Boarderlands 3, a frustrating game

Some video games. The story is good enough to hold up. Mediocre gameplay. The big one that comes to mind for me is spec ops: the line. A pretty typical over-the-shoulder third person military shooter. It has your standard pistols and rifles, turret sections. The only part mechanically that seemed unique was sometimes you could shoot out a window and have sand crashed down on enemies that were behind cover. But the story was an extremely interesting one, a retelling of Joseph Conrad's, the heart of darkness and Francis Ford cope was Apocalypse now, but set in in the vagaries of the conflict in the Middle East. That's a game that I can replay because the gameplay isn't bad and the story is involving. The question is, can the opposite be true for Borderlands 3?

I love Borderlands 2! It's definitely not high art or anything, but it is definitely in my top 10 favorite games. I've beaten it once with every character available. And beating it with Maya, the siren, three times. It's a silly game with fun gameplay, and enchanting villain that you love to hate, and it's just good. Turn your brain off and relax. Kind of fun. It was one of the only games that I ever pre-ordered and remember playing through it for the first time while texting with a friend who is doing the same. When Borderlands 3 came out I was a little bit older, a little bit wiser. I had experienced a lot more stories and games. My wife knew how much I loved Borderlands too so she got me Borderlands 3 for my birthday and I tore into it! 

The gameplay and mechanics of Borderlands 3 are wonderful. The guns are fun to use and interesting. Lots of variations and combinations of parts can create lots of different styles of weapons. I found myself changing my gameplay style just based on the next cool gun. I found! Some of my favorite additions to the game mechanics are: Malawan guns that can be switched between two different elemental damages on the fly, Vladoff guns that can switch between a sniper rifle and a shotgun, or a pistol and a rocket launcher, and Tediore guns that you can throw at grenades or throw on to walls of the ground and they become little turrets. Being able to do a cool action slide didn't really add much mechanically but it made the game feel faster. Being able to jump and ground pound was never super useful, but it still felt neat when you were jumping off a high building. The addition of a mono wheel vehicle was really enjoyable and boosting across Rocky terrain or over cliffs or between buildings was and exciting experience! 

But now we come back to the question. Can the fun game play of Borderlands 3 prop up a game that is too long, has frustrating story moments, and has NPCs that have been fllanderized to hell and back? Let's focus on the main villains, the Calypso twins. The idea of influencer/streamers that create a cult of personality is an interesting one, but I don't think enough is done with it. With handsome Jack and Borderlands too. You had a villain that was interesting and annoyingly suave, but there was nuance to him. You really got the feeling that he thought he was the hero of the story. He was the kind of guy that thinks what he's doing, no matter how terrible, is eventually going to lead to a positive outcome for the most people. He was an evil CEO that thought that he was above the law and at one point even pays you to kill yourself as a show of power. The Calypso twins missed the mark. There's no nuance to them, there's not much hiding beneath the surface of irritating influencers. Their goal? To become super powerful. How are they going to do it? By killing anything and everything they can. Near the end of the game. Tyrene Calypso decide she's going to become as powerful as a god and just go from planet to planet destroying everything until there's nothing left but her. I could see the argument that this stupid goal. Befits a stupid character, it rings at Hollow. It's the motivation of an evil scientist from a b grade action film made in the early '80s. Even as a kid I question the idea of wanting to destroy everything because then you would just be alone. True, I did hate the villains but not in a way that was interesting. 

Another large, large issue with the story for me was the way it upped the stakes. The story follows a pattern for each chapter: you make a plan to defeat the twins, you spin the chapter seeing it through, you. Defeat the boss at the end and just when it seems like you have succeeded the twins teleport in, kill somebody and steals your progress, and then teleports away. You can't do anything during these events, your character doesn't even have a model in the cutscenes. By the third time of this cutscene incompetence, the trick has been played out and all steaks feel pointless. 

And the last little part about the story of Borderlands 3 is that it's long. The game takes forever to play through with some entire hour-long chapters feeling like filler. How many times do you have to go back to home base to continue the quest? How many time does your quest log update just to show " talk to Lilith"? How many times did I just jump in circles or power slide around waiting for everybody to finish their self-important speeches? Every character is one note and boring. Everybody uses two paragraphs when two sentences would have conveyed the same information. Every quest requires about 5 minutes more running around, then they feel like they should. 

In the end, it feels like Borderlands 3 got too big for its britches. It felt like it was a grand space Opera, when really it was just a long plotting series of incidents. When I was younger and more crass I would have said that it was sniffing its own farts, but now that I'm older and owes so much more sophisticated, I'm going to say that Borderlands 3 thinks that it's better than it is when really it's half of what I wanted.