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oodlyenough · 2 years

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in the wake of the true colours hype last year i decided to rank every LIS game + dlc and then ... never published the post bc the fandom was so full of people picking fights with each other lmao

but now the fandom is dead and my opinions have not really shifted at all so here is my extremely long-winded opinionated post on life is strange lmao:

#1. life is strange

lis1 my beloved...

honestly i just love this game. all my qualms are fairly minor. I like the stupid dialogue -- I think it has more character and is more memorable than same-voice quipmachine dialogue that is trendy in lots of media, and captures the spirit of the way teenagers talk even if not the slang specifically. i love the way every part of the game serves the theme -- from the photo collectibles and max's photography interest to the idea of capturing moments in time, time travel, etc. rewind is an absolute galaxy brain mechanic to introduce into a choice game, used to great effect.

i LOVE the nightmare sequence, and i even love the ending choice that again serves the theme of "you cannot rewrite time to fix all your mistakes". i love having a murder mystery time travel game where the central relationship is two girls falling in love. 10/10. my beloved. #2. true colours

i love true colours a lot! i thought decknine made massive strides between BTS and this, and it made me more optimistic for the future of the franchise. i was so happy to love it

i loved alex and thought she was a wonderful, complex, well-performed character. i thought the empathy was used really interestingly, i liked seeing the world through other characters' emotions. i loved the core cast of supporting characters -- steph, ryan, gabe, charlotte, riley, duckie, they're all characters i got attached to and wanted to form good relationships with. i liked that it was a murder mystery. i liked getting to follow NPCs like bald guy and the ice cream couple through the game. when i first finished, i was like, wow this really gave lis1 a run for its money in my affection...

however, on reflection, i wish TC had pushed a bit further in a few things. i wish more choices felt like actual dilemmas instead of simply Good Choice and Bad Choice -- for eg i would like to see a serious consequence to *not* taking charlotte's anger, instead of only bad things happening when you do. i wish the end scene with the council played a bit differently, where the support of the council mattered more, or your choices in the jed speech mattered more. i wish that the friend you didn't romance didn't vanish off the face of the planet after the council meeting. i wish we'd had more time to get to know steph and ryan. i wish more licensed music had been integrated into scenes, instead of cordoned off into the zen moments. i really missed the end-episode music montages!

so, while i do still really love TC and it's a strong #2, it is still #2. #3. dlc: farewell i thought farewell handled the bittersweet nature of the day very well, even before it first clicked with me it was *that* day in particular. it was fun to see young max and chloe, and great to hear ashly burch and hannah telle back in their roles. it's fair to say this DLC was fanservice, but as a fan i felt serviced, lmao.

however the ending scene is maudlin for the sake of being maudlin. it's unbelievable to me that the caulfields just drag max away mid-funeral without even a goodbye lmaooo... like come on... #4. life is strange 2 honestly this ended up higher than i thought it would lol the nicest thing i can say about lis2 is it took a lot of risks. unfortunately almost none of those risks paid off for me.

I like sean himself, and his little journey of self discovery in ep 3 was super endearing to me. lots of the scenery was beautiful. the lis1 easter eggs were everything i wanted them to be and i appreciate dontnod giving them to me. I respect the work that went into the branching endings and morality/brotherhood system, even if I found the final choice itself infuriating. i'm not *in theory* against games being Political, provided they know what they want to say.

but i didn't like not having the power, i didn't like not having a familiar setting and NPCs to get attached to over the course of the episodes, i didn't like the time jumps between episodes where i just had to catch up via sean's journal, i didn't like what i felt was the player's lack of control in directing the story, and i didn't even like a lot of the plot execution (for eg the karen plotline was not what i wanted from karen at all), i didn't like that the core mechanic was babysitting simulator at a time i was already feeling exhausted by that genre.

i struggled to connect to daniel and not connecting to daniel undermines the entire emotional core of the game. i resented my overall feeling that the game itself saw sean as a sacrificial lamb whose life was forfeit in favour of daniel's. i felt railroaded by the plot constantly and was frustrated watching sean do things i would never have chosen, or daniel do things i had explicitly tried to choose against. i was extremely uncomfortable watching a 16 year old be hate crimed every episode. i thought the game's politics were muddy at best, far less progressive than it thinks they are and offensively milquetoast at worst, like #NotAllCopsing me at the eleventh hour at trump's fucking wall, or having the audacity to have an NPC tell sean "they don't hurt children" at the border detention centre in the middle of the real life child separation crisis.

but ultimately this wound up placed in the centre of my rankings because despite my personal feelings being primarily negative, i at least respect the scope of what this game attempted to do, and think it was a more ambitious project than what follows.

#5. dlc: wavelengths I feel like I can't in good conscience rank Wavelengths any higher, bc even though it never made me *angry* and I personally enjoyed playing it more than lis2, it ultimately felt like an underused concept that had about one chapter of interesting development out of four. I really liked the autumn sequence, and learning about Steph's baggage from Arcadia Bay, and seeing Mikey. I also liked Duckie and Gabe's calls. those things all helped me gain perspective on the characters and relationships in TC and even in BTS.

But the radio tasks were repetitive, and overall it felt like a missed opportunity to do so much more to flesh out Steph's life in Haven -- her friendship with Gabe, and Ryan, and Charlotte, etc. So many of those callers could've been characters from Haven and helped the town feel more fleshed out. We could've had consequences (however mild -- an angry email or happy email) for how our ad reads went. We could've... done a lot more, honestly. I had fun with the dating app, but it felt pointless, knowing in TC she's single anyway. The plot thread from autumn felt incomplete to me because it *so obviously* set up Bae-route Steph reconnecting with Chloe or TRYING to reconnect with Chloe, even a google search, and then just didn't go there at all. It was more or less a shrug of a DLC for me and I feel like I couldn't genuinely recommend it to TC players unless they *really* love Steph.

#6. before the storm

the thing about before the storm is I REALLY wanted to like it. i love chloe, i was interested in seeing rachel, and more of arcadia bay. i wanted to love it!! there are moments in it i do like, chloe's dream sequences are mostly pretty cool, it's got a decent soundtrack that is mostly used well, it has some good visual moments like the stars in rachel's room or the flashback story with rachel's biomom. steph and mikey are alright here, and it's nice to see them blossom into fuller characters in wavelengths and TC. that end montage to "bros" by wolf alice was a+, probably my favourite part of the game. SOME of the moments of chloe's early lesbian crisis moments were well done (others um... very much not so, imo.)

but ultimately... this story wasn't a story i really needed to be told, and i resent what it brought to the lis1 timeline. it actively makes parts of lis1 worse or more nonsensical. i think chloe makes a better deuteragonist than a player character, and having us play an established character with defined canon behaviours was a mistake. (we should've played rachel!!!) i thought the rachel they wrote was inconsistent not only with LIS1 but within itself, creating a vaguer and ultimately less interesting version of the character than i was able to imagine just based on lis1 alone. i thought the joyce-david-chloe drama was very poorly handled and what they accomplished was making david even more of a ridiculous caricature and joyce even less sympathetic than she was in lis1 when she shrugs off david's abuse. i didn't like how they wrote amberprice, and i resent that i'm stuck with this bland interpretation now forever. in a prequel to a game where you find out a teacher is drugging young girls, a character who will eventually be killed by this *can drug another girl for comedy to steal her role in a play* and no one in-universe bats an eye. also all of episode 3 was hot garbage trash from basically top to bottom, closing montage excluded.

also, all the scab VAs are not good. some of the voice acting is distractingly bad. or perhaps it was the director. everyone takes extremely long pauses between words whenever they want to emote. why? david marijuana.wav

ultimately, even though there were parts i liked, the parts i don't like annoy me more because they are not only in bts, they have infected the LIS1 lore, wavelengths and influenced the way fandom, the comics and now d9 treat the characters. so... 👎🏻 #7. dlc: captain spirit this really offered me nothing i'm ngl. i was not into child abuse simulator, i was irritated that it was being branded as a taste of lis2 yet gave me nothing i liked, was bored the whole time, was not into playing a ten year old white boy in a series that, to that point, was about gay girls coming of age. just did not enjoy anything about this tbh

#life is strange #true colours #life is 2 strange

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vxnevermorevx · 5 years

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Welcome to my mind

For the last three years, my mind has been... Well, shit. Not that it hadn't been on a steady decline for years prior.

Recently, someone named her Denise. My other me. "Because that's what she is..when something is the opposite of something it's de-. She's not nice, she's De-Nice..."

Denise.

The name give to the me that's not me but spends more time pretending to be me than I do.

*Character Bio*

When I'm not Denise, I'm Ginny and she was the most wonderful person. I miss her dearly.

I had a great childhood. Very few psychological events, in my opinion. We never had much money, but my mom made sure I never knew it. My father worked hard at both his job and destroying his marriage; which is probably one of the marks on my childhood. More to come on that, I'm sure.

I didn't have trouble in school, per se. Bullied only a handful of times in all my school years. My mom is a designer, so I wore things you couldn't find on stores throughout my whole school life. I was *always* ahead of the trend and some kids couldn't handle it. We're talking 1991-2003. So, jumpers, corsets, mesh dusters, pants with fur on the bottom, dressing like anime characters... I was the first of everyone around me to be dressing that way. And I loved it!

But I had my revenge, as my hecklers could be seen wearing the same things they made fun of me for, after it became trendy. I guess you didn't have to be dead to be caught wearing that after all...

I struggled in math and excelled in art and writing. I had mostly good teachers, I think only one hated me.

I met all my best friends there. Can't say I've made all that many more in the years since. But, in my defense I'm surrounded by people who are nothing like me. You see, I grew up in Florida. All my vital youthful years were spent there. And now I live near Portland, Oregon. God, why? I even lost one of my dearest friends to the city. She completely changed from a fun, artistic girl who liked to draw, read, and cook...to...one of them. She's now a guilt vegan ( let's you know how disgusting you are for eating meat ) and is obsessed with shows that need to be cancelled. I had known this girl since first grade, she said she would follow the first friend who loved out of state. That was me, so she came out here too. Our friendship immediately began deteriorating as she would not allow me in my own room during the day, because she was talking to some loser friend of hers online. This person left her in a Walgreen's 20 miles from her home, on the wrong side of town, when we were all barely old enough to drive, because she was taking too long looking at eyeliner. But, she sounds like a solid individual to begin emulating. Are you serious? I watched my fully replacement take effect. 20 years of friendship completely gone in a matter of months. Have you ever watched someone stop carrying about you? Think about it. No, don't think about it. It's awful. She even physically ended our friendship. The first I had ever experienced. It was wrenching. But, I'm too far ahead now. I need to tell you how I got to Oregon.

Somewhere around me being 16, my dad stopped coming home. His mother had recently died and he knew some pretty shitty people willing to help him take the pain away. How does a poor, dyslexic, hoodlum, with a history of abuse cure the blues? Crack, of course. My mom did all she knew how to do, but she was pretty done with it all. They got divorced and some rich old lady "saved" him and whisked him off to Maryland where he would suffer many years of depression for what he had done to his family.

Now, it was just my mother and me. I immediately got a job and gave her my entire paycheck to help keep us in our lovely house. But as fate would have it, the city claimed eminent domain on our house with plans to build a water treatment facility. So, they lowballed us on what our house was worth and gave us 6 months to move. Now, here's some important side information: my mom is an army brat who grew up with mountains her whole life, until moving to Florida for my dad, which was apparently one of the last places she ever wanted to be. And my chummy from another tummy, was born in Oregon and had recently left me to go to OSU. This girl is my sister by all counts but blood. So, with a few other helping factors the logical answer was to start anew. How completely different my life would have been if I stayed. Can't say it would be better, just 100% different from what it is now.

But, in 2005 we moved to Oregon on the promise that we would do all the things we wanted to do and be living in Seattle in a few years.

None of that worked out. I can still remember the first night we spent in our apartment. I hated it. I let everyone know too. I think I cried for a week. I just wanted to go home. My Sisi was too far away to see her more often than the weekends and slowly her grades began to falter. This led to her dropping out and moving back to Florida just five months after I moved out here for her. I fell apart. I had only my mom and I love her, but sometimes you need your friends... You know? We did what we could and took jobs we hated and tried to get used to our new surroundings. I'm apparently a spoiled brat so I'm sure I made things painful for my mom who was finally back in her element and here I was stomping around telling everyone how much I hated it. Hate it. Present tense. I know the whole world is a cess pool of hipster, millennial idiots who all think that they know how to run the world, but the concentration of their free-for-all holier-than-thou ways is as dense here as the trees. It's exhausting listening to people who haven't showered in a week tell you how special they are because they have this heightened awareness that they learned from some Joe Blow and happens to not be fact at all. I have had a 24 year old Hispanic girl tell me that only white people can be racist, everyone else is prejudice. I told her that that in itself was a racist statement. And she said "no it's not. My teacher told me, and she has a PhD." I don't think I need to explain the definition of racism, but I do think Manson could have thrived in this town.

Fast forward quite a few years and we are both still in Oregon working jobs we hate not getting any of the things done we said we would. Are we lazy? Are we depressed? I'm sure it's both.

But, a small miracle comes my way, as I'm getting dressed to go down to the office to sign the next years lease I get a call from a woman who used to work with me. She asks if we are still looking for a new place to live and I tell her yes! We end up renting her townhouse from her because she's getting married. She proves to be a terrible landlord, probably because she's not all that good at being a person. She's really great at other things, but not that. Somme people are like that. But, I also haven't learned how to speak Oregonian in the 14 years I have been here.

A few more years and we end up buying the house and I have changed jobs for my health and things are looking up. I lose some of the weight I had acquired in my sorrows. I even find a guy that I can tolerate. Mostly bc he's 4000 miles away in another country. But, I struggle to find my way in our incredibly mismatched relationship. And he's so smart. So, successful... Here it comes... "what's he doing with a loser like me?"

My friends.... They all have something to show for their lives: degrees, children (Im not interested in these things,) husbands, jobs they don't hate....

I have a mortgage and a ridiculously high HOA, two payed off cars, 50 extra pounds on my ass, a job I'm not particularly built for, and a guy whom I love differently than he loves me.

I'm killing it.... Or myself. One way or the other. "I still haven't figured that shit out yet " -Eddie Murphy

I think this a pretty good place to stop for now. You should have a good amount of reference points for the following posts which will entirely be me, describing my chronic severe depression hoping that someone somewhere might read it and know they are not alone. I feel such a sense of validation when I read something from someone who feels the same as I do. This blog isn't for attention or critiquing, as most will likely be written when things like grammar and story structure aren't focused on. It's purely to get the chaos out so, I can organize it.

I don't know who you are but if you're reading this far, please stay tuned if you want to say "Wow, that's exactly how I feel."

Do good.

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