Tales from the Borderlands

I'm going to state a potentially unfavorable opinion. I don't really like Borderlands very much. I have owned both main Borderlands games and played them very briefly. I understand the appeal and as a person who loves games like Diablo I should be all about Borderlands, right? It just never really clicked for me. It never became an obsession for me. It was a game series that the entire world was in love with and I merely enjoyed the trappings of it. All that being said, Tales From The Borderlands is one of my favorite games of the year.

If you've played any Telltale Games adventure in recent years you won't see anything surprising here. A majority of the game is watching scenes play out, listening to dialog, and selecting different responses as the story moves along. Occasionally you'll take control of your character, moving them around scenes with the left stick and selecting interactive areas and items with your right stick and face buttons. That's pretty much it. Every once in a while you'll be a part of action scenes where you have to do QTE's but much of Tales From The Borderlands is sitting, watching, and listening and frankly, I love it.

This first episode of Telltale's new episodic series focuses on two interwoven stories. Rhys is a Hyperion employee engaged in an Office Space style escapade of white collar revenge and Fiona is a tough as nails con artist born and raised on Pandora. Eventually, of course, the two characters get pushed together through violence, awkwardness, and unfortunate circumstance and from there the adventure kicks off in full. It even features one of the main playable characters in the Borderlands shooters as a side character but you spend the whole game playing as just Rhys and Fiona. Therein lies one of my favorite things about Tales: It's about the other guys.

I'm sure the lack of interesting story in Borderlands was by some semblance of design but, honestly, the Borderlands cast has always just been a bunch of one-note caricatures. Sometimes it's chuckleworthy, sure, but it never really set Pandora and it's inhabitants up as anything more than a playset. Tales not only gives Pandora some really interesting texture but it also lets you peek a little bit at life within Helios, the "Big H" where Hyperion sits above the desert treasure trove. The story itself is fun and engaging, with fun little moments that let you be funny in precisely the way you want. Some of the choices were such that I seriously wonder what my game would have been like if I went the other way, though I suspect much of that appreciation only comes to mind if you play with an interest in game design sitting in the back of your mind as you play.

Graphically Tales is very similar to their previous games. It uses Telltale's now trademark cel-shaded comic look which lends itself very well to the Borderlands style. At all times the game looks so much like Borderlands, even down to the choices of fonts, menus, and light pillars coming out of stuff. It's unabashedly Borderlands (and sometimes even points it out blatantly to the player) and it works really well. My biggest gripe is that even though Telltale has added more P's to it's catalog, it's engine is starting to look fairly aged. Little graphical glitches as scenes load and transition can be really jarring and character animation is still incredibly stiff and unnatural. It doesn't ruin the game at all, it just reminds you that you're playing a Telltale experience every few minutes. Part of me wonders if having them improve their character rigging would ruin the flavor of their games at this point in time. Seriously, though, I'd love to see better animation from them some day.

In the end Tales From The Borderlands: Episode 1 is a fantastic start to a new episodic adventure. On one hand it's yet another TTG adventure and nothing has changed in that regard. On the other hand the characters and story are really damn fun. Unlike The Walking Dead, I wanted to play the next episode immediately after finishing. Tales is the best Borderlands game I've played so far. I found myself actually caring about the weird culture and history going on in this setting far more than I ever had before and made me really wish that the proper Borderlands games could have the sort of depth this game provides.

But then again, maybe things are better this way. I can have my dollhouse version of Pandora while the rest of the gaming community has their action figures with kung-fu grip.

If Telltale ended up making an adventure series based off of Bucky O' Hare I might need a change of pants.