no heaven: Borderlands (2009)
My cousin and I finally got around to rolling credits on Borderlands 1 (for the first time as adults, lol) as well as playing through The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, its first DLC. I wrote recently about how enamored I was returning to its desolate landscape and cruel humor and I'm feeling that even more now. It's such a funny, bleak game! It hates corporations so much! It thinks the player characters were miserable rats! It openly laughs at you for expecting a happy ending! AAAAAAAAHH!!!!!
I always avoided the last mission in Borderlands for the reason you avoid the last mission in any RPG: I wanted to hit every possible side quest and explore every area before "ending" the game, and therefore I never ended the game. The last mission is also long and kinda weird and has that massive but anticlimactic Destroyer battle at the end, and I was an impatient teen, so I didn't really miss it.
Hoo boy, do I appreciate it a lot more now. It is a bloody little carnival ride! The vault hunters are basically spectators to this left-field nightmare battle between the Crimson Lance and the aliens. You can run in shooting or you can take your time, keep quiet, and watch a really nasty diorama unfold. I was not even thinking of this quest sequence when I wrote my Unwinnable article but it feels like a perfect encapsulation of Borderlands' ethos. You're a vulture picking clean the remnants of a battle more important people are waging. Atlas are the warmongers, the moneymakers, throwing their resources at this vault, and they're also the ones getting totally fucking obliterated by hellish aliens with wings and laser swords after they spend the whole game being condescending towards you. It really emphasizes that feeling of the vault hunters' insignificance… Love and respect that design decision. And then you get fucked over by the vault itself and almost die doing someone else's dirty work! Salt in wound.
But after the boss fight and that rough little rug pull we get the Angel reveal, which in hindsight I guess they retcon a bit in the second game but whatever, her plotline in BL2 is great, I'm not bothered. What did strike me about that reveal is that right at the vault hunters' moment of triumph — or, more realistically, moment of violent disappointment — is when we get the information that the only benevolent figure during the vault hunters' exploration of Pandora is in fact the watchful eye of another corporation. Death to Atlas, long live Hyperion. One mad king for another. That's grim as fuck! Like, congrats for beating the game, but wow I think you guys lost!!!
Meanwhile, Dr. Ned doesn't even bother to distract you with treasure, it's just 100% openly about Pandora as the abandoned stomping ground of faraway amoral capitalists. The whole DLC is about Jakobs, the corporation, abandoning the town of Jakobs' Cove after it's struck with a zombie virus (by Dr. Ned, who's not Dr. Zed wearing a fake mustache. I'm pretty sure he does actually canonically end up being his evil twin. That is so funny to me.) This is basically the beginning and end of the joke. There aren't like… survivors to rescue. There isn't a sympathetic ear to turn to or someone to help fight the brutal company and make a better life. There's not any sort of moralistic lecture. Capitalist excess to the point of comedic brutality is the setup and the punchline, and you roam around in it, and make some money, and get betrayed once or twice, and leave the island just as miserable as it was when you came. Having to wait for the Jakobs representative was a great bit that encouraged that theme, and then the subsequent Claptrap murder…. so good. (Unrelated side note: the credits gag in the final boss fight made me laugh so hard I started crying. I am a sucker.)
Anyway, I love how earnestly bleak it all is while still being so extremely funny. We're currently in an era of self-aware anticapitalist fiction about The People Rising Up and it's wild to realize that this game I had in the back of my head as a kinda edgy, bro-y plotless shooter was engaging with the exact same things, just to different ends. Like, I don't think if you had asked me what Borderlands was about even six months ago I would have said anything besides "shooting people and getting cooler guns," and now I feel kinda seriously that it's about the self-interested, mercenary interests that appear after extractive capitalists have their way with virgin country. It's like they did the spaghetti western pivot to blood and guts and moral neutrality before they ever tried the white hat/black hat scheme.
I am really interested in how I'm going to feel about Borderlands 2 after all this! The big thing Borderlands 2 does is make the original four protagonists into folk heroes slash political figures, with a community around them and sympathetic personal goals. That's a big tone shift from how wry, cynical, and brutish they're written as in this one. I think I'm still going to like it, but I wonder if it'll come off as cheesier now that I am older and wiser and also basically impossible to please. I am also going to be so sad about Bloodwing :(