On its 10th anniversary, it’s time to admit that Life Is Strange was never simply a love story: it was a watershed moment for games that tell hella authentic, human stories

Life is Strange might not be the biggest blockbuster series, but at this point in its history, the franchise is a respectable presence in publisher Square Enix's stable nevertheless. There’s a reason the Japanese company has kept the property in its catalogue, even as it’s divested most of its other Western IP.

It's been a decade since the release of LiS' first ever episode, and the long-since-completed original can now comfortably point to four full-length follow-up games (each accompanied by a one-shot bonus episode), two comic book sequel series, two prose novels, and a mooted television adaptation as evidence that it has, indeed, enjoyed a fair amount of success as a franchise.

With so much canonical and extra-canonical material for a game's legacy to form around, it can be difficult to rewind your perception of Life is Strange to the point in time where it all began. But 10 years ago this week (or indeed today if you played it on PC, although Xbox and PlayStation owners had to wait until January 30 and February 3, respectively), all the world at large knew of Life is Strange came from its premiere episode, Chrysalis.

The original Life is Strange is just about old enough to have a legacy at this stage, a cultural frame of reference that generally regards its most famous feature as the sapphic romance between playable protagonist Max and her best friend Chloe. This love story is now such a sacred text at the heart of LiS fandom that last year's direct sequel was reviled by many fans from the outset for breaking them up.

It can feel odd, then, to go all the way back to Chrysalis and realise that actually – even though the original Life is Strange did eventually act on some of the hints of an underlying attraction between Max and Chloe, which don't get me wrong, was a not-so-small deal in 2015 – it maybe wasn't the groundbreaking moment for queer representation in games that we all remember, either.

Which is not to say that Life is Strange wasn't doing groundbreaking things with representation. In their reception to Chrysalis, several contemporary reviewers seemed amazed (and slightly bewildered) that Square Enix had thrown their good name behind a female-fronted time travel adventure when the story could surely have worked just as well with male leads.

And indeed, series originator Dontnod has spoken in numerous interviews since about the difficulty they had finding a publisher, since the first stipulation most companies laid down was that the narrative needed to be retooled with a male protagonist – a condition that Dontnod firmly refused to entertain.

Despite being written by a duo of male writers (and setting aside the occasional awkward attempt at millennial slang), I can personally attest to Life is Strange painting a rather authentic portrait of young womanhood circa the 2010s. Perhaps it's because you don't actually need to have experienced being a woman first-hand so long as you've got a decent handle on the fact that women are, in fact, quite a lot like most other people. Male writers can sometimes be over-praised for simply taking note of this, though, so I also want to take a moment to appreciate the fact that Jean-Luc Cano and Christian Divine demonstrated an understanding of the internal tensions and group politics particular to teenage girls when they wrote Life is Strange.

It's easy to take a surface-level read and divide the female cast of LiS into good girls (Max, Kate) and bad girls (Chloe, Victoria) – and of course, we all know that the bad girls will show their gentler sides over the course of the story. But something that's always resonated with me despite going underappreciated is that the good girls aren't exactly angels either. At the start of the game, the highly religious Kate tacks anti-abortion literature to the door of a classmate whose recent pregnancy termination is an open secret at the school; despite her status as a bullying victim being a core plot point, she's clearly not immune to the temptation to carry out a little herself under the guise of some well-meaning justifications.

And of course Max, upon learning to control her time travel powers, immediately sets to work using them to cover up her social awkwardness and increase her standing with the school's popular cliques – arguing that doing so gives her access to more detailed and reliable information to fuel her role as amateur sleuth.

Life is Strange as a franchise has a lot to say about what members of disenfranchised groups do with the power that's within their grasp, and even though the first game is not exactly a triumph of intersectionality – focusing as it does almost exclusively on white girls who were already relatively privileged to begin with – there's an authenticity to both their acts of kindness and their moments of pettiness. LiS resists condemning its central characters on the basis of one mean-spirited action, but it also doesn't paint anyone in a saintly light just for managing to be a basically decent human being.

Stacked up against this nuanced portrait of the tumultuous tail-end of girlhood, it's unusually the young male characters in Life is Strange who fall a bit flat. The narrative seems wholly ambivalent on whether we should interpret Max's shy admirer Warren as a nice guy or a Nice Guy™; and while school bully Nathan has some pitiable details revealed in his backstory, it's never enough to add up into even a single redeeming quality.

All of which is to say that Life is Strange really was a revolutionary moment for female leads in video games – not simply because the protagonist and deuteragonist are both young women, which had definitely been done before, but because the girls in the story are consistently the driving force behind their own and one another's actions.

What is less present in this first outing, however, is the queer representation that the series is arguably best known for today. Chloe is rather blatantly gay-coded; the "blue haired lesbian" trope was already recognisable shorthand in 2015, in case you somehow missed both her romantic longing for Rachel and her flirtatious overtures towards Max. But the nature of both relationships is still largely subtextual, and even if you successfully read between those lines, the game retains a measured ambiguity about whether either is reciprocal. It's entirely possible to complete a playthrough of Life is Strange without seeing the sole overtly romantic scene between Chloe and Max – which, on the subject of tropes, can only occur in the ending where Chloe dies. Bury your gays, indeed.

Of course, the Life is Strange series is iconic for its queer representation today, but that legacy has been built up significantly over the intervening decade – thanks to developer interviews, multimedia spin-offs, and follow-up games which made a concerted effort to draw out the focus on queer characters and relationships. The original laid that groundwork, undeniably, but didn't necessarily poke its head all the way over the parapet straight away.

But this revelation doesn't need to be accompanied by disappointment. Max and Chloe's status as star-crossed true lovers may have found most of its support outside of the original text itself, but the fact remains that Life is Strange presented the gaming world with two female leads who stood out strongly enough – both as individuals and as a pair, whether regarded romantically or platonically – to inspire devotion from players who still care deeply about these characters 10 years later.

Actually I take it back: Life is Strange totally is a love story, just not one that hinges on the existence of an ideal romance, or indeed of a romantic dimension to its central relationship at all; or on the need for permanence to make that bond significant. It's also a love story that each lead character gets to experience self-contained with herself, as a fully realised individual who drives the action of her own story forward.

And the fact that this story about superpowered girls and their feelings was a success was instrumental in shifting the way triple-A publishers approached female leads in games: a decade down the line, playable women aren't treated like box office poison any more, and while that's surely not all down to Max and Chloe, they were definitely there helping to lead the charge. Even though, you know, on paper there's no reason the time travel thing wouldn't have worked just as well with some forgettable PS3-era standard military dude.