By Will McCurdy
…I’ll explain the title in a bit.
Borderlands came out from the shadows of being a glorified simulator of what happens when you give gun designers hard drugs and the color pallet of Van Gogh’s later period of mental instability to much the same but with quite a story tacked on.
The player character travels to the planet Pandora as one of four vault hunters (six with downloadable content) featuring in the first game a militant defector, a tattooed woman with space pyrokinesis, a punch happy brute who speaks like the Hulk and an alcoholic marksman with a vicious pet bird. These types are merely the beginning of the cast that exists throughout the series including a thirteen-year-old explosives expert with an insatiable appetite for crumpets, a hulking man with a buzz axe whom wishes to be the conductor of the poop train, a dictatorial psychopath with a mask and several other masked psychopaths WHO LACK AN INDOOR VOICE!
Yet, beneath the guns, comic book style animations and gratuitous explosions of red, there is a subtlety that is never really touched on because no attention is brought to it. There are black, white, Hispanic people and so on of various different sexualities and not a single character cares. The main antagonist threatens the wife of a female scientist, a famous hunter laments about their previous male and female lovers with the greatest source of attention seems to be Moxxi, owner of a local pizzeria and frequent user of innuendo.
As for the above title, spoiler warning.
After fighting through bandits, giant worms and gimmicky side bosses, the party happens upon the fault they have been searching for said to contain riches beyond their wildest dreams. Unfortunately for them, the term “boundless treasure” was mixed up for giant beam firing squid monster that will kill all life on the planet. After the defeat, the monster serves as the final nail in the coffin as to the issue of social and sexual ignorance. The Atlas Corporation which has been the main antagonist for the entire series is broken by the vault hunters, the last vestige of societally enforced division breaks with the rest of the citizens of Pandora allying with whomever they share common interests rather than by race, sexuality or corporate affiliation.
The game goes beyond the usual gun nut experience to act as a prediction for the resolution of the current predicaments of humanity regarding racial and sexual conflicts. Eventually space colonization and issues greater than the human condition will allow for the human race to forego notions of the other that keep us so greatly divided. At the same time, it provides the more audacious solution of having an apocalyptic squid monster be our great unifying factor, in which case avoid calamari for a bit.