
Do you think Life is Strange 2 would have been better received if the game revolved around ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)?
Life is Strange 2 is my most favourite game in the franchise, but it was also very politically charged and that's one of the reason it received a lot of harsh criticisms which I understand. Now I'm not from the U.S and therefore not well versed in the U.S politics. A lot of criticisms said that the racial discrimination in this game was too exaggerated, but as I don't live there I can't comment on that.
However, for the last one year I've been seeing a lot of videos on youtube regarding ICE detaining immigrants in the U.S and shooting people. Today I was watching this documentary “We Tracked ICE Flights Across America. What We Found Surprised Us”, and while watching this it came to my mind that Sean and Daniel's story would have fit a lot better in this setting than the original story. At 2:40 mark in the documentary, they interviewed a detainee who actually wanted to leave the U.S and go back to Nicaragua, but ICE wanted to send them to a different U.S state in a different detention center. So think about this, instead of a random police officer shooting Esteban, ICE agents stormed their place and killed him which resulted in Daniel gaining his power. The rest of the game is about the brothers running away from ICE agents and wanting to escape to Mexico, but ICE wants to send them to a concentration camp and they are also charged with murdering ICE agents at the same time. I think the overall theme would have fit much better.
I know back in 2018-19, ICE wasn’t as aggressive as they appear in today. But nowadays whenever I see any news regarding ICE, it just reminds me of Life is Strange 2.