Like all stories in this universe, it’s essentially a treasure hunt for a Vault, Borderlands’s persistent MacGuffin device for unlimited riches and power, always protected by a big evil on the post-apocalyptic desert planet Pandora. Optimism, in the context of this particular game, means taking a world that, despite the color, is aggressively nihilistic and cynical, and telling a story equally aggressive about finding reasons to defy that nihilism instead of feeding into it. Hundreds of games can do bright, colorful, cheerful. All one has to do is turn on a Nintendo console for 10 minutes, and you get happiness. That shouldn’t be mistaken with happiness. It boils down to one single element, missing from all the Borderlands games, and so much of gaming in general: optimism.

The story crafted here isn’t just a fine Borderlands sequel, but one of the most enjoyable sci-fi adventure stories in recent memory. It’s awe-inspiring, then, to watch Tales soar so very high above the call of duty in that regard. All Tales from the Borderlands had to do was force Borderlands’s gameplay to get out of the narrative’s way, and you’d still have an exponentially better game almost by default. It incorporates everything terrible about MMORPGs with everything terrible about modern-day shooters. The one thing that’s always been a problem for the Borderlands series is the fact that you have to play it.

Tales from the borderlands age rating