Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
It does because it is. See: The arrest of Larry Mitchell Hopkins, or the murders of Raul and Brisenia Flores. It's just that... It's nearly impossible to catch or prosecute anyone at the border. It is immense, and dead bodies disappear there inside of a few days from scavengers. There are probably thousands of human beings who utterly disappear in the desert every year.
There's a buuunch of reasons for this.
First, Sean panicked. He saw a dead police officer, his dead father, and assumed the deaths would be pinned on him and/or his brother, especially since the only other living witness he just shoved onto a rock and knocked unconscious, and who is known for being very vocally racist. I doubt it was Daniel that Sean feared would be brought up on trial; he fled to make sure he and his brother would not be separated.
As for Daniel proving he had powers... That's the other reason: Sean is terrified - probably rightly - that his brother revealing his abilities will result in Daniel being taken to some government lab somewhere and never set free. He wants his brother to get a chance to choose a life for himself, not to be a lab rat.
Third, believe it or not, people go to jail for really weak reasons all the time. A police officer is dead. People will want someone to go to jail for it, and "I don't know how he died" isn't going to fly as an excuse, especially since the officer just shot Sean and Daniel's father.
If you pay attention, Daniel very smartly destroys cameras. No-one knows about his powers before that. And if he stopped the bullets, that means you got the ending where he and Sean escape.
... You think portraying actual reality is politically one-sided? The two migrants aren't strange or unusual. It's a pretty common story.
I could argue this endlessly, but I don't have the spoons at the moment. Just... If you find this scene to be one-sided because it depicts a very common and normal thing, I dunno what to tell you. This is reality for thousands of people.
(Also, kinda weird to get angry with the migrants while Sean and Daniel are trying to do the exact same thing, but hey, you do you)
Uh... I don't think anyone was arguing whether it was illegal or not? They were being held in a detention centre. Seems to me that it was pretty obvious it was illegal.
Now, whether it was immoral, or whether the law being enforced as such was immoral, that's another story entirely.
The law isn't a good barometer for morality. Plenty of moral things are illegal. Plenty of illegal things are moral.
I thought it was a stray piece of glass, myself. But it's pretty clear the truck gets shot up in that ending because Daniel hesitates; he's frightened and uncertain.
Interrogations depend on the officer. The officer played a fairly normal routine to my eyes, though; he offered Sean a coffee, sat down with him, tried to be friendly. Seemed like he played a fairly familiar part of trying to give Sean someone who would listen to his side of the story so that Sean would confess. That's police interrogation technique 101.
Same with giving Sean the coffee. Give the suspect coffee to drink; caffeine wires them up, but it's also a diuretic. You get them full of fluids, really needing to use the washroom, and then deny them a bathroom break to get them agitated. Again, fairly standard police interrogation.
They might be, yeah. I'm also pretty sure two kids on the run might not be aware of that.
It is. The US didn't have the same level of fence or wall building it does now just a scant 33 years ago. It actually helped create a sharp rise in illegal immigration, funnily enough.
It's the same as this idea that there's just some... Tidal wave of people rolling across the southern border constantly, which just isn't the case. The overwhelmingly vast majority of illegal immigration is visa overstays; people coming to the US legally and then just... Never leaving.
This isn't a partisan point either. Janet Reno under Clinton said some ghoulish thing about how increased border security was leading to increased deaths on the border; people dying in the desert due to exposure, dehydration, injuries, etc. The increased suffering and misery there as an attempt to deter the desperate, instead of working to try and address the roots of the problem, is a policy program that's caused wanton suffering to many Latinx people. Just because you can try and create an arguable justification for it does not change the disproportionate misery it has caused.
Any time someone says "political" as if the mere existence of politics is a bad thing, I wonder if they just don't know context is a thing that exists.
You do realize that the original Life is Strange is political as hell, right? Like... That game is a feminist project through and through. It is thoroughly anti-authoritarian, and focuses on the victimization of women by men, especially men in positions of authority and privilege. It regularly shows the corrosive power of fame and money.
I mean, c'mon, one of the biggest moments of the original game is Kate asking you whether she should go to the police or not because she doesn't know if they'll believe her or if the experience will only make the trauma worse.
All things in this world exist in context. All things are political. It's only when something disagrees with people's politics or portrays their beliefs in an unflattering light that they notice them.
It's not. It just assumes that the characters are people living in a world, instead of perfectly rational and omniscient automata with no emotions, who live in a society with similarly infallible engines of justice.
Maybe you should play it more or at least watch a playthrough before jumping to conclusions, then?
Uuuh... Huh. If you think this is unrealistic, I think that's a fault on your part, mate. There's a palpable irony that Life is Strange 2 depicts a life that isn't very strange at all.
The story does have a big undercurrent about racism and racial attitudes. I'm not sure why that's unacceptable subject matter. Racism is a real part of the world, and excluding it from the life of a Hispanic teenager in the United States would be excluding a big part of the lived experiences of many people, especially those living on society's margins.
The rest of the world will move on and disregarding this game for what it is: political pandering.
I wouldn't worry about it
This game had sales so bad that it killed the entire Life is Strange franchise
After this game it deserves to die.
Which is sad because the first game was brilliant. This one is something you'd grimace at while scraping it off the bottom of your shoe.
I guess I am? I don't see how the game having a target demo is a bad thing, but okay.
People like to use the word "pandering" a lot about these sorts of things, though. If a game has any sort of left-of-centre political message, it's "pandering". If it's got any non-cishet people, it's "pandering".
I'm always curious what people mean by "pandering". It always just seems to be code for "saying things that make me uncomfortable". Which, I mean, hey, if it does, that's fine, I guess? But why not just state it outright: You disagree with the game's politics and thus the experience wasn't enjoyable for you. You can even argue what you find objectionable about its politics.
But "pandering"? That's just a non-term at this point. It says nothing.
I disagree with how stupid, sloppy and preachy they were used in this game. Since the writers have proven with LiS1 that they could write a good story in former times what else than pandering to the woke culture and gaming press could have caused such a disasterous game? The time spent on political messaging would have been better spent on an actual story and QA work.
LiS 2 is a road story with a core cast of two characters. That is a terrible decision. Good characterization comes from seeing characters interact and build relationships, and putting them in situations that test their personality. For LiS 2, the only consistent characters Sean and Daniel have are each other, which leaves them with a severely reduced spectrum of opportunities to show who they are.
Likewise, the only major time I can recall Sean getting a chance to show the kind of person he *really* is comes with deciding whether to break into the safe or not in episode 3. That's when Sean gets to show whether he is a risk-taker or more cautious with real stakes (except the stakes aren't real, as the end of the episode shows, which is another *really* disappointing part of LiS 2; so many seemingly important decisions are ephemeral out of a need to keep the story moving forwards in a literal sense).
All these things have the same root cause: Sean and Daniel never get to spend too much time with any single character beyond each other, so their decisions never feel too impactful. You'll never really feel the consequences for screwing someone over or helping them in a previous episode. It makes being good feel unrewarding and being bad feel kind of pointless. In theory, this sets an interesting message about community into the subtext, but interesting messages in theory can be bland and boring in practice.
If you toned down the experience of racism in the game, you wouldn't make it better; you'd just find it even more bland as it'd lose yet another thing for it to actually have happen or talk about. Not to mention losing one of the very few games to even discuss this issue in the modern day.
I actually think, though, that LiS 2 has a lot of redeeming qualities that settle into it in hindsight. In terms of story concept - that of needing to look after and guide someone more powerful than yourself - that's a rare story to be attempted in games. For good reason, mind; it's very difficult to do well. It's still an important part of the human experience, though; to act as a parent for the next generation, who has so much opportunity and possibility before them.
The game itself is also this big love letter to the wandering populations within the United States; the people at society's margins; and to the country itself. As much as people may interpret the game as somehow having anti-American rhetoric, I would say the opposite: This game was written by people who clearly love the United States and see it as a confused, wounded, and weary place, but one that hides within it beautiful thoughts, beautiful minds, and beautiful people. The scenery is all woods, forests, farms, small towns, rock canyons, and desert; some of the most majestic things the United States has to offer.
Honestly, I think the biggest take-away I have from it is a desire to go and play Where the Water Tastes Like Wine again; a game with similarly grand and loving perspectives upon the United States.
There's a lot that LiS 2 did well and did right, even if a singular central flaw in its story structure did so much severe damage to it. I could pick it apart, critique it to pieces, just like I could with the original LiS, and I'd end up finding a million flaws there too, but they both made me feel things. In some instances, extremely *strong* things. You can't really do that without channeling something good somewhere.
Okay, I was angry that there was no option kill Daniel. I would have needed that to find my canon ending, but whatever.
To me it comes down to that they are able to tell a good story but they did not. And when you look at the game and its overbearing political messages which they also constantly talk about in interviews I identify their pandering as the reason why this game is such a disappointement.
If its not pandering to the woke media but honestly their own conviction then they failed even more as developers.
Life is Strange has always been political, though. It's not the presence of the politics that's the issue; the feeling of them being overbearing is just a symptom of the same root cause in the story's structure as a road trip.
It's the same reason all the characters - not just the racist ones - you meet along the way feel a bit flat; the game has so little time to spend on any of them. Take a moment and consider how different the game would be if Sean met the itinerant farm crew at the end of episode 1 and you travelled with them for the remaining episodes. Think about how different the game feel would be then.