#I've played bl1 at least five times. I've beaten bl2 and the pre sequel once each

[lord-radish]

I've almost finished Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel, and I've gotta say, the Claptastic Voyage DLC is the Borderlands 1 throwback I was waiting for. It still has that overexaggerated Borderlands 2 comic relief in the main level, but there was a really nice throwback with Dr. Zed and Patricia Tannis, and I think they reused BL1 assets in the BL2 engine which was a cute touch.

I played a lot of Borderlands 1 as a teenager, and I only played the second game as an adult years later. That first game is really empty and dry and a little generic and flaky for the most part, but I really enjoy that spread-out, lonely feeling mixed with the PvE with the skags and rakk and stuff.

It isn't particularly light on dialogue, but it pales in comparison to the second game, where every mission has at least eight entirely voiced lines and random citizens make dubstep noises as you walk around the main hub area - I prefer the sparseness.

Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel is cut entirely from the cloth of Borderlands 2, and it's not a bad thing because BL2 is a technological upgrade from the first game and has way more functionality and flexibility on a gameplay scale. But it also takes after the second game way, way more than the first game, in that the dialogue is fairly dense and they're going for an actual story with key players, not a morally dubious treasure hunt sign-posted with story missions. The humor also has that thing where it's always undercutting itself and it feels like it's trying too hard - more of a BL2 thing than a BL1 thing.

Jack is a very talky character in the Pre-Sequel, given his prominent role and being set up for Borderlands 2, and you have the game's framing device as well which provides running commentary the whole time. You have a motif of heroes and villains not being who you thought they were, which I wasn't super into. It's very much Borderlands 2.5 in function rather than Borderlands 1.5, and while it's understandable on a gameplay level, I just didn't vibe with how hard the story and dialogue tries.

That being said? Claptastic Voyage is another page out of that book, but through the framing device of you going through Claptrap's memories, it acts as more of a bridge between the first two games than the main game does imo. I'm not done yet, but going back to this virtual Fyrestone to get this MacGuffin was a cute segment.

I also like Claptrap for the most part, even if he has a reputation for being a flat comic relief character in the first game. His hateablity was ramped up for the second game and he was turned into a caricature for the sake of humor, but I found it much more obnoxious when the second game continued to shit on him and outright call him unloved than even his small repertoire of canned lines in the first game.

He wasn't perfect in BL1, nor was he a sacred cow - one of my favorite parts of the first game was the Claptrap that gets ganked in the Island of Dr. Ned DLC. But he wasn't the outright punching bag and serial annoyance he was in the second game. Basically, I'm more in line with Angel's "funny little robot" comment than BL2 starting off by ripping out his eye and giving him an inferiority complex.

The Pre-Sequel proper and the DLC still has Claptrap being the point of much mockery and derision, but through seeing his memories and having his inner world be the setting of the DLC - having the character of Claptrap as a focus, in both the BL2 school of beating the shit out of him and giving him more of a straightforward way of addressing the past of BL1 - I think this DLC has bridged the gap between the games a whole lot more than the base Pre-Sequel game did.

To sum up my feelings, it's like the Pre-Sequel existed first and foremost to flesh things out for the second game - the next chronological entry in the series, released two years before - and the Claptastic Voyage DLC is acting more as a bridge between Borderlands 1 and 2. Borderlands 2.5 vs Borderlands 1.5, at least as far as tone and vibes go, even if the DLC still focuses a ton on that BL2 quality of writing.