Watched a walkthrough of New Tales from the Borderlands.
In summary I think Gearbox is trying to single-handedly cure my autism by making my special interest as bad as possible.
Introduces really interesting characters that seem like they're going to be reoccurring because they have like, names and personality traits and rapport with the main cast to then only have less than 10 minutes of screen time, you could probably make an entire main-line Borderlands game just about them and it'd be better than Borderlands 3
Vaultlanders is literally a joke-y waste of time where you mash the A button. It is non-optional.
A lot of pointless QTEs (to quote the streamer I was watching; "I had to press the A button three times to open this chest")
Button mashing QTEs are kind of a thing of the past and it seems ironic to have a physically disabled character in the game and then not have an accessibility options that would turn this feature off like other games do
Anu and Octavius are really annoying, I don't like them. I get Rhys being a fish out of water is a big crux of TFTBL but it gets kind of old navigating a borderlands game as someone who is appalled by murder and violence, and both of these characters share the trait of "sucking at everything and being kind of lame" without like, exaggerating
The game seems really disinterested with the plot it sets up, the tediore invasion and Anu trying to finish her wormhole gun are thrown away and ignored pretty immediately until the writers feel like bringing it back up. It doesn't feel like the characters actually have a narrative and move along the plot, the plot just occurs when the writers want to insert conflict or give them a macguffin to use. And with it being a tight 5-episode game 2 or even 3 of those episodes are wholly unrelated to the main plot, instead being about... starting up a business...? while the tediore invasion is still ongoing?
It feels like a lot of stuff was cut from time that characters then reference later, which I'd forgive if a huge chunk of the game wasn't pointless filler/it feeling like writers would just insert things arbitrarily to begin with
There are very few walking around, point n click style adventure segments in contrast to just doing QTEs and dialogue options, I lost absolutely nothing by just watching a series of videos vs. actually playing the game.
The last section of gameplay has a bit literally identical in concept to the last section of gameplay in Detroit: Become Human
The game ends on an NFT joke
A lot of taco-related humor in the year 2023.
There's a pretty important scene where they just forgot Dahl and Vladof existed but this might partially be because they didn't have time to or didn't want to make two new character models
It creates new lore with major ramifications before immediately throwing away said lore without elaboration
You open a vault in episode 2
This entire spin-off game is based on a few lines of joke-y dialogue in borderlands 3 and that's how it feels.
Fran is definitely the best character in the main cast, she has more than two character traits, she has a backstory that actually has affect on how her story goes and the only smidgen of character development is thrown her way. She is capable and her disability is written in a very grounded way that doesn't sideline her but also doesn't handwave things away with scifi tech.
LOU13 is also a good character, a bit 2-dimensional but his concept of being a 100% accurate but needing his target to say their full name first was a fun concept and I wish the player could utilize that more than twice.
The world building on promethea is actually really good and the first episode had me hooked by convincing me it wasn't going to water down the insanity and violence Pandora was known for by too much. I really liked the designs and personalities of the side characters introduced and I was excited to see them more (I did not get to) it does also lightly touch on the aftermath of the Cult of the Vault after Borderlands 3.
This entry passes the insanely low bar of not treating people with dwarfism as sub-human
They kitbashed the chubby bunny statues from wonderlands into creatures that burp weed drug gas and that's pretty hot
A lot of milfs in this one. Like, 3 or 4.
Un-retcons eridium so it's rare again and not something you can find just lying around
The tediore soldiers talk like gay softboy furry roleplayers and that's oddly endearing
Things I'm Neutral??? About??
Athena taking over hyperion offscreen?? apparently??
Rhys was kinda whiny and didn't do much in his appearance
The skins are alright I guess but are kinda unnecessary in a short episodic game, so does the money system, like it's pretty unlikely you'll ever run out of money and the amount of money you can pick up is really insignificant so like, boohoo you can't get every skin in the game in one playthrough I guess?? Not like you'd want to anyway. At least it doesn't nickle-and-dime you for colors like Wonderlands does.
Tediore-made assault rifles and very frequent use of laser projectiles on guns that don't even look like they'd fire lasers
2087
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