Finished the season last night, and...
(spoilers ahead)
I have to say that while I admire its intent and it certainly had some great moments, I don't think this season was nearly as successful as Season 1, and I think Telltale is fumbling both the overall concept of difficult choices and the use of Clementine as the player-character.
For one thing, I never could get past the feeling that Clementine was being given an unrealistically influential role in this group, and that it was driven by the necessity of giving the player some agency than by what made the most sense for the characters. The one person who might logically be inclined to listen to her is Kenny, but he's too busy having an extended nervous breakdown most of the time - whenever you try to tell him to chill out, he usually just finds some excuse to keep acting like a nutcase. Yes, she's smart and she's done well to survive this long, but by definition, anyone we meet has probably had to go through some tough experiences to survive, so why do they listen to her any more than anyone else?
Speaking of which, if Clementine coming to terms with his increasingly extreme behavior (either by supporting him anyway as a friend, or trying to calm him down and eventually shooting him to keep him from killing Jane) was supposed to be the main "arc" of the season, then it's another example of how asking a presumably mostly adult audience of gamers to roleplay an 11-year-old can go wrong. I had seen Kenny as a bit of a loose cannon all along and was growing wary of his violent overreactions from pretty early on, but I was left waiting for a chance for my character to realize it as well. And even then, I think I wasn't given a chance for Clementine to express it very directly until one of the adult characters brought it up.
I have a *big* problem with Lee, in the dream/flashback, saying something along the lines that sometimes growing up means helping the people you care about even it means having to hurt others. No, it absolutely does *not* mean that. Frankly, being nice to people you like and care about is easy. It's how we treat people who aren't close to us that, IMO, is a better measure of character. I certainly don't remember Lee saying this in Season 1, and if given it as a dialogue choice I most definitely would not have picked it. Maybe this was an attempt to make Kenny's POV and behavior seem more sympathetic than it otherwise might, but why are they putting the words in the mouth of someone who, depending on the player's choices, may well have disagreed with Kenny at every possible turn?
I was also irked that they continued glossing over the whole question of what happened to the people at Howe's. We don't see any of them dead except for Carver, but it's clear that at the very least, they've been driven out of there to an uncertain fate. IMO, using Howe's as bait for walkers as a way to escape was even more serious as a moral issue than, say, whether or not to take the supplies from the station wagon in Season 1, and yet the game *forces* you go to along with it. Obviously Howe's had its own set of issues, but that was mostly Carver's doing, and nobody seems to acknowledge that this stunt might well get the entire community killed. Clementine and Jane don't really comment upon it in the ending I saw, and nobody brings up what may or may not have happened there when the discussion of possibly going back comes up.
There are a lot more loose ends than there were at the end of S1, for reasons that don't seem all that clear in terms of storytelling. In S1, when someone like Kenny or Lilly exited the story, it happened in a way that felt more resonant with their characters and what had led up to their decisions. In S2, it feels more haphazard. Christa and Clementine are separated by accident, and Christa never does turn back up. All of the 400 Days characters except Bonnie were, presumably, still at Howe's when the walkers attacked, but some of them barely got a line or two and we don't know if any of them survived or where they went. Mike, Bonnie, and Arvo flee on foot after the fight over the truck and Clementine being wounded, but this was more of a plot point in the conflict with Kenny than anything that felt like the natural end-point for their characters (though maybe Mike and Arvo are incidental enough that lack of resolution for them is acceptable). There's the quick cut to the gun that Randy (?) has at the end if you let his family into Howe's, but is that meant to imply that he's necessarily going to turn on Clementine and Jane, or just a reminder that there's still going to be distrust and suspicion?
And last but not least, they never revealed what happened to Christa's baby or justified, in story terms, hiding it from the audience. This is a big, big problem for a game that centers around how the player-character develops and reacts to circumstances. I mean, think about it - we're supposed to roleplay Clementine with the assumption that her attitudes and behavior might change and be affected by what happens to her over the course of what seems to be not much more than a few weeks, as well as her experiences with Lee from S1. But an entire *year* that she spends with Christa, during which she presumably witnesses either a miscarriage or the death or kidnapping of an infant, has so little influence on her that we can just assume she's the same person that she was at the beginning of S2 Episode 1? Or, if it does change her, we're just supposed to guess at how and why? For me, this is a cardinal sin of games that ask us to roleplay a main character in terms of attitude, dialogue, philosophy, etc. If we're going to do that in a way that's coherent and makes sense, the game should not withhold from the player information that the character clearly has.
While I'll be interested in a Season 3, I kind of hope, at this point, that the divergent endings of S2 mean that we'll be starting fresh with new characters, hopefully with an adult player-character whose perspectives we can understand a little more easily. The Lee/Clementine arc now has a potentially unworkable mix of characters who just disappeared and choices that might affect their status and future decisions - for example, if Bonnie is alive and were to return to Howe's on her own, she'd probably have different reactions to finding (1) the place abandoned, (2) Clementine and Jane alone, or (3) Clementine and Jane with the family that shows up at the end.
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