07 November 2014
So yes, I am here to talk to you about a game. If you’ve ever played one of these games, you’ll know. If you disagree, I’d advise you to reconsider.
I first got started when my boyfriend and I bought the second one on sale. I was instantly sucked in by the first-person shooter/RPG mixture with levels and skills and buildable talent trees. I loved playing Diablo 2 as a kid, but now I didn’t have to remember which skills do what, thanks to only having one main skill. We played through it on the Xbox 360 using split screen. We beat the game. We loved it enough to beat the game again. We tried other characters and beat the game. We started exploring the world and looking at the side quests and learning the characters’ backstories. We got the Season Pass and played through the DLC. We loved Tiny Tina’s character and the writers of the story even more. We didn’t think it was possible.
Then the first game, Borderlands, went on sale. We got it and the General Knoxx DLC. We Brick’d and Lilith’d our way through it all. About the time we got to the DLC, we had already decided to get the Presequel and looked at the announced characters. We played alongside Athena, and my boyfriend made the decision to play Athena in the upcoming game.
Now, we’ve beaten the Presequel (released on the 13th of October) twice and reached the level cap of 50 this past weekend. What makes me love the game so much? First and foremost, the writing. In my opinion, video games are just another way to tell a story. It needs good characters, great plots and conflicts, and yes, even plot twists. Any form of interactive gameplay is acceptable, but good gameplay does help and the Borderlands series definitely has that.
What do I mean by good characters? Have you seen Lilith? She’s a siren, a special human with awesome tattoos that has a unique, awesome, phase-related power: Phasewalking. She has great dialog and attitude. Mr. Torgue? He’s a rather musclar individual, owns a weapons company, loves explosions, and is always shouting, being voiced by the same voice actor that gave us Hercule in the English dub of DragonBall Z. You’d think with personality traits like that, he’d be a hypermasculine individual, or a womanizer or something. Instead, on more than one occasion, he takes the time to point out that women are people and don’t deserved to be objectified, and he’s bisexual. In fact, there are characters who are gay, bisexual, asexual, and even have stutters.
Other things:
Labels for sexuality aren’t necessary. I’ll talk about this more in an upcoming blog post about being gay, but no one in Borderlands is called or considered gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc. Janey Springs is just into girls. Dr. Nakayama is into guys, a little obsessively. Moxxi is in to a lot of people, but that may be just when she is “in character.” People don’t ask for your orientation, just for your phone number.
The game has the right balance of taking itself seriously and being completely absurd. Stopping Zarpedon from destroying the moon is serious. Preventing Jack from controlling the awakened Warrior could prevent the planet from being destroyed. On the other hand, there is a place called the “Badass Crater of Badassitude” and there is a shotgun that literally curses at you when you switch it out for another weapon.
Tiny Tina. My favorite non-playable character. I tend to like dark things. I like hearing people’s personal stories of triumph. I don’t know if it’s some early childhood mental distrubance, or if that’s completely normal. Tiny Tina, you find out through ECHO recordings and a side quest, is a 13 year old orphan because her parents were sold into human experimentation. Her salvation? A grenade she had on her at her mother’s insistence. Now, she’s an explosives expert. Sounds like a sad backstory, but it doesn’t end there. In the side quest, you help her get revenge on the person who sold her parents. The writers even take it further. She narrates a DLC in which her and some of the other characters are playing “Bunkers and Badasses” (Dungeons and Dragons) and she is the Game Master. She writes a whole campaign which reveals deeper insights into her personal psychology and how she hasn’t learned how to deal with loss.