Whenever the language comes on Life is Strange, it does not take long for a very specific word to fall: emotional. Hardly a game knew how to press the emotion buttons of its players directly and to stir an entire generation to tears. Although Max and Chloe no longer appear in the successor, developer Dontnod remains true to its formula for success – and brushes them completely against the grain. Because Life is Strange 2 is not only soulful melodrama, but also biting political commentary. We took a close look at the entire season for you.
It starts like a normal day in the life of a teenager. Sean prepares for the Halloween party, which he has been waiting for weeks. Because there he hopes to finally get closer to his big crush Jenn, whom he has been shooting for ages. His father urges him to keep his hands off alcohol and drugs, but still lovingly gives him some money along the way. Chips and soda wander out of the fridge into the backpack, everything is ready.
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But then everything changes. An altercation between Sean's little brother Daniel and the belligerent neighbor's boy escalates. The policeman who rushes to settle the situation gets on his nerves. In the excitement, a shot dissolves. The father of the two brothers is fatally hit. From now on, they are on the run. Because the incident has unleashed a supernatural force in Daniel throwing police cars through the air as if they were Matchbox cars.
Coming of Age: with great power comes great responsibility
Life is Strange 2 is the story of the brothers' road trip on their way to Mexicowhere they hope for a new beginning. You play Sean, the older of the two, who has to grow up from one second to the next, because from now on he not only has the responsibility for his little brother, but also has to be his role model and moral compass. For the brother, who is actually still a child, has superhuman powers, whose true power he does not yet appraise and even less knows how to control.
Developer Dontnod follows through and through the concept of the first part, as the fantastic is once more the trigger for dramatic developments, but never the center of a story, which revolves primarily around the fate and the relationship between two people.
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Like its predecessor, Life is Strange 2 is off the beaten track of its fantastic hocus pocus and escalating dramatic entanglements in the first place a subtle down-to-earth coming-of-age drama immersed in a teenager's emotional and experiential world in a videogame-like manner: trapped in insecurity between one's own inexperience, because one is actually still a child, and the responsibility for oneself and others, as inevitably entails adulthood, between the need to face the seriousness of life and the urge to hit the strings and try out to find your own place in life and in the big wide world. Time and again, Sean finds himself torn to balance between the unconditional loyalty to his brother and his own needs and yearnings for friendship and security. And as if that were not all bad enough, he runs like any teenager in his old age risk shipwreck between the waves in the emotional chaos of the first love.
One of the most beautiful scenes is the one in which Sean grabs her with a cheeky tramp, and the game takes time to follow this development: from the first teasing, the stealthy looks, the awkward, adolescent impersonation, to the first intimate contact during the nightly nude bathing in the Waldsee. Once again Dontnod impresses with a cautious and restrained narrative style, which gives the representation of life reality much more time and space than the adventurous Heckmeck,
Nevertheless, in this respect, they reveal their greatest weakness: so welcome is it that a story takes time for its characters, tuning in softly and personal tones instead of constantly stomping on the staged timpani, Unfortunately, the sagging ones are so deep, too thereby regularly through the game, Often one is only busy for a few minutes to wander through the current location and click on objects in order to listen to read-in descriptive texts. What should give emotional depths to the characters' inner depth and their emotional state, however, remains largely superficial and redundant, The most common condition during the game is stoppage.
Life is Strange 2 never reaches the rousing pull of the first part. Where it may have been a bit too stormy on the emotional keyboard at some point, Part 2 may remain too meek. In addition, he acts dramaturgically over long distances as created on the drawing board: While the individual scenes pretend to impart authenticity and credibility, they are always constructed as artificially created experimental arrangements, which were designed purely for their function for the story and the current issue. The game does not seem so natural, but like a catalog of theses.
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Above all, however, almost all secondary characters are criminally one-dimensional. So each character is from the first moment unmistakably defined and clearly recognizable as good or evil: The neighbor boy is equal to the welcome with the Stink finger as a troublemaker to recognize, the bad drug dealer beats women, and American patriots just do not like foreigners. The good guys, on the other hand, stroke cute dogs. The good girls too. Life is Strange 2 is about as multi-layered as transparent film.
Decisions: Brothers – A Tale of Two Sons
commendable: Even if the choicesthat are to be met in the game, as in the predecessor barely far-reaching consequences, so they are never on the pure action, but always on das Directed relationship of the two brothersDoes she weld together the common adventure or alienate herself in the face of difficult circumstances? Does Sean educate his little brother sympathetically and indulgently, risking that his childish-impetuous mind will prevail, that he will not learn where the limits are, and use his power irresponsibly and selfishly? Or does Sean keep a strong hand, not only inflicting his brother's anger on him, but also his supernatural power, which could crush him with a snap of his finger? The scenes in which the two brothers measure their powers in the dispute – the big brother with arguments and life experience, the other with childish defiance and boundless, destructive power – receive thereby an almost frighteningly subliminal intensity.
The game going never so clumsy in front. your choice an clear pathto dish out choices that would be clear as good or bad. Rather, it puts you in a predicament that increases its pressure, until the temptation to free itself with concentrated power becomes unbearable. If it is still quite easy at the beginning to preserve oneself in the face of the greatest danger, not to steal, even though one is about to starve, with each new humiliation the desire for satisfaction grows ever larger and therewith the temptation, the power Daniel is given to abuse.
Is it really so reprehensible not to play the common racist at least a little prank to teach him a lesson? Do you prefer to hold your other cheek in each fight before you defend yourself? Do not you have the right to get the money back from the criminal boss who stole it from you? Daniel is sort of the Origins version of a comic character who has not decided yet whether to become Spiderman one day or more of a joker, Life is Strange 2 is in this sense an exciting parable on the question to what extent circumstances influence this development for good or evil and how much of it is subject to one's own will.
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In this sense, the circle closes to the coming-of-age drama, because this decision is not only incumbent superhero, but every teenager at this age. Even without superpowers, Sean and Daniel would face the choice of setting the course for the rest of their lives, which does not make it easy for them: As immigrant children of Mexican origin, they are constantly exposed to more or less openly racist hostility.
The beginning scene, which shows their daily life before the outbreak of the catastrophe, is one of the strongest in the game because they are quite subtle and incidentally one realistic insight into the social reality of a migrant American working-class family gives. After the divorce from the mother, the father makes every effort to keep the family together and to be an example of decency to his sons. But the lure of drifting away in alcohol and drugs is already beginning to show.
It is most unusual for a video gameHow generously the developers deal with such topics. They neither shy away from frank nudity nor from issues such as drug use, homelessness, police violence and religious fanaticism. Obviously here were no Americans, but in this respect liberal set French access, yes, it seems as if they were the American censors permanently the stinky finger.
Because in reality how are you between the lines of her play a very specific concern: Life is Strange 2 is only superficially the story of a road trip and the coming-of-age of two adolescents. In the heart it is a reckoning with and a look through the focal glass on the present America under Donald Trump.
Settlement with Donald Trumps America
Sean's and Daniel's journey across the US, from Seattle in the northwest to California, is like a cross-section of the social hotspots of this America, which has split into camps of nationalists and migrants, the blinded and scorched, conservatives and idealists, the displaced and the disappointed. Anyone embarking on this road trip will understand immediately how Donald Trump was so easy in the election campaign to talk about half of this ragged people. "Because of people like you, we build the wall," is a sentence that falls at some point casually and drills with his finger in the wound, which gapes like a deep ditch through this land.
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The America of Life is Strange, and thus America under Donald Trump, is oneIt lives in a constant witch hunt and seeks alleged culpritsForeigners, the homeless or even the corrupt political establishment. Here everyone lives according to his own rules, and those who do not belong are automatically the enemy. In secret, behind the facades of petty-bourgeois righteousness, a secret civil war has been raging for a long time.
One after the other, she takes a look at the game: racist policemen, white supremacy extremists, right-wing militarists, religious fanatics. Even the harmless-loving grandparents show through their caring facade through the subliminal destructive aura of bourgeois conservatism.
Life is Strange 2 highly creditable, that it deals with such topics and underlines them with such a clear attitude. I would like to cheer and applaud the courage of the developers. But I can not. Because meant so well the message It may be so flat and striking in its formulation.
Life is Strange 2 engages in its execution only in the deepest shoals of the cliché box and can thus compete against each other no arguments, but only Abziehbildchen each other. Hillbillie patriots are just waiting for their opportunity to torture foreigners, Rednecks are always ready to use violence anyway, the political left is nothing but neglected potheads, and conservative Christians are still mentally still on a crusade. Whenever the game thinks it has something to say, it says so not just with the wood, but with the jackhammer,
Life is Strange 2 is now available as a full season.
If you just point your finger at clichés, you're not unmasking the culprits, just revealing your caricatures of ridicule. The America of Life is Strange 2 is not a powder keg in which it smolders, but a comic book, from which all naselang the evil clowns are shot as if from the robber pistol. Such a procedure causes no change in the circumstances, but works on the contrary at the depth of the crack, which it purports to close.
