!

My big fear now, based on this game, and Max saying at the end that someday she will go back to Arcadia Bay/contact Chloe again, is that perhaps they are setting up that Max will somehow merge the timelines of the first game as she did the timelines here, to have her cake and eat it too by saving Chloe and the Bay.

I'm sure some people would find that so satisfying, the happy ending they always wanted for the characters.

But, for me at least, that would be the ultimate death knell for the series, and the ultimate spit in DON'T NOD's face, even more than this game existing at all is.

I pray I am wrong, I pray that whatever they do next is not that, I pray that whatever they do next is better than this (seems like a low bar but I'll never underestimate the depths a company can sink to with the power of enough fucking focus groups).

I really do hope for the best for the future of the series, I want better for it and for Deck Nine in general than to be stuck reheating DON'T NOD's nachos for all time, but as long as the executives continue to stay at the helm, desperately attempting to please an unpleasable fanbase by doing focus group after focus group, despite focus groups generally proving that people do not in fact have any idea what the fuck they want, pandering to the audience (though they couldn't even really do that correctly) rather than innovating and making the sort of bold creative choices that made the original and 2 so standout in the first place, I fear we may see it end sooner rather than later.

Okay I really do still prefer to end these things with some positives, sincerely, so here we go.

As I said earlier, I had virtually no issues with Moses or Gwen, I thought they were great characters and I wanted more of them!

I think it helps that Gwen is basically one of the only characters who it feels like any of your choices actually affect. From how hostile she is towards you in both timelines to if she's willing to fight for her job at the end, she consistently is one of the only characters who made me feel like my actions really had consequences, and I wish the rest of the cast could say the same!

We never got to see anyone but Max's living space but at least we did get to see Moses, Lucas, Yasmin, and Gwen's offices. (Well I guess what Moses has is more a lab but whatever!) I did appreciate that! I just wish we'd had more!

The oner at the Turtle near the start of episode 4 is really good! I'm such a sucker for a good oner!

The shimmery effect when Safi is shapeshifting? Really cool! It's not how I would've ever thought to visualize it but it's better and cooler looking than anything I would've thought of!

Loathe though I do that it's there, the storm admittedly looks really fucking cool. Maybe cooler than the first game, even.

The graphics in general and the animation in particular (especially on the faces) remain insanely impressive, even if we're still veering more toward realism than I'd personally prefer.

The cast did an insanely great job. I think the writing in this game wasn't any good, but you'd never know it from their performances. Not a weak link among them! Special shout-out to Hannah Telle, of course, because there's not a single doubt in my mind that this would have failed even harder if not for her return! And particular shout-outs to Olivia AbiAssi, Blu Allen, and Rachel Crowl, whose performances I also thought were particular standouts!

Soundtrack is once again on point! I'm still disappointed by the continued moving away from licensing existing tracks because of draconian streaming platforms like Twitch auto-muting that shit, but the original songs are all really good!

With True Colors I complained that there was basically no investigation and it was boring, and here there was very much investigating! Now, it's still not quite where I want it to be, because a good chunk of what you investigate (the cow skull, Alderman) is pointless time wasting bullshit, but it is still in fact investigating so I have to give them credit where it's due! Much more interesting and appropriate than if we all got together and played Moses's stupid card game to cheer him up or whatever!

Items being labeled as stuff like "Fuckin' Mug Tree, I Guess,""Normal Lamppost, Actually," and "Oh No" is good shit, genuinely made me laugh every time, Max saw that mugtree and really said

Safi's poetry is pretty good! Some of it feels a bit on the nose, and some of it feels like kinda faux deep bullshit, but poetry tends to feel that way to me in general sometimes LOL so take my review with a grain of salt there, but anyway apparently they hired someone specifically to write Safi's poetry and it does show!

I like that they remembered Max is a horror fan. They played it up a lot in this game, even a little too much in my opinion, but I'm glad that was present because I think a lot of people ignore that aspect of her character because they find it unpleasant. I see people smear Warren as a creep by bringing up his enjoyment of Cannibal Holocaust, but you can have Max tell Warren that she's already seen Cannibal Holocaust! Max is into the freaky shit too! So I'm glad they remembered!

I don't really like the way they did Max's PTSD in this game (seriously, ZERO problems with a windowless basement room bathed in red light?) but when she says "Sometimes, right after Jefferson, I looked at cameras and I wanted to throw up. It's weird, but the only thing that helped was picking up my own camera." That? That right there? Is exactly how I imagined it.

I also like the little Go Fuck Your Selfie banner in that part. :P Bringing back "shaka brah" made me roll my eyes so far into the back of my head but bringing back go fuck your selfie made me smile. Insert "aw you're sweet/hello human resources?" meme here I guess

I really, truly feel this game had good ideas. I wish they had been better implemented, that they coalesced into something more cohesive, more original, more interesting, more daring, more in-line thematically with the original. This could've been something, and Squeenix stopped it from being it. Never forget they are the main problem here.

Well I guess that's my rant. I'm glad I finally got all this crap off my chest.

As for the future of the franchise... Squeenix are clearly in a tough position right now. I think it's pretty clear what's going on right now. With the survey they sent out (which I did not get a copy of, boo, hiss, I have many intelligent thoughts they should be reading, as you can see from this post) and the focus groups they've done in LA and London (do one in NYC so I can go you cowards), it seems they're probably in a place of trying to evaluate their options going forward, since the next game is probably a good ways into development, but was all based on the idea that this one would be a slam dunk. Way I see it, they have four options:

Option 1: Change nothing and move forward with the original plan. Probability: ~5%. Unless all the focus groups say that what Squeenix shows them of the next game fixes all their problems with DE, which is insanely unlikely, I don't see this happening, unless they are just THAT desperate to save money.

Option 2: Make some changes but leave the basic framework intact. Probability: ~75%. Changes are almost guaranteed to be made but it's going to be most tempting for them to want to keep as much the same as possible so they don't have to spend too much more money fixing everything. They're gonna wanna keep as much the same as possible for that reason.

Option 3: Massive overhaul, major changes. Probability: ~25%. It may be that the changes needed to fix everything and please the fans are so extensive they end up with no choice but to make huge, sweeping changes, with even the basic framework being altered. This is undesirable for Squeenix for obvious financial reasons but they may decide that it's worth the gamble, it really just depends on the feedback.

Option 4: FUCK IT, complete overhaul, scrap literally everything and start from scratch. Probability: <1%. Cut my life into pieces, this is the last resort. Almost guaranteed not happening because they are likely quite a ways into the next game (when asked on Twitter when the next game was coming the series' official account simply replied "👀" which might as well read "sooner than you think" in my view) and will NOT want to throw away everything they've worked on thus far, they will want to save as much as humanly possible. This is basically guaranteed not to happen.

I can't say what'll happen next, or how long the next game will take, only that whatever happens, I'll be here, and if it's bad, I'll be back with another stupid big post about it like this one and my previous ones.

Final score: 1/10, will never play again, I wish to forget it.

Play Lost Records: Bloom & Rage instead. And if you were wondering what my review of that is, especially after the disappointment of DE, it's