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The script for Remember Me was a hilarious disaster so I don't have high hopes for this thing, especially since it appears to be running off similar concepts. Still time to prove me wrong, though.
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Feb 1, 2015 06:27
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Accordion Man posted:It's got some awkwardness to it dialogue-wise, but its overall pretty good, especially when it comes to the characters already. It also feels really sincere which makes me look past any flaws that come up. It's probably got the worst case of ludonarrative dissonance of any game I've ever seen and totally fails to follow up on any aspect of its (actually pretty interesting and original) setting. It's an ambitious disaster, but a disaster nonetheless. I mean, Life is Strange probably won't have the main character blubber over scrambling someone's memories while whitewashing all the murders they were directly and indirectly responsible for up to that point (including a drat hospital bombing), so it has some wiggle room.
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Feb 1, 2015 06:41
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The game was about as emotionally affecting for me as a Law & Order episode. Chloe in particular was boring as sin. I still like and respect what the game was trying to do (right up to the ending, which was genuinely clever and a perfect example of game writing striving above its medium), but the character writing was weak enough so that I was pretty detached from the whole thing.
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Jul 5, 2016 05:20
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Beefstew posted:The ending is good, too. I stand by my earlier interpretation and still believe that it's a lot more challenging than people give it credit for. I made a big effortpost about it in the LP thread and yeah, I agree - it goes the extra mile by actually incorporating long-running themes and imagery and references from the whole game up to that point, including the otherwise painfully on-the-nose Catcher in the Rye shoutouts, to make a point about responsibility and owning up to the consequences of your actions and the nature of good intentions. You have to scrape away a lot of dull, artificial character drama to get at it, but it's probably one of the cleverer things in a game plot in the last few years. Of course, gamers are gamers and wildly misinterpret it as something it's not just because two boring girls kiss a couple of times. What are you gonna do.
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Jul 5, 2016 13:15
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AriadneThread posted:i'm glad there's only one correct way to interpret media, it sure would be tiring if multiple people could look at the same thing and come away with wildly different impressions that we had to treat as equally valid It's a little frustrating to see people wishing for better writing in games and then, when one actually tries for something that's in the same zip code as literary and even kind of succeeds, a lot of those same people decry the ambitious parts while focusing on the title's most trite, shallow aspects. I mean, LiS was still enough of a success for DontNod to keep working, so I'm not sweating it. They're not a perfect studio by any means but I like the ideas they bring to the table.
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Jul 5, 2016 14:02
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AriadneThread posted:so would you say character relationship, particularly a gay relationship is neither ambitious nor literary then? No. Stories aren't special just because they have lesbians in them. It's been done for ages and nothing about Max and Chloe's dynamic struck me as all that interesting or innovative. That's not to say their sexuality is a bad thing, either. It's a neutral thing. It has no bearing on the characters or story at all. I was way more taken in by Max's internal drama and how everything in the game was ultimately a reflection of her inner self, not to mention how Chloe's otherwise cliche personality got filtered and tossed around by the circumstances of Max's own issues. Lots of people like the game for its character writing, and there's nothing wrong with that! What rubs me the wrong way is decrying what's also a very ambitious and well-thought out plot arc because it didn't service those characters the way those people wanted, especially if they try to tie it to some larger theme about how lesbian relationships always need to end badly or something like that. It's totally senseless.
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Jul 5, 2016 14:20
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exquisite tea posted:The funny thing about all this to me is that Max can also not have a lesbian relationship with Chloe whatsoever. Gaze into the minds of the gamer, my children. Yeah, that's another thing to consider, but in any case the relationship between Chloe and Rachel(?) leans pretty blatantly in that direction, so LiS definitely doesn't shy away from same-sex relationship portrayal regardless of the player's choices.
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Jul 5, 2016 14:29
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Plom Bar posted:What would you say to the idea that nothing, absolutely nothing, exists in a vacuum, and that considering a work within the context of a larger body of literature is, in fact, a worthwhile pursuit? That's what I'm doing. Life is Strange slots pretty neatly into latter-day magical realist traditions (maybe not so much the more classical writers like Marquez and his contemporaries, but I haven't read as much of them as I should) with a smattering of coming-of-age stories like, as mentioned, Catcher in the Rye, in case Max's last name wasn't a big enough tipoff. I think that's a lot more important than TvTropes-esque lists about how many lesbian relationships end up with a corpse because, as mentioned, the sexuality of the characters is a neutral thing. The ending runs off themes of regret, sacrifice, and the need to live with your mistakes, and that's what drives Chloe's possible death. The nature of her relationship with Max isn't relevant beyond the fact that she was a person with whom Max was very close, and then took too long to reconcile with before it was too late. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Jul 5, 2016 |
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Jul 5, 2016 15:10
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Thuryl posted:Funny how certain kinds of people are more likely to end up doing all that regretting and sacrificing than others, though. It's true that the game is crazy centered around Max to an almost solipsistic degree, but that kind of made it better for me because it made the otherwise uninteresting characters a lot more tolerable. It's telling that the final act's nightmare sequence has the entire cast just constantly reiterating Max's name, Max's thoughts, Max's hangups, Max-Max-Max all the time, and ends with Max confronting a version of herself who rips her up one end and down the other for her selfishness. Life is Strange is all about Max. Everyone else is basically a prop.
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Jul 5, 2016 15:20
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AriadneThread posted:it may be neutral to you, but it's not to others Which is fine. But the writing isn't weak just because it fails to match your values. Paladinus posted:Imo, a white thirty-something man in a trench-coat can be a fitting and a well-written protagonist in a game. Only if he has an estranged daughter figure and a life on the dangerous fringe of society. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Jul 5, 2016 |
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Jul 5, 2016 15:30
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AriadneThread posted:The writing isn't strong just because it matches yours. Oh, no worries. People who love Doctor Who also find it intolerable garbage. I'm not saying anything about liking or disliking, just that on a strictly structural, "here is the story and its ideas" basis, the plot works and achieves what it was trying to accomplish. You can dislike it in spite of that, but it doesn't change the fact. I wasn't thrilled with the game myself, it wasn't until the very end of Chapter 2 that I started enjoying it out of anything other than morbid fascination at how inept the dialogue was.
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Jul 5, 2016 15:58
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Argue posted:I liked Oxenfree while I was playing it, but it did not have a single good ending. They later released some free DLC which adds a new ending which I guess is meant to be the best ending, but I didn't like that ending either. Kentucky Route Zero's last episode ended with enough finality to be considered a conclusion to the whole series, albeit an incredibly bleak one. The wait between episodes 2 and 3 was torture, though.
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Jul 13, 2016 14:25
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King Vidiot posted:Aaaape aaape aaaape, who wants to go ape?! Let us not blame poor, hapless Warren for the sins of the scriptwriters. As for Jefferson and Kate, it's never spelled out, but you do get a chance to overhear Jefferson driving Kate even deeper into depression when she tries to confide in him and he brushes her off with an insinuation that she brought the entire incident on herself. My guess is that he knew that Nathan's fuckup had started to pull the thread on his own criminal activities, and was banking on Kate committing suicide so that he'd have a reason to "regretfully resign" and start anew somewhere else, probably bumping off Nathan on the way.
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Oct 30, 2016 01:46
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Karpaw posted:Season-appropriate: I've watched several LPs where people flub the quoting scripture part because they interpret the "give you rest" in Matthew 11:28 as meaning death through assisted suicide. Hell, I can get behind that.
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Dec 23, 2016 14:51
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