Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands tees up a flurry of intriguing narrative concepts, a veritable world of risk stuffed with fascinating ideas and mind-blowing potential outcomes. After which…it does nothing with them, culminating in an ending that fails to appreciate its personal potential. Let’s chat about it.
Spoilers comply with for the ending of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.
A spin-off of Gearbox’s Borderlands collection of loot-shooters, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is chronologically set between the occasions of the second and third mainline video games, and bodily set nearly fully inside a fantasy tabletop role-playing sport known as Bunkers & Badasses (a enjoyable twist on a sure influential tabletop sport from IRL). The divisive Tiny Tina performs the position of dungeon grasp; you’re a “fatemaker,” mainly a catch-all time period for “participant hero.” Your solely glimpse of Pandora, the primary setting of Borderlands, is by way of the plot’s framing system: the cave during which you play Bunkers & Badasses.
Wonderlands options a normal “save the realm from the dangerous man” story, which is enhanced by some top-flight vocal expertise. Wanda Sykes and Andy Samberg play your fatemaker companions (respectively, a completely sentient robotic and an completely hapless bounty hunter). Will Arnett, in the meantime, voices the sport’s villain, the Dragon Lord—a task that matches him like a glove.
Early on, the Dragon Lord provides inklings that he, not Tiny Tina, is answerable for Bunkers & Badasses. “Psst—beginner. Don’t fear, these jerks on the desk can’t hear me. It’s simply us down right here,” he says in an early mission. Afterward, Tiny Tina remarks how, “That’s not speculated to occur,” after the Dragon Lord abruptly beheads Queen Butt Stallion, the ruler of the realm—a deviation from Tiny’s script. Related moments, whereby the Dragon Lord runs afoul of Tina’s meticulously crafted narrative, after which brags about it, abound by means of the remainder of Wonderlands.
You get the sense that Wonderlands is hurtling towards an inevitable conclusion: The Dragon Lord truly busting freed from the sport and wreaking havoc on the “actual” Borderlands world. Possibly you combat him outdoors of Bunkers & Badasses because the requisite second-stage ultimate boss combat. Or possibly he effectively and really escapes, (Presumably as a villain within the inevitable subsequent mainline Borderlands? Or—screw it, why not—a cameo on this yr’s forthcoming big-screen adaptation?) Both approach: How freakin’ cool!
However no. Within the sport’s ultimate few missions, as you’re staging an assault on his fortress, the Dragon Lord begins brazenly speaking about how he’s in a position to have an effect on the sport. It’s a cool idea, although the wind is instantly sucked out of its sails. Despite the fact that the Dragon Lord is certainly in a position to alter what’s “supposed” to occur in Tina’s eyes, summoning in waves of enemies and environmental hazards so that you can take care of, she merely wields her powers as dungeon grasp to snap him again into place. He’s caught as a pawn, regardless of how badly he desires to be a chessmaster.
After which there’s the precise ending. Properly, first, the meddlesome Dragon Lord seems to be a complete pushover within the climactic boss combat. Possibly it’s as a result of I specced as the strongest class within the sport—and in addition performed with somebody rocking an equally highly effective construct—however we minimize by means of the Dragon Lord like butter. Queen Butt Stallion comes again to life, un-decapitated (de-decapitated?). There’s a short cinematic second the place it looks like you’re given some selection over the Dragon Lord’s destiny; your character, in spite of everything, is a fatemaker. However the place every other sport would permit for an ending with a number of conclusions, you don’t get such company. You let him dwell. Queen Butt Stallion orders him to 200 years of imprisonment. His position, then, turns into serving because the steward for the endgame Chaos Chamber mode (which, for what it’s price, is completely, irrefutably superior).
He doesn’t, as you’re led to count on by means of the vast majority of the sport, truly escape of Bunkers & Badasses and go away any impression on the broader Borderlands narrative. He simply turns into one more NPC.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands may’ve been daring, it may’ve really tapped into the “marvel” a part of its namesake. As an alternative, it trades the prospect of creativeness for one thing much more acquainted and mundane. Slightly than letting Bunkers & Badasses spring to totally imagined life, Wonderlands dispels its personal magic, as if saying with a dismissive shrug a phrase I believed we filed behind lock and key years in the past: “It’s only a sport.”
