when double exposure came out, i ask for your thoughts+review on it. now that i see that you’re playing through reunion, id love to see your thoughts on this and how you feel about double exposure in hindsight! :))
Thanks for this! My partner and I finished Reunion recently, so I'll try not to be too spoilery for anyone who hasn't played it yet (at least beyond stuff from early game and the announcement materials). My first thought: I enjoyed it a lot more than I'd expected. My partner did, too.
The usual disclaimers: no, it'll never be my favorite LiS game (but it'll also never be my least favorite; sorry LiS2). It's not perfect, there are tons of little things that bug the shit out of me (WHY does Chloe have the storm tattoo even though in this fused universe the storm didn't happen?), and I'd definitely have approached many things completely different if it'd been in my power to do so.
But having said all that, I actually really liked it. Many (but not all) of my favorite characters from DE returned, and I really enjoyed getting to hang out with Moses in particular more. I dig grown up Chloe and thought she and Max played off each other really nicely. The gameplay was more enjoyable than in DE, the crunched timeline of 'need to fix this problem within this specific weekend' worked well, and I thought the story was good and the mystery compelling.
There are arguments for why it wasn't the best idea to return to Max and Chloe's stories, and those are completely valid. But D9 made the decision to go back and continue that story with DE and Reunion, and overall I think they did a pretty good job. They made some great characters in both games (Moses, Amanda, Safi, Diamond, Gwen, etc), created an interesting environment in Caledon, and did - in my opinion - a really solid job with aging up Max and Chloe.
It still bugs the shit out of me that Max being into horror movies and not into anime has been canonized, since I always read her as having the opposite opinions in LiS1, but otherwise I think this is a very plausible and believable version of how Max might grow up after LiS1.
And same with Chloe; this version of Chloe makes sense to me (especially in a world where she didn't lose Joyce and her whole hometown to a storm). She's matured since her teen years, but she hasn't lost her essence. She's still a rule-breaker, still rough around the edges, still has a wicked sense of humor, but she's also more responsible and more secure in herself.
Some minor complaints about Reunion: The game should have a full on photo mode; it's ridiculous that you can only save photos if you took a picture of what the game wanted you to. Max should've at least looked up the socials for the friends she lost 11 years ago and found out were suddenly resurrected; we literally got more news about former Arcadia Bay residents from DE when almost everyone was dead. Chloe's backtalk ability should've been used more; if you're going to bring that mechanic back, it should get used more than a couple of times. And most importantly: why the fuck is there so little Diamond in this game? I legit thought she was going to be the protagonist of the next game after DE, and instead she's got, like, a tiny handful of voice lines which are very easily missable.
In conclusion: Reunion isn't perfect, but it's the game we got, and I enjoyed it. I'll play it again, and I'll enjoy it again.
As far as Double Exposure goes... I still think it was an okay game. It wasn't everything I wanted it to be, and it's not as good as Reunion, but it's still better than LiS2. The timeline hopping gameplay mechanic wasn't as much fun as rewinding time, and it felt fairly hand-holdy/on rails. But it was pretty, the story had some genuine "oh shit!" moments for me, and it introduced some characters and locations I really enjoy. The bonus cat content was way too expensive for how little content there actually was. And the ending was... kind of a miss, IMO. It felt like it was setting up a specific direction (X-Men, basically) for the continuing story, which felt kind of ridiculous and then was also essentially completely dropped in Reunion. I don't know, for me, if you're going to make that leap into "but what if Max was Professor X and Safi was Magneto" territory, then you might as well actually follow through with it. But on the other hand, I think I liked Reunion better than where I expected the series to go next. So... *shrug*