MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
(Spoilers for the entire game as well as Borderlands 1 and 2 ahead, obviously.)
To start out with, I don't particularly like Telltale's output or Borderlands. Despite that, yes I wrote a lot. Not really for the intents of making this thread, but more to solidify my thoughts, although now I have a place to put them out there if anyone cared. I don't have a problem with the genre TTG fits into itself. I like point and clicks/visual novels quite a lot, although I used to be a lot more bullheaded about those genres. I enjoyed Walking Dead Season 1 when it came out, but after TTG started working on 20 different properties I lost count and interest. I don't much care for Walking Dead, Fables, Game of Thrones, Minecraft as a vehicle for a story or Borderlands, although I am somewhat interested in the Marvel/Batman games but mostly just as a curiousity. As for Borderlands, despite beating the first two games (skipped pre-sequel but read up a little bit on the wiki) it feels like a series that I am one or two steps away from loving. I like Diablo. I like picking up things and comparing numbers. I like how variable the guns, grenades, class mods and skills are. I don't like the shooting. It feels sloppy and since everything has 1,000,000 health it never feels satisfying to shoot anything. Don't like the artstyle for either TTG or Borderlands. There's nothing really...wrong with it, its just not that aesthetically appealing or interesting to me. Also this game still has a massive case of what I like to call "Telltale Face" where everyone's regular resting face is this smarmy look with one eyebrow raised and half a smile. So pretty much Dreamworks Face. I despise a good part of the writing for Borderlands. Anything Claptrap or Tiny Tina related makes me want to drop the game immediately. Also I kinda just massively dislike Gearbox and Randy Pitchford (ok mostly Pitchford) so that doesn't help. One minor thing I do appreciate about TTG is that the achievements/trophies are just all unlockable by beating the entire thing. In other games like King's Quest 2015 you have to play through it multiple times or gather dumb collectibles which is terrible. So TFTB had to do a lot to win me over, but I decided to give it a fair shot because people seemed to like it quite a bit. "It's Telltale's best work" and "Worth playing even if you dislike Borderlands" were common things I read, and I can agree with that.
Good news is I liked it quite a bit. Better then Life is Strange, which I played trhough earlier this year. Life is Strange is a fine game and I can see why people like it a lot but it didn't do a whole lot for me. I think TTG did a good job of taking the salvageable parts of the Borderlands series writing and humor (IMO of course. Man I am so fucking glad there wasn't a Claptrap in this game. I hat that asshole.) and just did it better. Some of the better parts of the previous games writing like Handsome Jack was just done better here. Now look even I like Handsome Jack. But don't let him be the Joker of this series. Don't make him the center of everything that ever happens. This was a good sendoff. Don't bring him back. I saw that there was a character in Pre-sequel that was a Jack body double and could summon clones of Jack. Please don't do that ever again.
Even the dumb memes felt better to me. I had a good laugh when Bassanova drove in to the dubstep track that plays in all the ironic MLG no scoping videos. The fact that it was a real and recognizable song sold me on the absurdity of it since I recognized it instantly. Also, I'm disappointed only 12.7% of people chose the "See You, Space Cowboy" option. Losers. Voice acting was superb, except for the crying at the end. I dunno if it glitched out or what but Rhys' crying was playing over the regular audio and it sounded awkward to begin with. Hardly knew Rhys was Troy Baker, love Laura Bailey, Dameon Clark is good as Handsome Jack (again) and was surprised to hear Patrick Warburton's instantly recognizable voice as Vasquez. It was pretty fun to investigate things as Rhys using the cyber-eye, and I appreciate the use of the Borderlands font and style of description for items being used. Even though I'm lukewarm on the series I can still appreciate stuff like the character intros being the same, Marcus narrating the intro of each episode, and little details like Moxxi's pizza boxes littered around the place. And then you have the straight up fanservice stuff like the appearance of Zer0 or using the character customization box for plot reasons, which hey - go for it. It's a game for Borderlands fans. Clever implementation.
TFTB has a lot of clever implementation, and it seems that TTG and Gearbox were OK at poking fun at their own stuff. Lots of play with the "X will remember that" which is something I don't really like a whole lot, but when you get stuff like "Loader Bot will store that memory file" or "Handsome Jack WON'T remember that" and the best being "Telltale Games will remember that" when you skip the credits, its pretty fun. I kinda wished they played more with the dialogue options though. I liked all the characters and liked that you would play as two different characters and see how the scenes evolve from other sides. I could at least tell where all of them were coming from in the dramatic moments, which is important since none of it felt forced. Okay, maybe except for the flash forward scenes when the main pair are captured and fighting but I can let that slide because of the setup. Gortys and Loader Bot weren't annoying little shits like Claptrap. Sasha and Vaughn were great supporting cast. I'm not sure what to think of the Loader Bot twist but I expected it from Episode 2 because of the voice and eye and then when the immortality thing showed up I was 100% certain. Not a bad reveal but I kind of expected someone more shocking, not that the reveal is bad. I really liked how weirdly understanding and calm the captor figure was, though. He had some real great lines despite hardly talking a whole lot and they did a good job making it so you couldn't get a read on the guy. The game has a lot of solid moments, just a list of the scenes I liked best -
- Rhys ripping off his arm, digging out his cyber eye and shoving a glass shard into his head to lodge out the data module. Reminded me of the part at the beginning of Walking Dead S1 E5 but done better. Jack's last moments were good as well, again sold by the voice acting.
- The part with Scooter in space repairing the rockets, although I dunno how the hell that little helmet helped them not have no air or freeze to death. Eh whatever.
- The part where you gotta peel Vasquez' face off the Bandit's mask. Real gross and funny.
- Shooting Butt Stallion and seeing him bleed while the Security Guard panics and yells "YOU SAW NOTHING." What's the other option do, by the way? That was the funniest part of the game.
- The last talk between Rhys and Fiona while going into the vault. Really good character stuff and cements them both as likable, if a bit dickish. I really appreciated the dialogue choices in this game, usually I'm not big on that and maybe that is just because Fallout 4 was downright terrible at it, but all the choices seemed like something the characters would actually say. First Telltale game I ever utilized the say nothing option, which was good in some comedic situations.
- The Atlas General guy still being alive when you cut his eyes out.
- When Rhys and Jack are bothered by Vaughn being buff.
-
I'm happy to say that I didn't experience any crashes or massive glitches. There was slight stuttering and model glitches but nothing severe like in other Telltale games (I played on PS4.) Technically, the only problem I had was the loading screens really break up the flow of things especially in sequences where you are flip flopping between Rhys and Fiona fast, like in the finale. The loading screen also looks like its running real slow, which kinda bothers me but dumb nitpick, that isn't important. I will say that I'm somewhat disappointed with the way the game looks beyond the art style. It doesn't look like a PS4 game nor is it really taking advantage of it. I realize these are smaller budget titles and TTG's team is probably spread pretty thin as is, but I wished it looked a little better. I dislike the sequences that involve you walking around an environment as slow as possible. I think at this point it would be better to just go full VN mode and just have a cursor on a screen to indicate a character. You don't do a lot of walking, but when you do I want to yell because you move at such an unbearable speed. In Jack's office I swore it took 35 seconds to walk from one end of the screen to the other. Why not just make it a cursor? What is lost here?
I am surprised that the game seems to have actual in world consequences for the Borderlands universe that I don't care about, but still. Walking Dead and Game of Thrones (from what I understand) have zero impact on the source material, but maybe since this is spinoff from another game series and they worked with Gearbox directly in a series that isn't super well established already more could be done. I'm specifically talking about Scooter dying and the Helios base being completely destroyed.
The final sequence was great and the way you assembled your team was neat. I was sad I couldn't get the secret guy because I thought it would be Brick, Mordecai and Lilith but I looked it up and saw it was Claptrap and immediately wasn't sad anymore. As for the actual fight when the inputs started showing up and I noticed the controls were an arcade cab I said "Man they batter have a Hadouken in here." Then you get Gortys to do Guile's Flash Kick, Chun-Li's Hyakuretsukyaku, Zangief's Spinning Pile Driver, Dhalsim's teleport and then a straight up Shoryuken! Best Street Fighter reference of all time. A+ for not just having a little Hadouken and calling it a day. Doing Cloud's first Limit Break was cool too.
I got a few questions about how things wrap up, and I dunno if I missed them - How did Rhys get his cybernetic arm, head module and eye back? How come Athena was just let lose after being captured by Brick, Mordecai and Lilith? The heck happened to Cassius? What the hell is the Hyperion finger gun thing? Was that a pre-sequel joke or just some random nonsense that was supposed to be odd? Was Rhys really obsessed with Jack because that was never elaborated on.
Choice wise there are some things I'm curious about -
Also, fuck Randy Pitchford.
To start out with, I don't particularly like Telltale's output or Borderlands. Despite that, yes I wrote a lot. Not really for the intents of making this thread, but more to solidify my thoughts, although now I have a place to put them out there if anyone cared. I don't have a problem with the genre TTG fits into itself. I like point and clicks/visual novels quite a lot, although I used to be a lot more bullheaded about those genres. I enjoyed Walking Dead Season 1 when it came out, but after TTG started working on 20 different properties I lost count and interest. I don't much care for Walking Dead, Fables, Game of Thrones, Minecraft as a vehicle for a story or Borderlands, although I am somewhat interested in the Marvel/Batman games but mostly just as a curiousity. As for Borderlands, despite beating the first two games (skipped pre-sequel but read up a little bit on the wiki) it feels like a series that I am one or two steps away from loving. I like Diablo. I like picking up things and comparing numbers. I like how variable the guns, grenades, class mods and skills are. I don't like the shooting. It feels sloppy and since everything has 1,000,000 health it never feels satisfying to shoot anything. Don't like the artstyle for either TTG or Borderlands. There's nothing really...wrong with it, its just not that aesthetically appealing or interesting to me. Also this game still has a massive case of what I like to call "Telltale Face" where everyone's regular resting face is this smarmy look with one eyebrow raised and half a smile. So pretty much Dreamworks Face. I despise a good part of the writing for Borderlands. Anything Claptrap or Tiny Tina related makes me want to drop the game immediately. Also I kinda just massively dislike Gearbox and Randy Pitchford (ok mostly Pitchford) so that doesn't help. One minor thing I do appreciate about TTG is that the achievements/trophies are just all unlockable by beating the entire thing. In other games like King's Quest 2015 you have to play through it multiple times or gather dumb collectibles which is terrible. So TFTB had to do a lot to win me over, but I decided to give it a fair shot because people seemed to like it quite a bit. "It's Telltale's best work" and "Worth playing even if you dislike Borderlands" were common things I read, and I can agree with that.
Good news is I liked it quite a bit. Better then Life is Strange, which I played trhough earlier this year. Life is Strange is a fine game and I can see why people like it a lot but it didn't do a whole lot for me. I think TTG did a good job of taking the salvageable parts of the Borderlands series writing and humor (IMO of course. Man I am so fucking glad there wasn't a Claptrap in this game. I hat that asshole.) and just did it better. Some of the better parts of the previous games writing like Handsome Jack was just done better here. Now look even I like Handsome Jack. But don't let him be the Joker of this series. Don't make him the center of everything that ever happens. This was a good sendoff. Don't bring him back. I saw that there was a character in Pre-sequel that was a Jack body double and could summon clones of Jack. Please don't do that ever again.
Even the dumb memes felt better to me. I had a good laugh when Bassanova drove in to the dubstep track that plays in all the ironic MLG no scoping videos. The fact that it was a real and recognizable song sold me on the absurdity of it since I recognized it instantly. Also, I'm disappointed only 12.7% of people chose the "See You, Space Cowboy" option. Losers. Voice acting was superb, except for the crying at the end. I dunno if it glitched out or what but Rhys' crying was playing over the regular audio and it sounded awkward to begin with. Hardly knew Rhys was Troy Baker, love Laura Bailey, Dameon Clark is good as Handsome Jack (again) and was surprised to hear Patrick Warburton's instantly recognizable voice as Vasquez. It was pretty fun to investigate things as Rhys using the cyber-eye, and I appreciate the use of the Borderlands font and style of description for items being used. Even though I'm lukewarm on the series I can still appreciate stuff like the character intros being the same, Marcus narrating the intro of each episode, and little details like Moxxi's pizza boxes littered around the place. And then you have the straight up fanservice stuff like the appearance of Zer0 or using the character customization box for plot reasons, which hey - go for it. It's a game for Borderlands fans. Clever implementation.
TFTB has a lot of clever implementation, and it seems that TTG and Gearbox were OK at poking fun at their own stuff. Lots of play with the "X will remember that" which is something I don't really like a whole lot, but when you get stuff like "Loader Bot will store that memory file" or "Handsome Jack WON'T remember that" and the best being "Telltale Games will remember that" when you skip the credits, its pretty fun. I kinda wished they played more with the dialogue options though. I liked all the characters and liked that you would play as two different characters and see how the scenes evolve from other sides. I could at least tell where all of them were coming from in the dramatic moments, which is important since none of it felt forced. Okay, maybe except for the flash forward scenes when the main pair are captured and fighting but I can let that slide because of the setup. Gortys and Loader Bot weren't annoying little shits like Claptrap. Sasha and Vaughn were great supporting cast. I'm not sure what to think of the Loader Bot twist but I expected it from Episode 2 because of the voice and eye and then when the immortality thing showed up I was 100% certain. Not a bad reveal but I kind of expected someone more shocking, not that the reveal is bad. I really liked how weirdly understanding and calm the captor figure was, though. He had some real great lines despite hardly talking a whole lot and they did a good job making it so you couldn't get a read on the guy. The game has a lot of solid moments, just a list of the scenes I liked best -
- Rhys ripping off his arm, digging out his cyber eye and shoving a glass shard into his head to lodge out the data module. Reminded me of the part at the beginning of Walking Dead S1 E5 but done better. Jack's last moments were good as well, again sold by the voice acting.
- The part with Scooter in space repairing the rockets, although I dunno how the hell that little helmet helped them not have no air or freeze to death. Eh whatever.
- The part where you gotta peel Vasquez' face off the Bandit's mask. Real gross and funny.
- Shooting Butt Stallion and seeing him bleed while the Security Guard panics and yells "YOU SAW NOTHING." What's the other option do, by the way? That was the funniest part of the game.
- The last talk between Rhys and Fiona while going into the vault. Really good character stuff and cements them both as likable, if a bit dickish. I really appreciated the dialogue choices in this game, usually I'm not big on that and maybe that is just because Fallout 4 was downright terrible at it, but all the choices seemed like something the characters would actually say. First Telltale game I ever utilized the say nothing option, which was good in some comedic situations.
- The Atlas General guy still being alive when you cut his eyes out.
- When Rhys and Jack are bothered by Vaughn being buff.
-
I'm happy to say that I didn't experience any crashes or massive glitches. There was slight stuttering and model glitches but nothing severe like in other Telltale games (I played on PS4.) Technically, the only problem I had was the loading screens really break up the flow of things especially in sequences where you are flip flopping between Rhys and Fiona fast, like in the finale. The loading screen also looks like its running real slow, which kinda bothers me but dumb nitpick, that isn't important. I will say that I'm somewhat disappointed with the way the game looks beyond the art style. It doesn't look like a PS4 game nor is it really taking advantage of it. I realize these are smaller budget titles and TTG's team is probably spread pretty thin as is, but I wished it looked a little better. I dislike the sequences that involve you walking around an environment as slow as possible. I think at this point it would be better to just go full VN mode and just have a cursor on a screen to indicate a character. You don't do a lot of walking, but when you do I want to yell because you move at such an unbearable speed. In Jack's office I swore it took 35 seconds to walk from one end of the screen to the other. Why not just make it a cursor? What is lost here?
I am surprised that the game seems to have actual in world consequences for the Borderlands universe that I don't care about, but still. Walking Dead and Game of Thrones (from what I understand) have zero impact on the source material, but maybe since this is spinoff from another game series and they worked with Gearbox directly in a series that isn't super well established already more could be done. I'm specifically talking about Scooter dying and the Helios base being completely destroyed.
The final sequence was great and the way you assembled your team was neat. I was sad I couldn't get the secret guy because I thought it would be Brick, Mordecai and Lilith but I looked it up and saw it was Claptrap and immediately wasn't sad anymore. As for the actual fight when the inputs started showing up and I noticed the controls were an arcade cab I said "Man they batter have a Hadouken in here." Then you get Gortys to do Guile's Flash Kick, Chun-Li's Hyakuretsukyaku, Zangief's Spinning Pile Driver, Dhalsim's teleport and then a straight up Shoryuken! Best Street Fighter reference of all time. A+ for not just having a little Hadouken and calling it a day. Doing Cloud's first Limit Break was cool too.
I got a few questions about how things wrap up, and I dunno if I missed them - How did Rhys get his cybernetic arm, head module and eye back? How come Athena was just let lose after being captured by Brick, Mordecai and Lilith? The heck happened to Cassius? What the hell is the Hyperion finger gun thing? Was that a pre-sequel joke or just some random nonsense that was supposed to be odd? Was Rhys really obsessed with Jack because that was never elaborated on.
Choice wise there are some things I'm curious about -
- I shot Felix, and expected him to die either way. When I could recruit him I was surprised to learn he could live. Any effects to the story?
- I chose to become Hyperion CEO with Jack. Now I misinterpreted this option, I didn't mean for it to come off as a betrayal. I just did what I thought Rhys would do.
- What happens to Vaughn if you let Cassius die?
- Both times I could, I shot Finch or whatever mohawk dudes name was in that Bebop/Rocksteady-ass pair with electric bullets and it melted half his face. What happens if you use different elements?
- What happens if you refuse to let Handsome Jack into the Helios system?
- What happens if you tell Sasha and Fiona about Jack?
- What happens if you abandon Loader Bot if you can?
- I chose to trust Fiona instead of Jack at the end of chapter 2. What is the Jack option?
- Can you spare Jack?
- I somehow got into Sasha romance route I wasn't going for and didn't know about. Does this always happen no matter what? I did give her the flower.
- Felix's gift for Sasha was just a magical mcguffin thing to save her life at the perfect moment or what
- Letting Yvette live (multiple times) didn't seem to change a whole lot.
Also, fuck Randy Pitchford.
And it's not like you missed anything in regards to tales if you didn't, "she got let go" is really all that is important.