Some may argue this is just the run of the mill "save the girl or save the world" trope. While that isn't wrong, I really liked what a
poster on the LiS subreddit wrote. Taking a moment to put the supernatural time manipulation aspect of the game aside, I felt that LiS is ultimately a game about saying that goodbye to a friend that you never got around to. Perhaps one could even make the case that Max's time rewinding ability is rather a psychological manifestation of her internally trying to process the death of her childhood best friend that she didn't keep in contact with and can't accept her sudden death before she even got a chance to try to reconnect with her. Perhaps the events of the story are her mind trying to imagine what would happen if Chloe was still alive and being able to reconnect with her. But ultimately the storm always comes, and Max has to make peace with the fact that Chloe is dead.
I don't know if I fully believe in all that (especially when there's a choice to have Chloe live), but loss is obviously a challenge for all of us to deal with, especially with someone close, and we all handle it a bit differently.
...
Some may say that choosing to "sacrifice Chloe" invalidates all the choices made in the game up to that point, but I strongly disagree with that. Perhaps the greatest triumph of the game for me is through the course of these 5 episodes, it made me care enough about the characters to share in Max's sorrow at the ending I received. Ultimately, choice (regardless of what consequence they truly have to the narrative) is what keeps these games so engaging to me. Not every decision radically alters the story, but each moment I make a decision allows me to inject a bit of my personality into the story. As a result, Max doesn't feel like a character I'm passively observing in a book, TV show, or movie, but rather she's an extension of myself, and I am an active participant in this world (assuming the game has the writing chops to successfully sell its world to me). This is truly what makes video games so special to me.
This was a great post - thanks for sharing, and it echoes a lot of what I felt about the game.
To go further, as I just finished the game two days ago and I've had the experience turning over in my brain since then, there's a fairly obvious parallel between this game and The Catcher in the Rye. Spoilers for this American lit classic ahoy:
First, it's obvious the game had some inspiration from the novel: Her name is Max Caulfield (Holden Caulfield is the main character and narrator), and the giant "The Winger and the Cow" poster in Max's room is a direct homage to one of the well-known book covers for Catcher (
here, or one of then top hits on GIS if this doesn't work because I'm on mobile). Also just like Holden, Max starts off as somewhat of a standoffish loner at an elite prep school who's mostly a blank slate for a slew of strange experiences that unfold around her. She doesn't seem nearly as jaded as Holden is but she's somewhat of an outsider; that opening credit sequence where she puts her earbuds in and walks through the halls is a super Holden thing to do.
There are a lot of deviations from the book, and Max is ultimately much more of an optimistic and selfless person than Holden ever is, but there is a parallel with what SlickVic said above: one interpretation of Catcher (I'm a teacher who works with Catcher so I love discussing different spins on the book) is that it's ultimately a story about time, grief, and closure.
Holden's little brother Allie was 11 when he died from cancer, and he was one of Holden's closest and dearest friends; Holden was only 13 when this happened, and he clearly spends the entire novel hung up over Allie's death. He brings Allie's baseball glove with him to school and writes a classmate's English assignment about the glove, he brings up Allie in several different conversations, and just general reminisces about his adventures with Allie in a way that makes you feel like Allie is still alive. And Holden does this subconsciously: he's never properly grieved about the experience (absent parents have never dealt with it properly either) and like Holden's younger sister, Phoebe, point-blank tells Holden, he never acknowledges Allie is dead. The ending is somewhat ambiguous but One approach is that the famous carousel scene at the end (Holden also loves carousel because, like him, they spin in circles, you don't ever move forward, and you stay right where you are) and his reactions to Phiebe imply he is slowly beginning to understand you have to let kids grow up and can't protect them forever from harsh lessons about life.
Another way to put it: Holden, mentally, is frozen in time. It's literal arrested development. Holden is obsessed with preserving things exactly as they were (innocent, carefree, unspoiled by the adult world - there's probably a dark spin you could take this to connect to Jefferson). One of my favorite scenes in the novel is where Holden talks about how much he loves museums, especially the Museum of Natural History in New York, because everything is locked in place, safe from change, and constant. So much so that he walks all the way to the museum, telling the reader how much he loves it, then he decides not to go in, and I always think this is because Holden is so afraid it might be different that he doesn't want to risk having the past be disturbed. He's also hung up over this girl Jane Gallagher from his past, who he clearly has feelings for, but despite given several opportunities he doesn't call her up; he's afraid of disturbing the past, so he leaves it alone. He doesn't revisit it or process it because he either can't or won't.
Max, like Holden, never got the chance to say goodbye to one of the closest friends in her entire life. She's also obsessed with time but spends it constantly changing the past instead of preserving it. Holden loves the past so doesn't want to alter it; Max is upset by what happens so rewinds and goes back to try to fix it. But if you choose the Sacrifice Chloe ending, like I did, then this is Max ultimately learning a hard lesson about normal, natural life: you can't change the past, but you can learn how to say goodbye by properly processing it.
At Chloe's funeral, Max is smiling faintly; she's had the chance to say goodbye, and you could argue that the entire week was her opportunity to go back into the past, spend her time with Chloe, relive old memories and make new ones, but ultimately learn how to say farewell to a vital part of her past and move on. Rather than dwell on the past and keep diving back to relive it (and rewind it and replay it and rewind it and replay it and...), my take on the ending is that Max is okay with letting go of Chloe because that's the natural course of life. Initially I wasn't sure where all of the "natural life dying out" plot threads were going (dying birds, beached whales, fish disappearing), but for me those are clear signs that Max tampering with time and space is running counter to natural life; nature is dying and the natural order of thing (double moons, eclipses) are indicators she's tampering with things that have to normally run their course to keep everything going.
I disagree strongly with the notion that the nature of the ending invalidates choices, because it's not about mechanical effects but the emotional effects on you as the player. If you took the time to talk to the bit players like Samuels or Frank or David or Taylor, you (both Max and the player) learn about their lives and their experiences, and this makes the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay option that much harder to choose. If you shut them out before, then opting to ditch them all becomes much easier for you, the player.
In a poststructuralist way of looking at it (as in, I saw above that there are hints the developers weren't fully happy with time and money constraints, but I think it's interesting to interpret what's here as-is): If you find the "Chloe lives" ending unsatisfying, for me that's akin to Max and you both still not having learned the lesson outlined above. There's still something clearly gnawing at Max in how she looks in that ending when she's in the car with Chloe; she is also not satisfied. Likely there's a part of her that thinks "what if ...?" Which implies that if she had the chance, she'd rewind again and jump back in and fuck up more things in an attempt to be the superhero that saves everything. But that ain't realistic, and she runs the risk of being forever caught in that loop.
Anyway, TL;DR for me Life is Strange was really about closure and moving on. I really like these style of games already (going on to Tales of the Borderlands next) but Dontnod clearly have their own spin on something that feels distinct from the Telltale model. Unlike a lot of people, I hope they don't continue Max's story (I also hated that they continued Clementine's story in TWD Season 2), but instead find a new set of characters to focus on in a new town. A hell of an experience, and now I have a shitload of new music to pick up. <3
