They were in for a penny, in for a pound. The tragedy comes in recognizing that once things got out of control, there was no turning back on what has proven to be a bad idea. They were the types of questions that should have been posed on day one, but again, this was something Sean thought of in the heat of the moment. Even as the brothers started to approach the border earlier, Daniel started to express his doubts and started lobbing up practical reasons for why this wouldn't work. As the couple told Sean about their plight and why they chose to leave an increasingly violent nation in hopes of finding peace, it started to expose Sean's idea as a total half-baked notion that he cooked up in the heat of the moment. It's actually that scene with the Mexican couple where my opinion of the Life is Strange 2 plot started to change, as the whole plot started to feel more like a tragedy. My biggest issue remains that this particular aspect of the plot feels like a uniquely Latino experience and one that wasn't able to be told by Latino people, but for what it was, I thought it was fine. The positive is that the political themes are addressed in a nuanced manner, in such a way as to make the player think and not club them over the head. There is some heavy subject matter at work here, especially as Sean talks to the detained Mexican couple who have been working to cross the border. It was in the image of the miles-long border fence, in the cartoonish (yet frighteningly real) depiction of the crazed white vigilantes, or the multitude of police with their guns drawn. While the past few episodes seemed to ease off on the idea of immigration and Mexican-Americans feeling persecuted in their own country, those images of American bigotry were front and center in this final episode. And indeed, brotherhood remains the central, critical theme in Life is Strange 2. The more the plot unfolded, the more the anger subsided and the more that Life is Strange 2 presented a story that, at its core, is about brotherhood. The plot of Sean and Daniel watching their father get gunned down by a trigger-happy cop only for strange events to leave them both running to Mexico is something that struck a raw nerve in the first episode. There are parts of Life is Strange 2 that are downright hard to watch as a Mexican person who's aware of the current political climate. I certainly wasn't expecting to get through this review without addressing a major plot element that I've harped on over the course of four different impressions pieces. But like many exhausting and arduous expeditions, Life is Strange 2 is something where I look back at in hindsight and am ultimately glad it's one I experienced. The longer the final episode went on, the more I wondered why the whole saga went down the way it did. Has anyone ever experienced going on a long journey, one that proves to be so draining that by the end, everyone's asking why they ever went on the journey in the first place? As much as I enjoyed elements of Life is Strange 2, I started to feel like Daniel by the end of "Wolves," the season's fifth and final episode. There will be minor spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk. This follows our individual impressions pieces for each of the season's first four episodes and contains our impressions for both the final episode on its own and for the full season as a whole. The following concludes our review of Life is Strange 2.
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