I mean yeah, Life is Strange was great and I'm not shading anyone who worked on it. But it could have used a dialog pass from someone a little more in tune with American teen speak.
That's the thing with these consultancies, they're support. They don't take over a project, they're brought on to help with things a dev might not be good at.
It's also not really clear to me that their focus is on "wokeness" to the extent that their critics claim. Like they do call out diversity and inclusion as a core value on their site but their services seem to be a lot broader than that. They do everything from full fat development and narrative design to UX design and accessibility stuff.
There used to be a Japanese dev called Red Company that would get brought on to do things like narrative and planning and characters, and they worked on everything from like Sakura Taisen to Bonk's Adventure, to Gungrave. I think Sweet Baby is one of those companies.
This whole conspiracy about them being the Wokifiers that companies are forced to use to boost their ESG rating doesn't seem be be based on much actual evidence.
So going further with Life is Strange series. Yes, it could have used perhaps a cut on conversational language for teenagers, but overall it really was quite decent from that perspective.
The sequels went further in ESG direction, consultants and all that it seems, and basically generally tanked. So I don’t know about how effective these consultants (not necessarily Sweet Baby Inc) were.
Then we have Spider-Man 2 and Ragnarok which seems to have used these consultants more heavily vs the first games and narrative storytelling, characterization, and overall writing seemingly took a hard hit. That hasn’t reflected in sales yet, but let’s see what happens with the third games if the trends continue.
We can also look at Starfield which is a mess from storytelling and character perspective, and seems to be worse than even Fallout 4, which is quite the feat.
So while modern industry practices do need these consultants, including getting advice from cultural perspective (see Ghost of Tsushima for well done example of that), it seems some larger recent examples of employing such services have not been paying off.