So the reason I loved the first game was less the time-travel sci-fi wrapping stuff (which is to say the fifth episode was a bit hit or miss for me), moreso the slice-of-life high school drama stuff between Max, Chloe and their myriad friends and the family drama. I liked that it had a big mystery with Rachel but was still grounded in the daily going-ons of Arcadia Bay.
Life is Strange 2 for me started really promisingly. I was fairly onboard with Sean and wanted to learn about his family, wanted to go to that party and watch him awkwardly flirt with the girl he liked, wanted to go to his school and meet friends. And the game seems to want you to be engaged in those things too, seeing as it gives you this bag to rummage through, a fairly extensive cabal of textlogs to read through, it lets you explore Daniel's house, there's the conversation with Sean's friend in the very beginning about how he should go about trying to get with the girl he likes, and they even continue that conversation too through fake Skype.
But then the game just out of nowhere goes from 0 to 100 and completely shifts the direction of its story. Your father's dead and Sean and Daniel are nomads on the road and it tries to be a really serious commentary on race relations in America. And for me, it's not that that stuff isn't worth exploring nor does it not work. It's that the game seemed to want me to care about this one thing, and violently yanked it away from me right when I'd more or less gotten hooked. I was so flustered that I almost didn't even finish the first episode (I'm pretty sure I put it away for a week after walking through some boring woods or whatever). I haven't played anything else they released from it and judging by the somewhat tepid reception the rest of the season has received, I'm not convinced I really need to play it.
