don't forget kids: Life is Strange had the worst ending of the year
retroactively turned into shit an otherwise alright game
tis hype is misplaced I tell ya
but worth experiencing I guess
I think it fell in line with the rest of the game. That and you'll never make everyone happy.
If you write in a single ending, you'll have people wonder why you couldn't affect the ending, especially when there's more mechanical involvement in this game (time travel) than say in something like The Walking Dead which had a single fixed ending and no real choice associated with it.
I think overall the game did make good with its final choice however you cut it. I don't think it's fair to say it undercuts the entirety of the experience beforehand because I would argue that in order to make "the final choice" at the end of the game, it was a culmination of everything you had done and how you personally interpreted the events of the games and characters. It certainly did more of that than Mass Effect 3's ending did, if we're gonna rake a game's ending over the coals, because ME3 arguably tries to do both a fixed ending and tries to incorporate player choice into it, but does it very poorly because it's a choice where you aren't given much to go on. Even Human Revolution's push-button-for-ending sequence wasn't as bad because the game built up to your choice through gameplay, narrative and theme to influence your (initial) choice. Or at least that was the intent.
I would argue people who think the choice in the LiS finale is a whole lotta bupkiss probably should consider the Telltale-style of adventure game never really was as heavily influenced by CYOA books as you would think, because the player rarely affects major plot events enough for anything to drastically change. All that's changing is the player's perception and interpretation of events and characters that unfold in front of them, and whatever interpretation that player holds, it feeds back to the game when the make particular choices when asked, and so on.
I do think re: the LiS Season 1 finale that there is room for critique regarding the amount of 'epilogue' stuff you receive for each choice or if they were really that considered, but I dunno, maybe someone will argue differently. I just don't think the 'choose your ending' was really that bad at all because its intent is to have the player decide what they think is best from an aggregate of experiences from the first episode down to the last choice; it's not some blind, out of left field choice that isn't explained to you until you do it. It's very clear what your choice is and your choice is (or should be) a culmination of everything you could learn in all the time you spent with the game beforehand.
