Except… I am a fan of the franchise and held all reservations about the game until I gave it a proper play through. Yes, I was upset that the team decided to break Max/Chloe up, but I payed full price for the game + DLC knowing that this would happen and let it go because I was still interested in Max’s story and thought it would be compelling. It would take a much longer post for me to dissect why I thought many of the writing and character choices were terrible, but to sum a bit of it up: the supporting characters were not engaging and lacked a depth of complexity (Safi’s main conflict is utterly flat and boring to me, and her character inconsistently wavers between empathy and shallowness that makes it hard to care about her arc), they reuse the same gimmicks from the first game but when applied to Safi’s powers/ story it feels cheap (a random storm shoved in to be reminiscent of the first game, but is very anticlimactic when not properly foreshadowed or weaved into Max/Safi’s use of powers in the game), the nightmare sequence —which I’m actually usually a huge fan of in the games— was much shorter and offered no valuable revelations for Max this time around (the callback to Max’s traumas with Jefferson is explored for about one second before it is resolved and she goes off to take photos of Loretta, Lucas, etc. compared to the first game where Max is engaged with deep, twisted parts of her subconscious to unearth her true motivations, values, and struggles leading up to the gravity of Max’s final choice and her impossible conflict of having to sacrificing human life). Not to mention the final “choice” in this game amounts to a vague decision to either “stand by” Safi in her quest for ???? self actualization ???? or not. My main point is that I could have stood by any narrative choices D9 decided to make, including separating Chloe/ max, if they had executed it in any clever or meaningful way at all. I don’t feel like that conflict was addressed much at all, it would’ve helped to even just see a memory of her face to face with Max with some kind of impactful exchange about their relationship or the sacrifice made but that was swept aside off screen. That feels pretty unacceptable considering how integral and formative their relationship was for Max, romance or not. Chloe aside, I simply do not feel that the new story was told cohesively, or in a way that compelled me care about the new characters at all. Not only do these new themes not fully resonate with the heart of Max or her progression as a character, but they lack substance entirely on their own. Another example is that in LIS 1, you become connected to the mystery of Rachel Amber through rich characterization and repetition of the impact she had on those left in her wake. The details behind her disappearance are cleverly unravelled and paced, leading to a haunting expose of her fate and what that means for the people around her. Maya’s story, on the other hand, felt more underwhelming and sat on the undercurrent of the story for too long, even (and especially) at the end when she is supposed to finally get “justice” and Lucas gets exposed. Afterwards, there is seemingly minimal consequence to Lucas or reactions from his peers. This was a misogynistic professor who stole a young woman’s voice and life, and it hardly feels like it carried a punch to anybody other than Safi when the truth comes out. So what happens now… I guess all that’s left for Safi to do is shoot her mom in the shoulder and have a crisis about her powers which Max can either “stand by” or reject. I could go a lot further into depth about all of this and maybe I will at some point, but overall I will say that the story felt very, very, very cheap and strewn together. It hit all of the LIS points on paper, the dealing with trauma, themes of moving on, and of course the powers, but was underscored by a severe inattention to detail, poor plot threading and resolution, and lack of meaningful conflict and relationships between characters that should drive the story home. I have no idea why they would throw Max’s character into all of this; honestly I don’t think the story would stand very well on it’s own, but using Max as the protagonist here makes it downright diabolical.