Borderlands is my Antitheses

Story and narrative are the two biggest draws of any game for me. If the characters are well developed and the dialogue is good, I can overlook gameplay inconsistencies. It is for that reason that both Heavy Rain and Fallout: New Vegas have worked their way into my good graces. Even though Heavy Rain controls worse than a drunk playing Simon Says, it weaves a compelling and emotional story that is well worth playing. New Vegas, on the other hand, is a glitched out mess. Insta-deaths, characters without skin and some of the worst check points I have ever seen fall by the wayside because the world is so well realized. Dialogue is engaging and I wanted to keep playing just to see where I would go next. No matter the flaws of the gameplay or design a good story can save the game for me. 

Then why do I like Borderlands? 

Don’t get me wrong, both Borderlands and its sequel are extremely good games. Combined I have spent about 100 hours roaming Pandora. Not too impressive a number to the hardest of hardcore Borderlands players, but it is highly significant when you consider the fact that none of the other games I own have even reached that number of hours played. And yet when Borderlands is brought up in conversation, the only time the story is mentioned is to say how bad it was. The narrative plotting of the first Borderlands goes something like this:

• ·         Get off the bus.
• ·         Kill bandits and take their stuff.
• ·         Do tasks that make you better at killing bandits.
• ·         Kill more bandits.
• ·         Oh yeah, this Vault thingy exists.
• ·         Kill more bandits.
• ·         Wait? …. You want to know more about this Vault thing?
• ·         Why can’t you be content with killing bandits?
• ·         Kill more bandits.
• ·         Ok fine … Have your stupid little Vault. But wait there is no loot in the Vault. Only tentacles and unfulfilled dreams!
• ·         Ha! Next time you should just kill more bandits.

Let us be kind and say that the first Borderlands is not have a grade A story. Nor did it have good dialogue. All the dialogue was attempting to be humorous and sometimes it succeed, but others if failed horribly. When you weren’t either getting or turning in a mission, the npcs spouted the same 5 or 6 recycled lines. By any of my aforementioned standards Borderlands would be a terrible game, but it is not. The saving grace of Borderlands is the gameplay itself. 

In many ways Borderlands is like Tetris. Tetris is the perfection of gameplay. No story, narrative or dialogue, just pure unadulterated gameplay. And it is in many ways perfect. The gameplay of Tetris is superb and stands alone. (The argument can be made that Tetris is a commentary on Soviet life, but that is for later). Although it defies my own standards I love Tetris. 

Borderlands aligns with Tetris on the gameplay trumping story side of tastes. Gunplay is slick and responsive. Randomly generated loot is addicting and the entire experience is just rewarding. The story fades out into the background as you focus on killing more bandits. Borderlands is just about having fun. A world is created and populated with enemies so you can be given several gazillion guns and go crazy. What about that doesn’t sound fun? Borderlands and its sequel are gameplay experiences over story. 

And I know this makes me a huge hypocrite, but I love Borderlands. Crap story and all.