What I Want from Life is Strange: Remastered Collection

In wake of Life is Strange: True Colors being announced at Square Enix Presents earlier this year, I decided to pick up the whole Life is Strange series as they were heavily discounted. After finishing both Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Before the Storm and then given about a month to recover physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally, I’ve become more than excited for the upcoming remasters of the two games that are planned to launch in September 2021 alongside True Colors. 

Given that the remasters are being made by Deck Nine, who developed Before the Storm but did not develop the original Life is Strange, some things may change beyond what we expect from a remaster. Okay, obviously that’s unlikely given that they’re advertised as remasters and not remakes, but if a remaster improves upon the original product, maybe some small tweaks here and there won’t go amiss? Naturally, there’s going to be major spoilers for both Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Before the Storm here.

Improve the Animations

A quick look on the Life is Strange subreddit shows an endless supply of lip-syncing related gags at the games’ expense for the past six years. It’s no secret to anyone that played the first Life is Strange games that the lip-syncing was essentially just ‘lip’, because it really wasn’t synced up to anything at all. The game’s approach of just freestyling with characters' mouths did not go unnoticed among the community, and is hopefully going to be one of the more major things addressed in the remasters. This is one of the only changes suggested in this article that is actually likely to be a thing, given that it’s a more mechanical, easily fixed issue. 

Rework the ‘Sacrifice Arcadia Bay’ Ending

Like most games of the genre, the ending gives you a pretty major choice: go back in time and let Chloe die to prevent the storm, or let the storm tear apart Arcadia Bay — along with everyone else in the town. The two choices represent a multitude of things, from the idea of accepting responsibility or trying to undo your mistakes again; the theme of the coming-of-age teen romance of the first half of the game against the dark supernatural adventure of the second half, and even emotional vs logical personality types. It’s a brilliant ending that perfectly culminates everything the game was trying to accomplish, no matter which route you’d taken to get there. The problem is that the developers clearly had an ending that they ‘wanted’ you to pick — the Sacrifice Chloe ending. 

Despite the fact that the fifth episode is almost entirely devoted to telling you that messing with time is a bad thing that you should feel bad for doing, the Sacrifice Chloe ending got way more attention put into it. If you chose to pursue a romance with Chloe throughout the game, this ending is the only way in which Max & Chloe share a romantic kiss and is one of the few times where Max, rather than Chloe, takes initiative regarding their attraction (which itself falls into the trope of Bury Your Gays & Dead Lesbian Syndrome). This is then followed by an eight minute epilogue set to Spanish Sahara by Foals that perfectly ties up the events that follow after Chloe’s final death, including her funeral. Ignoring the awkward trope pitfall, the ending is poignant and downright beautiful. Players who chose to sacrifice Arcadia Bay were instead met with a shot of Max & Chloe holding hands as the storm tore apart the town, set to Obstacles by Syd Matters, a song that is used multiple times at previous points in the game. The girls then wordlessly drive through the town. And that’s it. 

Is it touching? I mean… I guess? On its own, the ending is satisfying, but I couldn’t help but feel cheated after seeing the amount of detail that was put into the Sacrifice Chloe ending, especially when Episode 5 had spent the past two hours cyberbullying me for what was essentially playing the game. It was like being told by your mom that kicking the chair in front of you on an aeroplane is fun, and then being told to stop kicking the chair and being rewarded a cookie, only to then look across the aisle and see that your brother who had just stuck his entire foot right through the seat in front of him discovered it was actually a piñata with an entire chocolate gateau inside it. I’m not asking for an entire chocolate gateau, but just something a bit more than what we got would be appreciated. The Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending has the potential to be just as gut-wrenching as sacrificing Chloe, all while still offering payoff to those who were invested in the relationship between Max & Chloe without having to kill one of them off. The use of an original song seemingly called ‘Holding Onto Hurricanes’ that is used in the trailer has fans speculating that it will also be used in the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending, hinting at a possible rework of that whole sequence.

Involve Warren More

The ‘romance’ with Warren (I use the term loosely here) is one of the easiest representations of the early game theme of ‘coming of age teen drama’, but as the stakes get higher and higher and the theme transitions to ‘supernatural murder-mystery’, Warren is sort of left behind and it makes some scenes just incredibly awkward towards the latter half. After you go back in time to bring Chloe back to life for literally the seventh time in the game (after being drugged and photographed by Mr. Jefferson yourself, no less), Warren is in the background just… standing awkwardly. The scene is the perfect visual representation of his character at this point in the game. He’s there, but while he may be a nice enough guy, your love for Chloe is literally tearing apart time and space. Even if you pursued a ‘romance’ with him, he’s so irrelevant in the grand scheme of things that it’s just awkwardly laughable as the two tones of the game stand quite literally side by side in an awkward amalgam. Either remove the whole romance, or work Warren into a more involved role in the story.

Name-drop characters/scenes from Before the Storm

Deck Nine’s Before The Storm both gave us a brand new perspective on more complex characters that weren’t touched on too much in the base game, namely Frank & Nathan (and of course, Rachel), and it also introduced us to a wide array of new ones. It’s a really nice way to deepen both Chloe’s character, and the other residents of Arcadia Bay, but the curse of a prequel means that many things done in this game are oddly ignored in the base game. You’re telling me that after Frank kills his own friend for Chloe, the two end up at the knife-waving gun-toting rivalry we see in Life is Strange? You’re telling me that James Amber, a character whose every action can be attributed to trying to keep Rachel safe —as misguided as he can be in that endeavor— discovered his daughter went missing and makes no obvious attempt to try and locate her or even talk to a Chloe who is clearly very eager to do the same thing? These things don’t even have to be voiced, just a letter or a newspaper clipping or anything that helps bridge the gap of what happened to these characters and/or where they are now between Before the Storm and Life is Strange.

Are any of these likely to happen? Apart from the first one, almost certainly not. Both games still manage to effectively tell their stories, and this piece was more like a pipe dream of what could happen, knowing full well that it won’t. I know that I’ll still enjoy the remasters regardless, and I still aim to pre-order them closer to the release date when I have the money to do so. Do you have any aspirations for the remasters? Let us know in the comments below!