Thoughts on the first episode of Life is Strange Before The Storm

Last year's Life is Strange was not only one of my favorite games of the year, but also one of my favorite games of all time. Despite some clear and glaring flaws, there was a solid emotional core to that game. It portrayed the late teenage years of its characters with all the nostalgic, wistful flair that they deserved, but didn't shy away from the genuinely horrid things that teenagers often going through, whether they be relentless bullying, genuine struggles with self-esteem and mental issues, or having to deal with broken family life. It also focused on an incredibly dark story-line involving a series of mysterious disappearances of high-school girls that made it pretty explicitly clear how terrible the stuff these girls went through really was.Through its gentle folksy-indie rock soundtrack and painterly watercolor aesthetic it made the often very fucked-up content of some of its harsher moments more shocking, but also ensured that a game that went to some very dark places didn't feel exhaustingly gloomy.

Of course, the two standout features of the original Life is Strange were its supernatural elements, whereupon our main character Max can mysteriously rewind time and has visions of a weird storm wiping out town in a week, and the truly heartfelt but nonetheless complex relationship between Max and her estranged childhood friend Chloe. The supernatural elements were sort of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the episodes that focus most strongly on them (1 and 5) are by far the weakest, which I'd argue is a direct result of said focus. On the other, they're responsible for a lot of the good puzzles, the two strongest sequences in the game (namely the ending of episode 2 and the stretch from the last scene of 3 to the end of the first hour of 4), and the key ability to see the short-term results of each branch of big choices before committing to one path that gave decision-making a dynamic unique to the rest of the genre.

Chloe, however, is phenomenal. A combination of great character writing, a fantastic voice performance by Ashly Burch and a big old ball of complicated hang-ups, Chloe Price is the real reason to play Life is Strange. I basically have nothing negative to say about her as a character. Much like The Walking Dead's Clementine, Chloe is the biggest reason I like one of my favorite games of all time.

Nonetheless, I was incredibly worried when Life is Strange: Before the Storm was announced. Chloe as the playable character seemed like a fairly terrible idea after seeing how that turned out for Clementine in the mediocre second season of The Walking Dead. The announcement that it would focus on her relationship with Rachel Amber, the girl whose disappearance kicks off the investigation that Max and Chloe carry out in the original game, was also somewhat disappointing. I just didn't really want to see that relationship. In Life is Strange, Rachel Amber was held up on a pedestal as basically a perfect human being. Everyone except Victoria loved her, and it was implied that her spirit was acting as a guide to Max from the other world. Rachel Amber was the symbol of everything that Max wanted and needed to become. Having a perfect character like that in your story is a tricky thing to do well, especially in a world where everyone is as messed up inside as they are in Arcadia Bay, and I didn't want the game to take that risk for no reason. The other option is making Rachel Amber yet another teenager in the fucked-up world of Blackwell Academy, with her own hang-ups and imperfections. This would certainly make her more interesting, but that would kind of undercut her place in the story of the previous game.

That second option is exactly what Life is Strange: Before the Storm does in its first episode. Below her perfect facade, Rachel Amber is yet another teenager with the same types of problems that everyone else does. I do honestly enjoy the way she's presented in this game. She's friendly, cool, and instantly likable in a way that completely justifies Chloe's complete and utter infatuation with her by the time the first game rolls about, but only until the shit hits the fan, at which point she becomes an unreasonable angry mess of a human being. You can see features Chloe displays in the original but is missing in Before the Storm in Rachel, and Chloe even begins to pick up some bad habits from Rachel near the end of the episode. Unfortunately, this does mean that my pre-release fear came to be. Rachel Amber is a good character in Life is Strange: Before the Storm. She also makes the first game weaker by the sole fact that we ever get to see her on screen. I'm glad she's well written, but I'd rather she was never written at all.

Another big worry was, as previously mentioned, the use of Chloe as the playable character. Back when The Walking Dead Season 2 came out, I was immensely disappointed in the use of Clementine as the playable character in that game. I thought it promising pre-release, but it turned out she was completely unfit to the role. Whilst the game attempted to chronicle her slide from the innocence and naivete that the first season's protagonist Lee was so keen on protecting, it came across as forced, with Clementine being put in absolutely horrible situations for no apparent reason other than to make the audience feel bad for her. It turned out that when it was the player that was doing the thinking and decision-making and not the character you couldn't really make the character properly change that way. My preconceptions of who Clementine was prevented me from seeing the changes in her, and my own desire to make her commit certain actions as a player resulted in a frustrating disconnect.

Chloe is handled much better than Clementine, but playing as her still brings up a fair share of issues. The game puts a lot less choice on the player than Life is Strange did. There's only two major choices in the episode, and both of them seem to basically have all their consequences play out by the end of it. The less important general dialogue choices are also more tonal decisions than about actually affecting the flow of conversation. This means that Chloe is decidedly the same Chloe Price we met in Life is Strange, if somewhat younger and less cynical. This aspect of the game works pretty well, and it allows Chloe to go through a fairly satisfying little arc from the start of the episode to the end. Unfortunately, it also means that you don't really feel like you're properly controlling Chloe, or making any real decisions. Whilst the first Life is Strange was fairly linear in what you could do on the larger scale, you could push Max towards making drastically different choices at the local level. Take the beachside conversation with Frank in the fourth episode of Life is Strange, where you can have Max settle at anything from both Frank and his dog getting shot to everyone leaving the conversation having reconciled, and compare it to the argument with Rachel at the end of the first episode of Before the Storm, where no matter what you do the two of you make up and come to a mutual understanding.

Despite this, I still had a problem with understanding just how much this is the fucked-up punk-rock stoner Chloe we see through most of Life is Strange, and how much this is the naive happy girl with a fascination with pirates that we saw briefly in flashback near the end of the third episode. It's up to the player to some extent, and the moments where the game left this in my hands left me confused as to just how cynical and dark the Chloe I was playing as was, making me feel like I should be trying to role play this character I know rather than making my own decisions. The bits of the game that control Chloe for you (and the internal monologue she gives throughout) seem to be just as confused in this regard. I understand to some extent the point is that this is a Chloe that's not adopted the tough girl persona we see in Life is Strange, but one that is scarred by William's death and Max's perceived abandonment of her. This does often come across very effectively, with fantastic little lines of dialogue where Chloe seems to fluctuate between sadness and rage on the drop of a dime, but there's also a large part of the dialogue that just seems to indicate Chloe is totally one way before jarringly u-turning into the other mode after several minutes.

Despite these flaws, I'm excited to see where Before the Storm goes next. It's not much more flawed than the often cringe-worthy first episode of the original game, and it has some pretty high highs. It's inherited a lot of the strengths of the first game, and has interesting new twists on a lot of it. Getting to see a young and earnest Nathan Prescott, impotent to deal with the bullies that made him into the monster he is in the original, or a Victoria Chase who's not yet properly stepped into her alpha bitch role and hasn't learned to hide her inferiority complex is truly fascinating. The story of Rachel Amber and Chloe's friendship has some issues: It moves too fast and feels too important to the two of them way too soon, but it's nonetheless got some cool moments of genuine human connection that are up there with the very best scenes between Max and Chloe in the original. The new backtalk system is a cool mechanical replacement for the time-travel mechanic from Life is Strange, and is very appropriate to Chloe's character, especially in this period of her development. This feels like another Episode 1 of Life is Strange: Severely flawed and apparently a harbinger of a game that has deep-seeded issues niggling at a very strong core experience. The original managed to get rid of these issues as quickly as the very next episode. If the other two episodes of Before the Storm are as good as episodes 2 and 3 of Life is Strange, we might be in for something really great. It just needs to iron out the wrinkles as quickly and effectively as its predecessor.

Tamako Market - Delactable

A year or two ago, before I properly got into anime, I tried out Tamako Market. I found it incredibly boring, if admittedly well made, so I dropped it halfway through the third episode and went on to watch some generic shounen action show instead.

Upon getting into this stuff and becoming a raving lunatic who'll sing the praises of Kyoto Animation all day long and especially of director Naoko Yamada, I was rather surprised to find out that that rather mediocre show I dropped a while prior was made by the same person who'd made the frankly life-changing K-On!, the incredibly well-directed A Silent Voice, as well as the person who worked in the background on the incredibly solid Hibike! Euphonium. Naoko Yamada has quickly become one of my absolute favorite creatives alive, so I felt the need to go back and give Tamako Market a second chance.

What I found was a very solid, but somewhat unremarkable little slice-of-lifeish comedyyyyy fantasy? romance thing. Indeed, despite feeling fairly generic, Tamako Market is a show whose genre is hard to pin down. It focuses on the titular Tamako, who lives in the titular market, the daughter of a mochi shop owner. A talking bird with the power to become a projector in search for a bride for its prince suddenly shows up and winds up living with Tamako and getting incredibly fat.

Then the show just kind of goes. For the most part, Tamako Market engages in the same kind of shenanigans as Naoko Yamada's other big show, K-On!, with most episodes being their own little self-contained stories that nonetheless form part of a larger overarching story (think monster of the week, if the monsters were things like making a new friend or participating in a school festival). The little vignettes that make up each episode are usually very effective. There's no episode of Tamako Market that isn't fun, and, whilst the show demonstrates a bit of propensity for forced drama, most of them contain at least one or two genuinely heartwarming moments. 

This is helped in large part by the show's large supporting cast. Tamako and her immediate group of friends and family are fairly well-fleshed out, but most of the show's cast are workers at the market where Tamako's dad's store is located. They all have incredibly one-note personalities, but the show leans very strongly into them by making that one note play at the exact right time, really helping to punctuate both serious moments and jokes. You'll never get a full episode dedicated to the record shop guy, but he's sure to have an amusingly out-of-nowhere pseudo-deep quote and the perfect record to put on when the moment is right. They've also got their own friendships and rivalries between themselves that are often only hinted at via visuals (The croquette lady and the flower shop owner are always hanging out together, for instance). As such, despite being transparently shallow and one-dimensional, these characters manage to become fairly endearing. Combine with this fact their visual designs are spot-on, and that there's a ridiculously large number of them, and the market becomes a lively, believable place, full of people we like enough to be willing to suspend our disbelief in.

However, this focus on the supporting cast (and the larger main cast) means that Tamako Market is nowhere near as in-depth of a character study as K-On!. We don't get to know Tamako and company as well as we do the members of Hokago Tea Time and the one or two other people that make up the central core of K-On!. This would be fine, since K-On! is an incredibly high bar to set, but there's also the problem that the main cast is mostly fairly bland, suffering the same "one trait" syndrome that the supporting cast has. We certainly get to know them better, and their personalities are more multifaceted, but everything they do tends to fit very neatly within their archetype. Tamako is the ditzy energetic protagonist, Yui Hirasawa without the nuance. Dela is the goofily pompous mascot character that always gets his comeuppance, Teddie minus the existential dread. Midori is the responsible normal friend, Kanna is the short deadpan friend (also best girl), Shiori is the shy and kind friend, Mochizou is the childhood friend with a crush on the main character and no idea how to express it, Anko is the bratty but deep down kind younger sister, etcetera.

These characters aren't bland enough to not be able to relate or become fond of them (I definitely have a soft spot in my heart for Tamako's dad and Kanna), but they are bland enough to make the show as a whole rather unremarkable. I see in Tamako Market what a lot of people purport to see in a lot of similar shows, including my beloved K-On!. It's mostly cute girls doing cute things, which is a nice thing to see. A lot of these cute things are very cute, and when the show wants it can be really genuinely heartwarming. It's well made: It looks good, the dialogue mostly works, and the overarching storyline is fairly satisfying. It's not even lacking an identity the way I thought something like Sansha Sanyou did: the market setting is uniquely well executed, and gives the show its own distinct energy and feel.

But that's kind of all I see in it. It's a really, really good one of these, one of the best, but that's all it is. I just can't go beyond "good" on this one, even when I honestly kind of want to. It's a solid story, well told, with its own distinct thing that makes watching it over the millions of similar shows worthwhile, but it never went beyond. It didn't have a couple of incredibly powerful moments that blew me away like something like Death Parade, but it also wasn't consistently beyond just good, like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It certainly wasn't both things, like is the case with my absolute favorites in K-On! and Cowboy Bebop. It was just baseline good, baseline really really solid the entire way throughout.

Possibly the most frustrating thing about it is that I feel like it's content to be that way. It never really tries to go beyond. The closest it comes is in episode 10, which happens to be the best episode of the entire series, where a plot point that's been foreshadowed since the start pays off and there's a bigger focus on the emotional climax than most other episodes. For the rest of its run time, Tamako Market is obviously content to just be good. That's a commendable thing. "Just" being good is fairly high praise in my book, it's a hard thing to achieve indeed. What makes it frustrating is knowing that Naoko Yamada is able to do so much more. This is by far her weakest work, and I get the feeling that it's that way due to a lack of ambition rather than a lack of talent. I should not feel as robbed by a show that I like as much as I do Tamako Market, but I suppose that's the curse of high expectations.

Final Score: 7/10

Tamako Market is a decidedly good show with tonnes of positives and very few failings, which definitely makes it worth a watch. Unfortunately, that's kind of all it is or ever aspires to be.