#lis2 critique

[thealexchen]

hi! i recently got back into lis2 again and that made me really curious - do you still agree with a majority of the critiques you made on lis2 in 2020? i know it's been 4 years since that post was made, but i actually do remember when you dropped this critique on a separate account and i'd thought it was an interesting one to keep in mind back then :)

i appreciated a lot of what you have to say, even if i respectfully disagree with almost all of it 😭 - i didn't want to drop a whole "why" i disagree discussion on here because it seems kind of rude to drop such a huge thing about it haha, but i would like to say that this critique actually did stick with me for a bit and i appreciate that you made it when you did! your account was a big lis2 acc that i remember back in the day, and i always loved seeing your posts!

Hi there and thanks for your ask! I think I may know who you are, but you did get me thinking about that critique again (has it been four years already?? Jesus). After rereading it again, I have to say my overall opinions haven’t changed… I’m just not as invested in them as I used to be.

Since DE came out, I’ve seen a drastic shift from favoring D9 to DN, but I really think the reception comes down to their creative choices (or lack thereof). When I gave my initial thoughts on DE in May, I said that D9’s games rely heavily on fanservice to be marketable, while LiS2 was divisive from the jump because it was so obviously rooted in DN’s prioritization of making a game out of passion and not what would sell well (a continuation of Max and Chloe’s story). People have mostly been complaining that DE feels written without much thought or care for the original game, with lazy offscreen narrative decisions. Unfortunately, I believe this output is really due to D9 being puppeteered by Square to “corporatize” this series to death, which I find really depressing.

When LiS1 first debuted in 2015, the gaming industry was still recovering from Gamergate (which proved how misogynistic it still was) and LGBT+ issues were finally achieving mainstream attention, both positive and negative. The media storm surrounding LiS1 all focused on how different it was. It was truly radical at the time to turn what would be a typical Sundance indie film plot into an interactive AA game and make it mainstream. I think both the positive attention from gamers starved for a story like this and the negative attention calling it “Life is Tumblr” contributed to its massive popularity and attention that hasn’t been matched since.

I have always, always believed (like since 2018) in LiS being an anthology series and letting Max and Chloe’s story end. “Farewell” was supposed to be that, and I was really excited to see what DN was making next and hopeful I could fall in love with LiS2 like I did the first game. Even if I found LiS2’s narrative choices really frustrating, I still respect DN for sticking to their vision. Honestly, Michel Koch deserves his flowers so much for staying active on Twitter through years of fan hate and complaining and posting consistently respectful replies, even as his own characters have likely become unrecognizable to him.

But while DN stuck to their vision about LiS2, I think the main contextual issue with the game (and where my critiques came from) is there was too much pressure to follow up an accidental hit. DN wanted to follow up LiS1 with an even bigger, more serious, more ambitious, maybe more “artistic” and “daring” game that was boldly political… but I just don’t think they achieved that. The game still looks beautiful, with a strong soundtrack, art direction, moments of calm, and great environmental storytelling like the first game. But while LiS1 lured you into a false sense of security with its cozy vibes and high school setting, only to blindside gamers with heartbreaking and shocking plot twists late in the game, LiS2 is just a misery fest from start to end in an attempt to be as serious and memorable as the first game. There isn’t enough joy and nostalgia (DN is SO good at nostalgia) to contrast the sorrow, and the game wasn’t as memorable or fun to play for me.

My main critique in 2020 was the game relies too much on a violent trauma narrative without proper research and content warnings. Looking back on it now, I think DN internalized the praise too strongly that LiS1 was daring and different. They tried to be even more topical and bold without regard to how actual players of color might react to the racial violence onscreen. In addition, I critiqued LiS2 for not showcasing the positive aspects of Sean and Daniel’s Mexican heritage to contrast all the racism, and I thought True Colors did a better job at including meaningful and positive cultural details for Alex and Gabe’s family. They likely didn’t think to research more carefully how to depict POC (and how the standards for sensitive representation might be different in the U.S. compared to France). American politics are also wayyyy more complex than what’s on the news, and have a massive historical, social, and economic background, and nowadays, I’ll cut DN some slack and say I think that’s too much to tackle for any game. Yes, DN could’ve done better, but I wouldn’t critique them as harshly today, and I know they had good intentions.

If the pressure to follow up LiS1 wasn’t there, maybe LiS2 could’ve been different. Maybe DN wouldn’t have bit off more they could chew, or maybe this game could’ve been made independently of the LiS series and judged on its own merit. A game like Tell Me Why shows how DN is at their best when they tell smaller, nostalgic stories and are able to do the right research and collaborate with the right consultants and actors. I hope Lost Records can be the same, since DN is pitching it from the jump as an anthology and likely their do-over of LiS as their own independent studio.

Thank you again for asking! It was nice to revisit my critique. If you’d still like to talk about it, I am down for a friendly debate!

[thealexchen]

hi again - i'm glad you answered my ask and i'd love to discuss more with you after this one, however i'd probably like to move to dms just for the sake of privacy! if you recognized me though that's honestly kind of awesome since i feel like you'd only be able to recognize me through my writing style on twitter as i only really talk on there :'D i'll talk ab one thing for now that i think i completely disagreed with as a whole, which was sean and daniel not discussing anything mexican - i think that for an assimilated immigrant family in the USA, the diaz family was actually a great and fairly accurate representation of one, especially in regards to the cultural aspect. they are a mexican-american family, specifically highlighting american. being raised in america, i don’t expect sean and daniel to know a lot about mexico. their dad is very proudly an immigrant, and he too is fully into american culture when sean and daniel talk ab how much he loves 4th of july and halloween (very ironic). i don't take it as a knock on mexican culture at all, its just that i think DN was more focused on details of the characters as a family and individuals, which is how they chose to decorate the home and it's inhabitants.

even then, it's shown in the game that their dad actually does try to share his culture with his children, at the very least with sean. in the one hour where we get to dig through sean's life, there are a ton of references to it. their dad takes them to lucha libre matches, makes tacos for them, talks about mexican-american music artists that he likes (which apparently sean dislikes), and loves baseball which is a very celebrated sport in mexico. i’d also argue that there isn't really a one size fits all with how much sean and daniel are allowed to talk about mexican culture. it’s all these little things that make the game feel more authentic in its representation. even if some children of immigrants haven’t experienced this themselves, i (and many others) certainly have. these tiny details, down to the chosen sport of choice for the dad, felt very intentional and researched.

regarding dia de muertos, i don’t really see why they would have needed to include it. it’s a very private family holiday that was turned into a public celebration for tourists because of western depictions of it, which is only really popular in big cities within mexico. i doubt sean and daniel would have gotten excited for it since they didn’t have anyone in their family that they knew and would have needed to honor who was dead (yet). halloween, on the other hand, is also heavily celebrated in mexico as well, and is completely different from dia de los muertos despite having similar themes. esteban loving halloween and being really excited for it seems in line with mexican customs.

i see a lot of my family in sean and daniel, especially in the way they were raised - sean being basically fluent in spanish while daniel only understands it when spoken to is a small detail that is very common in bilingual households. through contextual clues, daniel most likely understands a good amt of it because sean and his dad may have spoken it to him in passing conversations. there are small references like him laughing at the idea of some (most likely white) guy teaching the both of them spanish, to which sean promptly says to daniel in spanish that that guy is an idiot. daniel says he can’t speak spanish, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand any of it.

all this to say that i don’t think that DN did a bad job when balancing the racial abuse that the boys faced with racial representation. i think that in a story that critiques both systemic and individualized racism that bipoc face, it’s difficult to write sean and daniel expressing that culture when they aren’t at home, where they’d express much of that culture. however, when they did have the opportunity to showcase it, DN expressed it in a very natural way that felt realistic and understandable, at least to me :)

sorry that this was so long and only touched upon one small part of your argument, it was just something that i felt very strongly about and wanted to say 😅 ik im speaking ab this on anonymous, i just don’t really want my acc to be attached to this specifically but if you wanna talk about the critique as a whole, i’d love to - either way i just wanted to leave it off with this for now!

Oh yes, now I remember details like the Lucha Libre matches and bands- it’s been 5 years since I touched my copy of the game. I didn’t know baseball was a popular sport in Mexico and the cultural context around Dia de los Muertos (I know the same has happened to Cinco de Mayo), so thank you for educating me about that. And Sean making fun of the Spanish flyer in episode 1 with Daniel was definitely a really accurate siblings of color camaraderie moment, like a little inside joke they shared.

I think Daniel not speaking Spanish also had to do with the limitations of working with a white American actor. Alex and Gabe never spoke Mandarin or Vietnamese in True Colors, which I could forgive because Erika Mori and Han Soto aren’t fluent, but it’s something I would’ve liked because besides their last names, it’s easy to miss what ethnicity they’re supposed to be. In a landscape where Asians are constantly mistaken for different ethnicities or conflated as all the same, I was disappointed to see some gamers didn’t know/figure out Alex was Chinese (and Vietnamese, but you’d only know that from one interview with Felice Kuan and Giang “Wendy” Chen’s name only being in the credits).

And yes, if you’d like to keep chatting please feel free to send me a DM! I’ll try to answer when I can but I’ve been really busy recently. Thank you again for your continued respectful conversation and open-mindedness 🙏🏼 I appreciate your patience as I continue to re-examine my own biases.

[thealexchen]

One Year On: Life is Strange 2 Critique

December 3rd, 2020 marks a year since Life is Strange 2 ended. I was inspired by @smitethepatriarchy‘s text posts (here, but there are several other answered asks worth reading) and @suhaplays’s text post (here) criticizing Life is Strange 2 to write a critique about how Life is Strange 2 handled certain themes and social issues.

(tw: gun violence, police brutality, animal death, incarceration, racism. In this essay, I use the word “queer” in a reclaimed sense, as a queer person myself. Of course, spoiler warning for all five episodes of Life is Strange 1 and 2).

A year on, my feelings about this game have soured... a lot. When the game was first announced, I was overjoyed that our new protagonists would be two Latino boys. Finally, we would have a culturally meaningful, groundbreaking video game with people of color and their experiences at the forefront! 

Then the game was met with immediate backlash and I utterly exhausted myself defending it for weeks on Reddit and Tumblr. Throughout 2019, as the episodes came out I became increasingly disillusioned, frustrated, and disappointed with where the story was going. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so damn miserable while playing this game.

Then in the summer of 2020, when Tell Me Why began rolling out pre-release material, I noticed that they posted a Q&A about transphobia, gave content warnings, and discussed at length about their collaboration with GLAAD, Checkpoint, and the Huna Heritage Foundation to make the game with sensitivity and proper research. I cannot speak for trans and gender non-conforming people on whether Dontnod succeeded at doing so with Tell Me Why. But Life is Strange 2 did… none of that.

Essentially, I realized that the reason why I was so frustrated with LiS2 is because it focuses way too heavily on a trauma narrative. This comes off as insensitive to players of color without any content warnings or extensive research.

Sean didn’t have to get kidnapped, kicked in the face, and called a racial slur by a gas station owner. Daniel did not need to watch his puppy get mauled by a mountain lion for the sake of a “difficult choice.” Sean didn’t have to lose his eye for the sake of heightened drama. Sean didn’t need to get called a racial slur and humiliated by his native language/beaten in the desert for refusing to sing. Daniel didn’t need to get shot— twice. Hell, all of “Faith” probably could’ve been cut— how is a church cult that brainwashes Daniel and beats Sean half to death relevant at all to the story?

Even if not all of the game’s violence was racially motivated, the consistent trauma that Sean and Daniel endure does not make for positive representation— or even good characterization. There is a difference between sympathetic characters and well-written characters, and trauma does not make Sean and Daniel any more complex or likable-- just more fucking traumatized.

LiS2 is more grounded in reality, but that also makes plot holes that much harder to excuse (Daniel’s powers being spotted, most of the Parting Ways ending, Sean’s prison sentence). But most of all, it grounds all of Sean and Daniel’s pain and trauma in reality. 

There is no magicking away a town-destroying storm with time travel. Sean can’t keep his dad alive by ripping up a Polaroid. After Max unlocked her powers, she was still a Blackwell student, reconnecting with Chloe, taking photos, saving lives, and uncovering a murder mystery. After Daniel unlocked his powers, the Diaz brothers lost everything. 

The game never lets you forget that Sean and Daniel are homeless, wanted, constantly in danger, and that they are never getting their old lives back. It permeates the entire game, and for players of color, just reinforces a sad, miserable, grim reality about living in the United States. It is, as @smitethepatriarchy said, potentially triggering for players of color, and it is certainly not something I needed to be reminded of.

And the representation of POC? It feels shallow and ill-researched. It would only take a Google search to find out that Dia de Muertos (a holiday to honor the dead, no less) was from October 31 to November 2 in 2016, the year the game takes place, but Daniel only talks about Halloween in episode 1. Sean and Daniel never discuss any Mexican customs, foods, or holidays. Sean doesn’t speak Spanish with his immigrant father, only during a scene when he’s traumatized (again!) by two racists, and again when talking to Mexican immigrants— in jail. Daniel doesn’t speak Spanish at all. Most of their allies throughout the game are white, including Finn and Cassidy, who appropriate Black culture with their dreadlocks.

So what’s left? Sean and Daniel’s existence as people of color is, at worst, just a narrative prop to justify everything that happens to them. They are people of color on the surface only. In a meta-sense, the game only considers the color of their skin and their last names as what is narratively important… yikes.

I don’t have anything against people who genuinely loved the game and were moved by its messages and story. But I can’t help but feel bitter that white players have the luxury of only thinking of this game as a work of fiction and not feeling any personal reliability to Sean and Daniel’s racialized trauma.

I don’t regret playing LiS2, but I do regret all the time and energy I spent defending it in the beginning. I understand now that I shouldn’t let people’s opinions get to me, nor should I feel obligated to like or defend a game for its attempts at representation. But now, I think I understand how queer fans must have felt in late 2015 when Polarized released. After following the game for 10 months, to see that Chloe’s ultimate destiny was to die and Pricefield is another ship plagued by the Bury Your Gays trope (in the ending that the devs clearly put more work into) must have been just as disillusioning and infuriating. I understand why some fans were so quick to unfollow LiS or develop mixed feelings about the series, because that’s how I feel too after following LiS2’s development from September 2018 to December 2019.

Before I end, I will admit that Life is Strange 2 arrived at a time when I needed it. I still stand by my belief that DN did a great job characterizing Sean, Daniel, and Chris without toxic masculinity, which is the best thing they could’ve done for a male-focused follow-up to a game about queer women. I love that Sean is still a canonically bisexual man of color in a major video game and that DN didn’t forget their queer audience. I love the world and characters that DN built, but I still prefer AU fanfictions of their normal lives, without all that trauma. 

So, I will continue to treasure Lyla and her 10 minutes of screentime (aka the only shred of Asian American representation I can get from this series). I still reblog LiS2 fanart to support the artists. I still support Dontnod, because as Tell Me Why has shown, they are capable of researching and writing stories with more sensitivity. And let’s be honest-- I’m still gonna be hella excited if Life is Strange 3 is announced.

But so many aspects of Life is Strange 2 were bungled that it came off as a remarkably average and forgettable experience. A year on, I don’t hate Life is Strange 2, but I am writing this to move on from it.

Thank you for reading.

[thealexchen]

Hey! I just finished playing LiS2 for the first time last night, and I ended up finding your blog in the tag. I found and read your critique and I just want to say that everything you wrote there was spot on. I could not figure out how to put into words how I felt at the end of this game and why it made me feel the way I feel, and your words made sense to me 100%. I just appreciated reading it a lot!

Hey, thank you so much! I wrote that over a year ago to sort out all the mixed feelings I had about the game after I tried to defend it so much when it first came out. I'm really happy to hear that it's still resonating with people after this long. I didn't write it to preach that my opinion was the only correct way to feel about the game, but I'm glad that I'm not alone in how I felt. Thank you for the kind message!

[thealexchen]

hey jaimie, aside from dumb reasons like not having max & chloe in it, why do you think people don't like lis2?

Time for an essay! Lol

Basically, LiS2 tried too hard to be different from LiS1. In trying to get people to compare LiS1 and LiS2 as little as possible, Dontnod ended up moving away from some of the things that people loved about LIS1.

1. It’s too different from LiS1 in general. Most likely, people were drawn to LiS1 for its unique qualities: a comfortable, familiar small-town setting, a wide cast of characters that had their own interior lives, a sci-fi murder mystery, and a central story about two childhood friends rekindling their friendship (and possibly making it romantic). LiS2 swaps out the small-town setting for a constantly changing road trip, the wide cast to a few side characters who we only see for part of an episode, and the main relationship to two brothers who learn to depend on one another. Sean and Daniel already have a pre-existing relationship, and their growth of “growing closer” might be a more linear and less interesting development compared to Max and Chloe, who repair their friendship, explore their feelings for each other, and are basically “connected by fate and the universe.”

2. Sean is too different from Max. Max was never “responsible” for Chloe the way Sean is for Daniel. He’s more outgoing, confident, and “mainstream,” which might make people think that he’s not as unique or relatable as Max was.

3. One of the main characters is a kid. Some people don’t like kids.

4. The story is not as tightly written and the world feels too empty. LiS1 was in one town over 5 insane days, LiS2 goes through the entire west coast over one year. It’s a huge, sprawling journey, but for those who liked the intimacy of the smaller LiS1 story with huge twists (the tornado, the dark room, etc) LiS2 can feel empty and boring by comparison. Environments are only in one scene and then they move on. The main goal is to get to Puerto Lobos, but the Karen mystery is underdeveloped at this point in the story compared to Rachel, Kate, Nathan, and the mysterious red binders in LiS1. The world is huge in LiS2, but empty.

5. The choice mechanics can be frustrating. Believe me, I’m extremely impressed by the complex choices, and I think the education theme can be done well (and has been so far… for the most part.). But when Daniel is the one who determines the actual outcome, the player might feel that their agency is taken away. It’s also hard to figure out what determines what– you can tell Daniel to only use his powers in emergencies, but he still might fail to save Chris, and that can be frustrating. Also, the nature of the road trip story means the story has to move in a certain direction, so as Sean, you don’t even feel like you have much control over anything.

6. Sean isn’t the one with powers. A huge gameplay mechanic was time travel, and it feels barer without any powers to control yourself.

7. The tonal shift is too extreme and can happen before you get a chance to bond with the characters. In LiS1 you had Max going to class, eating at the diner, walking on train tracks, and then you had Max saving Kate, investigating the files, discovering the dark room, saving Chloe, over 5 episodes. In LiS2, despite having a kid character, the story goes from light to dark in as quickly as 30 minutes. In the first episode, Sean flees from the police, is beaten, kidnapped, harassed, and breaks down crying about five times. If you feel for Sean and his situation, you’d be devastated, but if you haven’t been able to connect with Sean and Daniel, it would be very difficult to stay emotionally invested.

8. It’s glitchy, the wait times are long, the game’s official social medias aren’t as active, and the fandom doesn’t have a lot to work with in terms of fanart, fanfiction, etc. 

I hope that answers your question. I’ve been trying to look at Life is Strange 2 more objectively. It’s definitely not perfect but I want to give it a chance.