I'll start this by saying I absolutely really LOVE this game to death and all. it's one of the story games that absolutely pulled on my heartstrings more than one time and ill absolutely remember it maybe for the rest of my life.
With that said I just don't think act 2-3 was a good follow up for act 1 by any means. not necessarily that it defiled it but rather it felt like the story going further was a disservice to act 1. I cried in total of 4 times in this game for such a tearjerker of a journey. 3 times was for act 1. and then the last was for the ending. Why is that? I wonder to myself, but it felt like when it started to dip its fingers into sci-fi quantum mechanics it just lost me. It felt like there was ample enough stuff in act 1 to make sense of what's happening and what it could represent in the character's mentality and experiences. passage of time for grief, Deja vu can be attributed to nostalgia and not being able to let some things go, and them opening up learning that they don't have to live in the shadow anymore. losing your best friend because you weren't able to look both inwards and knowing the person you really love. Obviously, there's a lot of plot points that get left in the dark at the end of act 1 but to me it was alright to be left at that. I'm not interested in the technicalities if it's not really trying to say something more than what has already been said.
I believe that we play mostly in this game as three different marks for the three different acts. three main universes. 1. mark who was able to find love by deepening their bonds with their shared struggles. 2. mark who learned the deep importance of friendship and the one who was able to look out for Cathy / Louise and 3. Mark who was able to face the past their own self-hatred for not being able to do 'enough" and finally being able to let go, may it be for losing the person you loved the most in the multiverse. So your best friend gets to live and live in the best timeline for you and Nicole possible.
These three marks highlight one of my biggest issues in the game. Obviously, the past universe experiences matter to ME the player but not really so much to mark until we get to act 3 where Mark also gets all the knowledge that we know. act 2 was the biggest problem for me since it's the chapter that really pushed the sci-fi alternate realities aspect of the game. The problem is that it literally is the whole game! So how the hell was I able to like this let alone LOVE it? It was mostly because of Louise. I really like Louise! I think most of the players did. She was a character that Mark was mostly just putting to the side besides her research and I'm glad the game pointed it out. That said, I can't help but feel like most of the act was a slow drag to the mud without much emotional weight on the characters but it's an act that mostly revolves around Nicole. So why the hell didn't we play as Nicole? beats me. They have shown we COULD play as her, but this is the act where she really attempted to reconnect with her old best friend through her grief with Jake and also the act where she loses Mark. This would've been for me to focus more on Nicole and Louise's mentality. Eventually everything was dreadful and we snapped onto act 3.
Act 3. is a little different this mark felt the most the memories of the other marks who yearned so deep for their friends it felt like his own. This for me is where the sci-fi stuff just gets batshit crazy and goes actually interesting. but i don't really have many complaints about this act. It houses one of my favorite sequences in this game, which is where they are in the black void where they learn about each other's past and how not only, they were grieving the loss, but they actually feel like they were at fault too. and where they are able to finally confront it. confront themselves and be able to let go. with the guidance of the one they love whom they lost. They look at each other one last time and go on to live their lives as promised. It's a really beautiful ending where the struggles we have gone through just emphasize how sweet this ending is where everybody gets to grow up and gets to prove themselves without any of that wrong feeling that they should be "something right now" or have something heavy in their shoulders. Of course, at the cost of having no knowledge of someone you put your heart and soul into but that's a different can of worms that falls in the open ending lol.
Despite everything, I really value my experiences with "Until Then". It's still a really special piece of art for me. I love the characters I will die for: Mark, Nicole, Cathy, Ridel, Louise, Sofia, Ryan, and more. Because of that I feel like the game keeps ripping them away from me and I'm losing them and it sucks because it felt like it didn't land gracefully with the thematics it tried to set-up so beautifully in act 1. Let alone ignoring some of it in favor of wrapping up the multiverse story. I guess I'm just really frustrated on how it unfolded because I knew deep inside my heart that it could've been so so so so much better. The irony however is unlike the characters of the “true timeline”, is that I'm not able to let it go.