Borderlands 3, I Love You Anyway | In-Depth Critique 

"...just a graveyard of wasted potential." The best summary of Borderlands 3 writing I have heard in 4 years.

Angel did at least know of Tannis back in borderlands 1....that time she betrayed you to atlas. So really it makes even less sense to me that she'd give her powers to Tannis.

Bruh, your idea to have the calypso twins siren power be mind control is a great idea. That would have been much more fitting and could have led to a much more interesting plot. They are clearly modeled after social media influencers, so it makes perfect sense that their power would come from their ability to influence minds.

i love how Lilith just casually kamikazes into elpis, committing genocide as a result, and somehow nobody thought that this plot point was stupid

Troy was a siren out of a loop hole, and tbh I kinda liked it cause there is a reason that makes senes. It wasn’t unexplained and it made genuine sense why he was a siren.

Troy setting up to betray Tyreen was foreshadowed through the entire main story, not just on Eden 6. The moment he shows fear in a compromised position during an early cutscene and his general resentment toward the dependency he holds on his sister only ever pointed in one direction. It makes so much sense to hear your closing remark on this. Thanks for the video.

You said Tiny Tina's dlc was "The Only DLC Without Vehicles", I feel bad for The Zombie Island of Doctor Ned getting ignored in the corner lol

It's incredible how someone with less than 100 subs can make such a good video

I cant believe there was actually a genuine good faith critique of BL3 from a borderlands fan when the game dropped and I never saw it. I SEARCHED for people who felt the same way as me cause the game had flaws on launch sure but it felt really fun to play in spite of it. Its kinda sad the internet bandwagoned so hard and buried what I think is the best game in one of my favorite franchises. All you could find on launch is overly negative anger when the game dropped seeming to come from people who expected something different from borderlands

This in depth review deserves a lot of more plays, how is it under 1,000. Good one man. 👍

Even three years on and after many patches, a lot of your critique is still valid. Thank you for the effort in making this video!

That Rothfuss quote at the end is amazing. Great video, criminally underrated.

god i’m so bummed i stumbled upon this video now, i was looking for content like this when bl3 first dropped. really great content man!

Damn that review is on part with reviews from Joseph Anderson or whitelight, incredible work you've done

Subbed I'm a huge fan of joseph anderson and you're easily right up there with him. This is in my opinion a sad example where the quality and the execution is solid, but the luck wasn't there and it didn't rise above the ocean of crap to get seen by enough people. If you enjoy doing this kind of stuff I'd strongly encourage you to keep going, I've seen it happen before with BCPOV and now he's pretty popular

As much as i love all the humor and silly stories I really wanted them to focus more on the vaults and deeper lore... Good review dude, subbed.

The algorithm just recommended this video to me today and I really wish I’d found it sooner! I have mixed feelings about borderlands 3 but I think it took me 3 years to arrive at the same position you seemed to have been in from day 1. This video is has nuanced and insightful takes on a game that I think people have way more complicated feelings about than you’d expect for a borderlands game

Very comprehensive and concise summary of the weaknesses of this game! Watching this was a cathartic experience after 50 hours of that story. You made a lot of insightful points, thanks for posting!

Genuinely, one of the most insightful video game critique videos I've seen on RU-vid. It's a shame you stopped making them; I would've loved to see more!

I let the critics discourage me from playing this and I was little interested because BL2 had already felt like more borderlands….I picked it up for a sale a few days ago and I havent been able to put it down. One of my favorite looter shooters of all time.

Its really good to hear someone make a critique from someone who loves borderlands too. Fantastic video, I subbed for sure. Look forward to your next critique!

An absolutely brilliant video man, I swear there are so many smaller channels that are such gems.

3 years later this video still holds up! great work dude🎉

The humor in this game felt like that steve buscemi meme where he's pretending to be teenager. "How do you do fellow kids?" Almost every aspect of the games writing feels like its trying too hard. Its as if they took the memorable parts of bl2 like the dark humor of handsome jack, the wacky zaney humor of tina, and the hilarious meme "shoot me in the head" guy and flanderized the entire series to fit that tone. It comes off as forced.

I've gotta say I think Zane is actually my favorite vault hunter in BL3. The insane combo of kill skills you can get going is super fun to run around with, and I felt were paired really well with the action skills he had available.

Story aside. bl1: the introduction of the idea bl2: truly breaking ground with the idea bl3: the perfection of the idea

I can tell you put a lot of work into this. Thanks for putting it together. I enjoyed having a lot of my own thoughts about the game validated and articulated by someone else. It was a great listen while doing some Arms Race. :)

I never wanted this video to end, I love your chill vibe I see you haven’t posted in a minute hope you come back. Imma check out more of your videos later

Wow dude, I've been looking for an in-depth comprehensive Borderlands 3 video and I keep getting reffered to the same videos, finally after adjusting my search I came here and I almost didn't watch just because the view count was so low, but honestly this is high quality work!! Good stuff

Most spot-on summation of the game I've yet to hear ANYWHERE--and this is from someone w 381 subs? When I scrolled down, I fully expected both the views & the subs to be in the millions, it's just that good. You're great at this man. Agree w nearly every point made, particularly the issues w the story/writing v what it was in the glory days of BL2. Fantastic work; I hope you keep pursuing this if you have the time & inclination.

Man... you made me excited to play through this game with the mind control story. Great video!

Dude! How do you not have more views. So much time and effort went into this! Dx

I recently got an OLED steam deck and replayed the entire borderlands franchise. 1 is obviously the most underbaked but the bones are still there and I love its approach to setting up the lore of the world. Pre sequel gets better every time I play it, 2 is still a classic, and 3 I find I grow more close to every time as well. The OLED screen really made everything pop and it was like I was playing it for the first time. For all of its flaws I still love 3. Excellent video btw can’t wait to rewatch it 20 times. Edit:I’m also a very big pre sequel enjoyer ❤️

Dude great work. Keep it up man. Subbed and looking forward to the next in depth analysis/ critique.

zane was my favorite because i could strategize when i used my drone and where i put my clone,. For example, during the first traunt fight i took out my drone for when fodder appeared, and when he started launching the chasing projectiles i used the clone to dodge the balls, it felt tight to press f to dodge the energy balls., regain my bearings, and switch weapons depending on how far away i was from traunt. this was incredibly common and fun. also during regular fights, i would seek out the strongest one, and popping out my clone to distract the fodder while i kill the big guy, and if the big guy is charging an attack, like a malliwan heavy, i would dodge with the teleport. also the instant up with the clone was handy when there wasn't any fodder left.

First vid of yours I've seen and you NAILED IT! Balex was the best character in BL3

Fantastic video. I appreciate how all of your elaboration was very cohesive and trailed cleanly into one another often. You gave a very fair shake to each aspect of the game and explained in reasonable detail your criticisms and where you though it excelled, which I respect a lot give how easy it is to rant on popular opinions and tell people the same thing they've already heard. I especially enjoyed how you make some suggestions on improving things (your story tweak works really well actually) but how restrained you were I'm giving enough to fully convery your ideas without purely shiting on what's there and without running on beyond reasonable critique. Banger video! 10/10

shoutouts to you for liking TPS

Kill Killavolt is without question my favourite part of the game, and the only thing I will ever reinstall it for, because it was just so memorable to me. It's also important that Hyperion guns became my favourite while doing the quest, and I associated their amazing futuristic designs with the quest's amazing map, the fighting and the character of Moxxi :) For me, the entirety of BLands1 and stumbling upon this quest in BLands3 is the best the series has to offer, and no amount of empty depressing BL2 maps and can brainwash me out of this opinion.

Fantastic analysis, criminally under subbed... keep up the great work!

damn mid way the video i was thinking how good your pacing and such is then i realized you only have 300 subs! this feels like 500k subs content bro such quality

i'm very glad they didn't make sirens a allegory on the gays because its not like that isn't being done to fucking death

I have almost 1000 hours in the game and I thought I have seen all of these vids on youtube already so this was a surprise when youtube put this on my recommendations 2 years after its release.. good job youtube, good job.. gonna watch this now..

28:45 This is just my personal opinion on it but before mordecai went to pandora he had competed in a shooting competition with people from multiple planets, everyone used a sniper rifle but he won using just a revolver, the other participants scorned him and accused him of cheating which them got him banned from the tournament, later as an adult became a vault hunter, causing pandora to not only give him a new purpose, but it was the planet he found his new familty on, so with it being a hell hole, if it has alot of sentimental value to him, it would make sense he would have mixed emotions about the planet, why he hates it "sometimes" but that's just my take on that, great video by the way, I honestly wish more people watched this video

bullet efficiency... the sniper vs assault was the perfect example of my problem with some of the weapons the difference between repeaters and revolvers made sense with the damage differences

Smashing video, really enjoyed it! Currently accompanying it with my second attempted playthrough of the Game and I think this is the fairest and most well explained critiques of Game I've personally seen. Hope you chip away at this critique thing as a hobby on the side or something. This easily matched the quality of other big namer's in the field.

amazing video still holds a lot of valid points 3 years later.

The funny thing about the bl2 side quests was that more often than not the quests with blue weapons as opposed to purple weapon rewards were usually better because that’s how you’d get weapons with flavor text like the heartbreaker for example

This was wonderful. Your channel is about to explode if you continue to release videos like this. I'm really surprised about the ~5.500 views as of now, it could easily have been 100.000 and I would not have been surprised. I found ACG before he blew up, and I predict the same for you.

Apart from the bad writing, there is not much to criticize, but one point burns in my head: Why are there no more echoes, with interesting and sometimes important details? The big levels are great, there are also some nice spots, but why are there no more Vault Symbols (or other achievements), which were a great motivation to explore the levels very carefully? At this point, the game feels incredibly linear, you are not encouraged to explore the areas more closely because you immediately run into an invisible wall somewhere ... Somehow, passion is missing everywhere, otherwise the game is not bad, the gameplay is really much better. I also don't know why this wasn't communicated in more detail during development, that not only Mikey Neumann is no longer there as the creative head, not to mention Matthew Armstrong. Gearbox has apparently looked for four new authors for the third part, but nothing else is known about them. In the end, the game turned into a love-hate relationship for me: The add-ons are too much of a mess and the game regularly flies off the hard drive because Borderlands 1, 2 and even the pre-sequel simply offer the better narrative and great characters. The gameplay is actually better ...

This is such a good video, I don't know why it dosent have more views

I just got around to playing BL3 yesterday, and I absolutely love the gameplay and all the other upgrades, just wish the story was better.

37:41 THANK YOU! You’re the only person I’ve seen talk about this and I’ve said it from the beginning that it’s not good. Most people don’t care or even say it’s good.

It's like the writers only had Yes-Men, and threw all the ideas they brainstormed into the story with no second thought on explaining how the certain concepts fit into the world, or already established ideas. Like, they had to have gotten completely new writers for this game, because the writing wasn't this incompetent for 1 and 2

I love watching Critique video on my favorite game. not because of hate but its just fun and to learn more about the lore (like Zarpedon on TPS event) also i need video background while im farming for God roll light show! Great video

The pre sequel really is awesome and I would love it if in Borderlands 4 they mix the play style of it with 3

randomly searched borderlands 3 critque. Really good video. Main suggestion would be to make some more insightful thoughts outside mechanics e.g. context around the game, over game comparison, and maybe some in depth research on the development of the game/ the company. Would round out the video and provide something unique to the audience compared to other critique channels.

They need a button to mute characters.

Great video that deserves a lot more views!

As others have noted, the Joseph Anderson vibes are fantastic. Excellent video.

Great video way to put in the work💯💯

Thanks for the Video, really good quality

You summed it up perfectly.

dude i was really hoping to see your wonderlands review

i mean every Borderlands game has had 1 Vault hunter with Companions, It started with Mordecai/Bloodwing (god rest her soul) then bl2 got Gaige/Deathtrap, TPS had Wilhelm/ Saint & Wolf, of course 4LAK and his companions for BL3 and yeah thats the first one the companion was out full time and now we got Tiny TIna's Wonderlands and half the Classes in that game have a full time Companion (my first time running through i did Spore Warden multi classed with Clawbringer for 2 companions on the field at once). its cool to see them on the field full time imo.

enjoyed it. thank you very much.

This review is really good

Yooo I totally agree about the final boss fight in the pre sequel. Super underrated

I loved how viable some of the more common weapons could be, but by the same token legendary weapons felt a bit too common and I usually had more legendaries than I knew what to do with and they all decimated everything for quite a few levels above their level. I like finding legendaries, but they began to feel less and less special. I still really like legendaries being common enough for normal enemies to drop them or normal loot crates to have them. Just not as much as they do. Or maybe I’ve just been really lucky in my play-through.

so we are just not gonna point out how the destroyer went from whatever it was to a fucking tentacle monstor

You are a contagiously positive human being

This video deserves about a million more views

So here is my story, prior to the release of borderlands 3, I have never owned or played a borderlands game when I was younger I only knew 2 things about the game and that's there was a highly pitched yellow robot, and the cover set featuring a man in a mask holding finger guns to his head, fast forward to my junior year to highschool I'm eating lunch with my 2 best friends watching them go nuts over the trailers for borderlands 3 just a few months from release, I asked them what the fuss was about and they dragged me over to the other side of the table and made me watch the trailer and they explained to me how the game works and so I was convinced, fast forward to the Christmas of that year and I got it l, I popped it into my Xbox and it instantly turned into my favorite video game along side of games such as Halo, and me being someone who has never played any of the other games or the telltale game and as far as the story goes I loved the fucking shit out of it, I always hated Ava but that was about it, fast forward to today I am now 20 with a job and money and I finally got around to purchasing the legendary collection that has the first 3 games, and all the dlc and I even picked up tales and at the point of me typing this comment I have finished the main story of each and now I have much different feelings about 3's story I don't hate it but I feel way too much has changed and it kinda ignores tales and the pre sequels endings entirely, like what happened to the war that was coming and needing all the vault hunters you can get as said by the watcher and what happened to Fiona and Sasha and why is Rhys and Vaughn Soo different like it actually saddens me, I still love borderlands 3 and the story isn't the worst but I feel it could have been Soo much better

Thank u for your adoration of the pre sequal not enough fans appreciate how good that game was

I am 4 years late to this video, but I love it. You are right in all of your points. Now, this game desperately needs a skip dialog option so I can jump back to the action instead of just sitting in sanctuary listening to Lilith for the 10th time. Replaying it is a bit painful because of this.

Honestly, at the end of the day the biggest problem I have with BL3 is that you can only use the default 4 hunters. Additional characters (and through them, additional "campaigns") were a brilliant and understated part of 2 and TPS. The end game meta is playing with skill trees for maximum effect, and gameplay fun - something that pays off with dividends when the roster is expanded with more characters Hell I would have loved it to be an all stars style where you could play as any of the previous hunters (who are still alive) or characters you wouldnt normally be able to like Ellie or Tina or Hammerlock or Rhys with unique dialog for scenes theyd otherwise be in. Dare to dream

Funny how the first dlc turned Zane from the worst vault hunter to the best because of 1 class mod.

To the section about the characters. More specifically to the portion about their gameplay mechanics. One thing that has always disappointed me with all of the promotional material for a Borderlands game is the vault hunters are shown off using all of their action skills (or cap-stone skills if memory serves). But we obviously don’t get that. With 3 though, they took away a gameplay function in the d-pad and the ability to quick select a specific weapon we have equipped, so we could ping and otherwise use emojis in game. I have never once used an emoji in the game other than when I tried to swap weapons. So we essentially have three dead buttons on the controller. Personally, I think it would be a good move to let us unlock and use all of the action skills, like our characters are shown being able to do. Map alternative action skills and the like to and-pad button. Primary is still the RB/R1. It sounds good having 4 skill trees and in essence 4 different action skills for 3 out of 4 characters in Borderlands 3

You should definitely cover more borderlands

Good news. The endgame has been fixed up A LOT.

good analysis, you should do a sequel video on all the new features and updates Borderlands 3 now has past release because I want to know your opinions on them

Okay, Vaughn. I preface this in saying I liked Vaughn in his Telltale depiction: I think Vaughn's Borderlands 3 depiction is shitty, it makes narrative sense why he is that way, and the latter does not necessarily validate the former. Hear me out. Pandora's "thing" is that it's an unforgiving hell hole that corrupts anyone who goes there. The planet is a (literal, vis a vis the Vault) Pandora's Box. In the same way opening the Vaults releases the evil within, just being on Pandora is like opening a box. We see it with the Dahl miners in Borderlands 2. We see it with the bandit-equivalents in the Pre-Sequel. Hell, Handsome Jack was at some point the good guy. The Pre-Sequel's whole narrative is a case study for how Pandora distills people with the best intentions into a caricature of their basest aspects. Vaughn liked how freedom felt in his Telltale appearance. Him in Borderlands 3 is the logical progression of Pandora making him dial that to eleven at the expense of everything else. Vaughn is the human pupal stage between offworlder and bandit that we haven't really seen until now, but have heard about in ECHOs. In 5-10 years, Vaughn will be Captain Flynt. That said, Gearbox gutted that character. I don't think "it makes sense" is a valid defense for Flanderization. I'd go so far as to say it's a crutch being used by Gearbox to defend the lowest passable standard of writing they can get away with. Borderlands doesn't really have a story. It has...how do you say it? Shit happens between gunfights. That does not automatically constitute a story. --Which is fine. Borderlands is a spectacle movement shooter. I'm absolutely fine with the lion's share of attention being put into making the gunplay, the reason I play the franchise, enjoyable. So...yeah. Not really sure how to cap this off. Borderlands' "narrative," for want of a better term, has never intentionally been more substance than Roland's death; any other narrative gratification is failing upward. This is the franchise with the screaming walk-slow gun, bonerfarts, and a character whose only defining trait is that it's funny to shit on someone trying to make you proud. BDL3's story was dogshit in exactly the way I expected going in because what Pandora is and what it does to people is not a new concept. The writing didn't get (much) worse mid-franchise, it just got a lot harder to ignore because you can't either skip it or shoot things while the exposition plays over your ECHO. Great video, by the way. This was a great way to decompress post-series and fill in context for the characters I and the person I played with didn't use.

I could see the reason as to why Troy gets so much more powerful after leeching off of Maya is because the Rampager's power didn't actually go into Tyreen and instead was transfered over to him, even if unintentionally - sort of like an equalizing effect of sorts, since he's always been weaker due to missing half of his torso Seems like something that Gearbox could've written in rather than me coming up with a reason, but what do I know

In relation to referencing old stuff like the Office: yeah it's old but still relevant. It was the most streamed show on netflix just recently. So there rly isn't a problem to do that, and doing that would've actually make me laugh more than the cringe inducing sh*t from the Calypsos or Ava, or even the Chad dude. 😂

This what such a great insightful video. And I agree with pretty much everything you said. Its just such a fun game that is easy to love in spite of its flaws.

Excellent critique

it's especially disappointing when you realize just how easy it is to fix the player character's inaction during Maya's death scene. They could have EASILY made it so when you interact with the exit from the vault, your screen fades to black and the cutscene plays. Meaning that the player character was still in the vault while the cutscene played and entirely unaware of what was happening outside. It's such an insanely easy fix.

Its funny, if an IP changes too much, people complain. If they stay the same, people complain. I think people like to complain.

I have two things I want to comment on. I really liked your run-down on the interactions of skills within each class. Beyond being interesting and informative, it makes it obvious that you enjoy the game enough to experience all it has to offer despite the flaws in design that you cover in this section. Regarding the story, it's nice to hear a review that can be critical of the story while still cutting it a bit of slack (such as Ava not always being wrong despite being insufferable). Really great job on this video!

Mayhem 11 was honestly good enough for end game for me. It gives you the good guns without the bullshit modifiers. Edit: realized I forgot to mention that M11 was m10 difficulty just with 50% less loot and no modifiers. Enemy dmg/hp stays same as m10

Yo amazing analysis video! Also I think if you add a timestamp for 0:00 in the description, it would split the video timeline accordingly at the bottom (if that makes sense)

Not played this for month's, might have a blast later, playing Borderlands at the moment which is my favourite as this is where it all started

Bro. Why the FUCK didnt i see this sooner? This video is gold. I am so tired of people shitting all over BL3. Yes it has its flaws, yes it is not perfect, but damn is it fun to play. It is its own game! Great video.

I remember playing Void Bastards to scratch the Borderlands itch. Worth checking out, can beat it in a day.

21:15 Brilliant suggestion. Wish their strategy for fun and not alienating players was attuned to urs!

I think borderlands 3 has the most intense difficulty wall halfway through the campaign out of the entire franchise in the impending storm especially playing straight through without doing side quests

There's a lot of gun specific specs. In fact once you get into the nuts and bolts of each spec you realize that this game is very in depth when you pay attention to what each skill does and how each gun work.

I absolutely love Borderlands 3. I even liked Ava and the Calypso Twins.

Great content..thank you

Angel would've probably known about Tannis in the same way she knew of all the vault hunters and the crimson raiders. I assume she would've been tapping into to Hyperion's satellite and echonet-(channels? servers? idk they probably have their own computing shit that's unmentioned exactly what) as she did during her echologs in BL2 telling Jack about the vault hunters and other notable figures. So most likely she would've seen something about the 1 person on the planet noted as being the leading figure in knowledge and lore of said artifacts that Jack is/was after at the time. As to why/if she would ever reasonably give her powers to Tannis is still debatable. When she had the choice she might've seen Tannis as the only viable pick given she is the only other physically and mentally capable female in the Crimson Raiders at the time (I forget if Gaige canonically was around and partook in the events prior of the first DLC) as Tina is both a child and insane, Ellie is both stupid and probably not going to be during the adventuring or thinking, Lilith already is a siren and she might not have known you could stack siren powers as this game suggests, and Moxxi.... well I doubt she'd think she'd be a good fit given her knowledge of her actions in TPS and even BL1 and BL2. So if she wanted to prevent randomly giving her powers away Tannis makes as much sense as we've been shown of capable and on the side of Crimson raiders or at least anti-jack but not anti-sanity like psychoes or randos liek Captain Scarlett.