So I've played Borderlands the Pre-Sequel. It's not without its charm. New characters, more interactive dialogue with them, and playing as Claptrap is just the funniest thing for me. The idea of a little robot like him running around and laying waste to all kinds of monsters and people while blabbering on and on is just the greatest. Also some nice news NPCs, mainly Janey Springs and Nurse Nina.
However, the game was also very disappointing for me. The story overall felt kind of rushed and lackluster, and my biggest complaint is coming up now: making Handsome Jack, the main villain of Borderlands 2, sympathetic.
Now, normally, I'm not too adverse to drawing in some sympathy for villains. If done properly, it can work very well. But in a world like Borderlands, where they are no real good guys, trying to make a villain sympathetic, especially since many of us (including me) had spent a whole past game hating him, doesn't really work out. There are quite a few reasons for this:
- The universe of Borderlands is already a pretty crappy place. Corrupt weapon corporations run many things with iron fists and don't care about anything other than their own profits. Pandora, where most of the action takes place, is a violent, vile, hostile, shithole of a planet, with many unsavory and unpleasant characters living there. Bandits, crazy people (a crazed scientist with an ego to match her insanity, a deranged doctor who lost his medical licence for reasons he doesn't seem to want to divulge, and a greedy capitalist weapons dealer who would rather shoot a customer in the leg than give him/her a refund), and Vault Hunters (basically more professional and less-insane bandits who take paychecks for doing work).
Yet, BL2 managed to do the impossible; make me care about some of these people. Why? Not because they were nice people, but because the enemy that they were fighting (Handsome Jack) was so much worse than them in every single aspect that I was willing to sympathize with them regardless. But in order to keep liking these people, Handsome Jack had to stay worse than them, because that was really all the people of Pandora had going for them for the most part (even though they still have a sense of friendship with each other and also had some funny moments).
Jack was always a vile, loathsome piece of crap in BL2. For all of his blathering on about how he was the hero, and how the Vault Hunters were such bad people (and in some ways, he was right), we could feel secure in the fact that not only were the Vault Hunters better than Jack (they don’t going around shooting just anybody, and especially in not such overtly-cruel ways), his hypocrisy about him being so much better than the Vault Hunters (Jack shamelessly joking about doing horrible things while criticizing the Vault Hunters for doing things much tamer than he does) made him so much more hateable, and therefore a great villain.
Jack was a great villain because of how loveable and hateable he was. Few villains like that exist, and because they are supposed to evoke both feelings of admiration and loathing (feelings that are on the opposite spectrum from each other), they can be tricky to create. But Anthony Burch, the lead writer for BL2, managed to succeed in this task, and Jack was considered by many to be one of the greatest villains ever created (IGN said so itself, and many fans talked about how great of a villain Jack was due to being so likeable/hateable). Look at this passage from Burch in this article about writing Handsome Jack (http://ift.tt/1sTC96V)
"Since it’s Borderlands, Jack should probably be funny, we thought. But you should still hate him, because if you like him too much then you’ll stop believing in your ultimate goal of killing the crap out of him. Jack, like the story of Borderlands 2 as a whole, needed to toe the line between funny and serious – we wanted him to make you laugh, then do something that made you desperately wish to put a bullet between his eyes, then make you laugh again."
I think I can safely say that for BL2, and before the Pre-Sequel came out, Burch succeeded in his desires with Jack. Jack had me laughing one moment, and then had me wanting to pound the smug look off his face the next moment. At the end of the game, when I’d killed the Warrior, thereby ruining Jack's plans and ambitions, I took great relish in him throwing a tantrum and listening to him complain about how unfair it was that he lost (when of course, he thoroughly deserved it).
Wanting to kill Jack was the main motivator for me in BL2. I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt the same way. Saving Pandora was really secondary, as it was still a shitty place to live, despite having such quirky and insane (in a slightly charming sort of way) characters.
Which is why the Pre-Sequel kind of wrecks things. By trying to make Jack sympathetic, there comes the risk of liking him too much, and again, in a world where someone like Jack is needed to make people like the ones on Pandora sympathetic, it’s not a very good idea. In fact, it’s true. A lot of fans and other people (you can even see it on this site here; just look up Handsome Jack here and you’ll find quite a few posts with people talking about how bad they feel for him now and how much they hate Moxxi, Roland, and Lilith now) are starting to sympathize with Jack and hate Lilith, Roland, and Moxxi.
And, somewhat frustratingly, they may be justified in that dislike for those 3, as the Pre-Sequel is too ambiguous in terms of just how bad Jack was. He obviously wasn’t a heroic person, but he had redeeming qualities, and despite having a love for killing (hardly a big, overtly bad thing, as in the Borderlands world, death and murder are treated like nothing), there wasn’t really any reason to consider him that much of a villain. Burch obviously intended this, given him stating in an article by IGN that he wanted to make Jack more moral and the Vault Hunters less moral, but not only was that not needed, it was a bad idea. Again, we need someone like Jack in BL2 to like the Vault Hunters, and with that reduced/gone, then that stops working.
“Jack’s arc in the Pre-Sequel doesn’t feel particularly engaging or well-paced. Without spoiling what happens with Jack inside the Vault, I can only say that that it felt like a disservice to all the characters involved. His Pre-Sequel arc ultimately fails to inform who he becomes in any meaningful way, given the scale of his crimes in Borderlands 2.”
The fact that it also required past “heroic” characters to act villainous also wrecks things, as it shows that Jack couldn’t be sympathetic any normal sort of way. They had to make quite a few Out-of-Character moments amongst the “heroes” in order to make Jack sympathetic. That, and the whole overdone “mind/brain gets overloaded by some ancient eldritch, you-can’t-grasp-or-understand-the-true-form” macguffin in order to explain why he becomes so evil at the end is another cheesy cop-out, which again shows why trying to make Handsome Jack sympathetic just doesn’t work out. It requires a lot of inconsistencies, plot holes, and ass pulls..
There’s also the fact that they had to leave out his treatment of Angel (or at least any real interactions with her involving him insulting her or abusing her), as well as what happened to his wife (I’m still wondering if Jack killed her to keep things quiet about Angel), in order to make him sympathetic. That’s another weak factor.
Even as retold by Athena, the Pre-Sequel plays out largely as Jack’s story and he’s portrayed as a victim on multiple occasions. This was another mistake.
“Lilith already walks a thin line of general likability in Borderlands 2. By the time we reach the end of Athena’s story many fans were so turned off by Lilith that they weren’t even interested in the truth of her situation. This is the aspect that feels like bad writing to me. Up to this point Lilith’s been one of the series main protagonists and has taken on a leadership role, so sacrificing her likability in the service of Jack’s story doesn’t make her any less complex a character, but it’s not necessarily a decision for the franchise or our experience with it as players.”
“I’m not really interested in having Handsome Jack seem sympathetic. He was a dickwad who wanted to clear out the planet for his own intentions. Giving him some heroic backstory isn’t gonna change that, but there’ll be a ton of long-winded excuses for him after the Pre-Sequel comes out that I’m not really looking forward to.” From someone on Tumblr.
^ Interestingly, this is exactly what happened. Now I view Jack as more of a mad dog in BL2. I still see the need to kill him, but I don't feel any more hostility towards him, so now the main drive of BL2 is kinda reduced for me.
Thoughts? Feelings?
Submitted December 20, 2014 at 05:51PM by D4DDYF4YS4CK21 http://ift.tt/1vc2tV6
No comments:
Post a Comment