new horizons, right?

life is strange fan blog … mostly dedicated to double exposure!

[langfield]

LAMB , 22 ♡ any pronouns ♡ witchytwitchy .

welcome to my sideblog for dontnod’s & deck nine’s franchise, life is strange! what you can expect to find here are my opinions and reads on everything related to the series. as well as occasional artwork & writing snippets … or whatever else tickles my creative fancy. feel free to send in asks or requests if you wish!

icon art by my dear friend, @fire-in-my-woods ♡

[langfield]

have i. never posted my deranged nathan rambles on here? oh boy

[killingcve]

why is there not a single good safield fic

[chuzyuu]

oh youre weird...

mind you, you could've kept this to YOURSELF. you do not need to bring your negativity onto others. you don't like a fic? DONT READ IT. you dont have to announce to the world that you didnt like something. writing fanfiction is a hobby for most people and these people arent doing it for YOU. theyre doing it for themselves because they like to do it. you're not entitled to shit.

[villanargh]

this is the most insane overreaction to someone saying something on their own tumblr blog - she didn’t call out a specific fic for being bad, just that she hadn’t found any yet that stood out. she’s entitled to share her own opinion in her own space.

[inomakani]

That is a total overreaction indeed. It is not like the original post was tagged with the ship or anything!

[revengehorse]

so we’re just lying now 😭😭

[fire-in-my-woods]

You make me feel so innocent

Even if I wasn't right

You make me feel so innocent

Being with you all the time

Thank you to my dearest @lambjock for supporting my kofi.

[itslongnotlang]

Vinh Lang media in Life is Strange: Reunion

part 2/2 (prev)

[itslongnotlang]

Vinh Lang media in Life is Strange: Reunion

part 1/2 (next)

[langfield]

Do u think there is anything redeeming abt Reunion as a game?

there was a moment or two i found genuinely funny, if that’s anything! both of those occasions was chloe just being chloe, who was perhaps the highlight of the game … mostly. i enjoyed her making a crude gesture behind max’s door when the security guard noelle left, and their almost childish giggling after. and her immediately kicking ren in the dick for irritating her … i even enjoyed how heavily they leaned into chloe being a science fan, as i find it’s a part of her characterization often neglected in most things!

i suppose i even liked the fire idea and i’m also not against abraxas becoming antagonists, even though i wish it was done better. it was nice to see abraxas house at least, as well as the whole ‘hall of secrets’ aspect which i found beyond fun! it has potential for fic purposes lol.

but besides that? i’m kind of drawing a blank. i found most of the game tedious, boring, and lifeless. even the romance scenes between pricefield wasn’t of interest to me? it felt deeply cliche, and never did max or chloe talk about their problems in a way that moved or ensnared me. those two could’ve been any two women involved in some time travel or breakup plot tbh. and as i’ve said before, i found the other characters atrociously shallow or inconsistent … plus all of the promises at the de never came to fruition ( ie : diamond’s powers, safi’s independence journey, and max actually seeing arcadia bay again for bay routers ) and were instead dismissed completely. none of your choices in de mattered or actually carried over. etc etc.

any positives were outweighed by the bad for me, and the positives were already few and far inbetween! most of the fun parts of de ( crosstalk, fun side quests, and overhearing convos ) were erased as well, making reunion feel like limbo, where nobody except max & chloe, and a small handful of others, were real. so, yeah!

[lambjock]

vinh gets rejected by max and is coping with it very, very poorly via using reggie to handle all that misplaced yearning and passion within him. safi, similarly rejected, decides to indulge in the familiar comfort of revenge by having fun with her ‘not quite ex boyfriend’ … and by fun, i mean torment. and by revenge, i mean she shapeshifts into max and they have complicated sex about it!

[lambjock]

dichotomy of vinh lang iykyk

[mal3nko]

reggie becoming the new abraxas president by reunion is so random to me lmao like that dude was barely even a member in the last game and now all of a sudden he’s the leader?

[langfield]

perhaps my most biased and controversial complaint is that de for max is her moving on. it’s her healing from arcadia bay, and most importantly, chloe. as someone who chooses bay more often than not, it meant a lot to me to see max beginning to put chloe’s ghost to rest … and beginning to accept new people into her life ; people she can allow herself to love, and care for, and inexplicably trust. de shows how little max has grown due to the heavy weight of her trauma, but it also starts to unravel her and have her mature — slowly, but surely, she sheds her complexes and flaws and she doesn’t choose the girl over the town, but she won’t choose the town over the girl either. her refusing to choose matters. just as much as her refusing to run away with safi. max making a home of caledon, choosing to face her mistakes and the scrunity of her new friends … it is so deeply important to her as a character. max has spent the last decade hiding from people who love her, from her pain — she’s spent years beholden to chloe’s ghost in the same way chloe was to rachel’s and safi was to maya’s. and it’s unhealthy and so, so stunting. staying at caledon, having new friends, being honest, and even saying she’ll visit arcadia bay again one day? it was growth.

growth that immediately is ruined by reunion. for no reason at all, all her friends and lover(s) forget about her honesty at the turtle … and max just lets them, and will continue to let them forget, forever. she breaks up with vinh/amanda for vague reasons and stops talking to them. chloe gets revived and max gets her arcadia bay and her blue-haired girl — and she becomes obsessive, fixated, pathetically attached to chloe and her hero complex all over again. she lives and breathes chloe and spares no more thoughts towards caledon or arcadia bay besides vague notions of playing savior. she allows chloe to diminish her friends ( safi, always, and vinh depending ) and turns a blind eye to their suffering or even gets angry at them for causing problems. it goes back to how it was before : max, secretive, refusing to be open to anyone besides chloe and one other person. max, claiming that chloe is all that matters. max, who was previously tired of running away and had taken a shine to teaching and caledon, suddenly running off to play band photographer and loving every second of it. there’s no implication she’ll keep in contact with anyone besides moses. safi? amanda? vinh? reggie? diamond?? gwen? they’re blips in her life now. instead of being a permanent place in her heart, they were rendered as placeholders for chloe.

max’s flaws are revived and worsened tenfold and the game never challenges this like it did in de. it’s just so, so fucking disappointing. max was finally at a point of healing, of moving forward instead of looking back, and reunion gave her a ghost and an amazing new reality and dragged her back to the start. chloe and max’s bond doesn’t change. it goes back to what it was, maybe even worse. everything max does is for chloe now. in fact, the writers manipulated de’s ‘merging realities’ incident to make it about max choosing to save chloe and not safi. like … what? the writers wrote safi calling max out on this, and max’s two responses all but confirm it, as it’s a weak excuse or an even weaker apology. i guess safi was supposed to look selfish somehow with this dialogue instead of reasonable and hurt.

anyway. i don’t see how this is max’s happy ending. or how this ending for her is particularly interesting. max moving on and finding a life past the trauma of arcadia bay was always what i wanted, and what was so enriching about max’s plot in de anyway. undoing all that just to give her everything she wanted ( if you get to good ending ) is … boring. i don’t know how else to word it. as a tragedy enjoyer it all just sucks.

[hardhuilen]

My thoughts on Life Is Strange: Reunion

I have many, and I did my best to organize them here. Expanding on my first reactions that I discussed with @artioptera.

Spoilers, obviously.

Let's start with the positive – because it's really not all trash. Most of it is, but not all of it. In fact, I think this would have been a good game (or at least a decent one) if it had been a standalone story unrelated to Max and Chloe. As a Life Is Strange sequel, though, it sucks sweaty balls.

The central mystery is compelling and set up well with plausible misdirections. I really liked the gameplay surrounding it, finding clues and connecting the dots. However, the way the mystery is set up makes choices more into pass/fail conditions rather than the more ambiguous decisions where both options have a downside that we know from Life Is Strange. This makes it feel more like Until Dawn than Life Is Strange – the fact that several people live or die depending on you making the right decisions heavily contributes to that. And Backtalk, which in my opinion is slightly better than it was in Before the Storm but still sucks, has a very obvious pass/fail foundation. Overall, I guess it felt like your choices mattered less, especially the major choices, despite them having tangible consequences. (And your choices from Double Exposure barely mattered at all, but I'll come back to that.)

Another good things is that you can FINALLY freely take photos! It's still no photo mode (seriously why does Life Is Strange, famously a fucking Game About Photography, not have a photo mode. I'll die mad about it), but it may in a sense be better than that, because it lets you as Max engage with the environment as a photographer. (It should have both, obviously.) It's slightly too limited – which a Polaroid camera is! It should actually not even have zoom! But I hated not being able to crouch. If you want me to photograph small objects at ground level, don't make me do so from this stupid upright angle! As a photographer irl I'm very much a kneeler, and I'm not even that tall. But I digress.

Other things it improves on from DE is that there isn't any stupid DLC this time, and the game runs fairly decently on my computer. (DE ran like absolute ASS on launch, bad enough that I considered getting a refund lmfao.) With that out of the way, it's time to get into Hater Mode™.

The 'romancing', folks... it's bad. It's terrible. There are a lot of issues with continuity/retconning (Deck Nine's Life Is Strange has always been fond of retconning tbh) in general, but the way they handle DE's romances makes it particularly obvious – especially if you romanced both Vinh and Amanda.

In the nine months since DE, Max has dated and broken up with both of them. She tells Chloe as much. This in itself is already lame, but the way she tells the stories is very much two seperate monologues that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Not to mention that at the end of DE Amanda is put off when you also kiss Vinh – how did she even end up dating Max? The Vinh romance and the Amanda romance are treated as two completely seperate variables that do not influence each other, which SUCKS! The way Max tells the stories makes no sense. Did she date Vinh first, then Amanda? The other way around? Or did she date them simultaneously? Which would obviously be fine, but it should be mentioned! I had expected the 'romanced both' variable to lead to Max dating (or having dated) Vinh, and give Amanda some unique dialogue. But the variable does not fucking exist! They simply do not account for the choice to kiss both of them.

Not that that ends up mattering much – both the romances are dropped like a brick. There's some dialogue alluding to it, but no possibility to rekindle. The fucking capper is the way Max rejects Vinh when he still expresses interest in her at the end of the game: she is no longer interested because he tried to hide human remains. Excuse me, but that would never be a dealbreaker to the Max I know? Vinh was already a very morally questionable character in DE – which is what made him so interesting! – and Max herself is also very morally grey. She constantly talks about breaking and entering as a beloved hobby, for fuck's sake. But no, Vinh moving a thirty-year-old skeleton (which he fucking ends up changing his mind about too) is a bridge too far. What.

With Amanda, there is no discussion about the future of your relationship at all. Which is why I was baffled when, after finishing the game, the choices review told me that "Amanda continues to have romantic feelings for Max." HUH??? Why is that not addressed in-game at all?!

The only romance option in Reunion is Chloe, which is so boring. It's basically Pricefield: The Game; it's actually laid on so thick that it almost doesn't feel believable to play them as friends. But even within that framework there could have been more options! At some point I thought that Safi might also become a romance option – for Max, for Chloe, or even for both of them! There's actually a lot of directions they could have gone with this being a dual protagonist game, but alas. And to be clear, I don't think choice-based games should necessarily include romances. I think Life Is Strange 2 – a very good game – is actually made worse by them. I do get the appeal, and when done well they can be very satisfying, but in most Life Is Strange games both the buildup and the payoff fall kind of flat. It feels like an insignificant little sidequest rather than part of the larger story (True Colors DOES do this well by my recollection). That said – only having one romance option when the series has established a pattern of having two choices (excluding Before the Storm, but as a prequel it gets a pass) is just lame as fuck. And you don't even have to earn the romance; a proper choice-based romance is locked behind certain decisions, that's what makes it fun. But Chloe gets the option to kiss Max regardless of any of your other choices up to that point. I'm really not even anti-Pricefield, but Jesus Christ, man. They're pushing it REAL hard and it's annoying.

The way the romances are handled, along with how a lot of other plot threads are dropped and retconned, make me believe that this was originally supposed to be a very different game. Diamond having powers was like THE teaser at the end of DE, and she doesn't even fucking show up. A couple of mentions and one meaningless phone call. We don't even learn what her power is! Come the fuck on! Barely anything that happened in DE matters. I'm not a big fan of DE, but it shouldn't be made redundant like this.

Max's new powers make no fucking sense. It's not explained or even addressed how she can suddenly stay in the photograph permanently instead of just the moment. And her being able to tap into photos of events she wasn't present (or. born. lmao) for makes no sense. Not to mention the fireflies(?) outside the Abraxas house – because that's exactly what they do, they never mention that phenomenon again.

I missed the listening in on strangers' conversations – that was actually one of the things from DE that I really liked! It added so much flavour and depth, and without them Reunion felt oddly silent. I would also have liked more rewind puzzles; they give Max her rewind back and then heavily underutilize it. I think that's partially a symptom of her sharing playtime with Chloe, but they really could have done more. I guess the game as a whole feels very unpolished.

Coming back to the thirty-year-old skeleton for a moment – that's supposed to be Ren's father, but Ren... is clearly younger than thirty. He looks and acts like a kid, and I think he may even get referred to as such? People don't say that about thirty-year-olds. Besides that, the owner of the skeleton very much looks student-age too in the photo of him. It's of course possible to have children while very young, but the whole thing just comes across as poorly thought out. Why didn't they make Ren older?

Then, from the official Life Is Strange instagram account: "Will you learn more about the Arcadia Bay supporting cast? Yes." ME WHEN I LIE!!! There's one (1) throwaway line about Warren in a text – Chloe mentions he's an "indie film darling" which both means essentially nothing and doesn't fit his character at all imo. And fine, there's texts from Joyce, but we had those in DE too. We don't learn anything new about her. It's of course possible that I missed something small, but that wouldn't be a whole trove of information. They're leaning so heavily into fanservice with Pricefield, but completely neglect everyone else. It's just disappointing.

Lastly. I know we're all critical of binary choice endings, but that would genuinely have been leagues better then whatever the fuck this ending was. Max leaving Caledon made no sense at all when her putting down roots and defending her new home was such an important theme throughout both DE and Reunion. Not having any say in Max's future felt wrong. Chloe gets one final choice that influences the post-credits epilogue, which is just a bunch of stills, and, in my case, essentially adds nothing. This game was ostensibly supposed to be about giving Max and Chloe closure, but either Life Is Strange 1 ending was far more satisfying than this.

I enjoyed myself well enough playing, but ultimately this game is fucking stupid. lol.

[langfield]

reunion spoilers

finally finished the game after a grueling couple of hours and my main takeaways thus far are biased and also just. complains.

1. max literally leaving caledon to go on the road with chloe sets her entire character back but oh well! her whole thing in de was about planting roots, and she can even call caledon her home in reunion, but … no. of course she can’t stay. she has to leave and ‘run away’ despite this being framed as a bad decision for safi herself

2. max saying she can’t be with vinh for hiding a body in a dumpster is so goofy. when has max ever had morals. she lets chloe shoot a man and a dog and doesn’t gaf 😭 she understands vinh was in a crazy spot and has forgiven safi for shooting her mom … max has lost most of her empathy and compassion in this game and it shows lol

3. vinh leaving caledon and not knowing where his life is going … ok and that’s good how? him and safi getting weird, unhappy endings while yasmin gets her high ranking position back is so ODD but whatever!!

4. the game legitimately having safi call out max’s codependent relationship with chloe and yet not confronting that at all??? it bothers the fuck out of me. i don’t even mind pricefield endgame so long as the game tackled them in all their good-bad unhealthy glory … and yet none of their problems or dependency was addressed at all? max suddenly fixating on chloe and ignoring everything else — saying things like ‘you’re all that matters’ and that max hasn’t felt alive since that week back at blackwell … none of that is normal! but god forbid the game engaged with that willingly. i’m all for toxic relationships and i think pricefield could move past that, yet instead pricefield continued as they were, as they’ve always been, and that’s just so boring.

anyway. god i don’t know. so much of this game was rushed and frankly heartless. them retconning de’s last moment doomed the game and killed all of max’s relationships with the caledon cast and i can’t ever forgive them for that.

[langfield]

reunion spoilers

the fact the game had max remove the photos of all the caledon people … are you for real. tell me max has lot all her growth without telling me

[langfield]

semi spoilers + rant :

seeing some pricefielders already start their ‘mad your couple broke up? didn’t you say chloe’s and max’s break up was valid and made sense?’ takes which i saw coming the moment max broke up with amanda / vinh, but … at least chloe haunted max as a failed relationship. at least max still acknowledged chloe as her ex! and, best of all, no matter how ‘dumb’ some people found the reasons, at least we knew why they broke up! at least they had an interesting falling out.

with vinh and max it’s just … oh, our relationship was like hot milk (?). but we still sleep together often (??). when i found out the game retconned max’s big moment at the end of the game ( stupid, by the way ) i was like oh, okay, well. max being stuck in a relationship with a vinh who only contains the memories of living world vinh is not only fascinating but doomed to fail, as max’s main bond was with dead world vinh, a vinh who allowed himself to be vulnerable and who begun seeing max as a lifeline. i talk about that more here, but max breaking up with a vinh who still clings to all his personas and walls is interesting! her still sleeping with him despite their failure of a relationship implies she still wishes she could have something with vinh, even if it won’t ever be what she wants. langfield has plenty of reasons to break up in this context ( and i’m of the opinion that an immediate boyfriend/girlfriend relationship after de would be bad anyway ) and i’m not mad at that per se. what i’m pissed about is the utter devaluation of vinh’s character and his and max’s relationship …

max was not like other people for vinh, yet his card at the beginning of the game implies this is the case. vinh also doesn’t date, he sleeps around, and yet at the beginning of reunion he already has not only an ex girlfriend, but an ex boyfriend? that’s what bothers me. i can’t even make my silly ‘langfield gets back together’ fics like pricefielders can because i have no clue what the hell is going on with them — and i’m sure it’s somewhat the same for thomfielders as well. it’s just annoying. it’s lazy. i doubt even the writers know why these pairings just ceased to exist post de and that’s infuriating.

[langfield]

seeing de’s amazing cast of characters be written so woodenly in reunion is killing me ngl. like who ARE these people??? everyone acts so shallow compared to the vast personality they had before. why tf would you change de’s one redeemable quality and the only thing that made the game enjoyable

[langfield]

why does most of this dialogue feel written by ai .. like max’s dialogue is fine but everyone else’s feels??