Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands’ Story Can’t Match Its DLC Inspiration
SPOILERS for the plot of Wonderlands, Borderlands 2, 3 and the Pre-Sequel. (I’m also assuming people reading this have a reasonable knowledge of these the plots of these games because this article is long enough already…) Also, this is my opinion — none of what I say is intended to invalidate your experiences and enjoyment of Wonderlands’ story.
Introduction
I’ve been an avid Borderlands fan for a few years now. I’m not a massive FPS person, but when a friend introduced me to Borderlands 2 in 2018, I was instantly hooked. Since then, I’ve amassed far too many hours playing playing and replaying Borderlands 2, the Pre-Sequel, and Borderlands 3. I could barely contain my excitement when it was announced that Gearbox were going to release a new standalone game based off one of my favourite DLCs — Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep.
Before I criticise the story (spoilers, obviously), I want to say that there are a lot of things I like about this game. I love the gameplay, the design aesthetic, the loot, the character customisation (I especially like the voice and pronoun options). This game is rich — everything feels intricately detailed and there is just so much to do. I think I’ve spent more time doing side missions than the story. In fact, some of the side missions feel like proper stories in their own right! The endgame also looks like it will be very enjoyable. I haven’t got into it yet as I’m still finishing up side missions, but everything I’ve seen so far looks very promising.
But, and this is a big but, I had very (unexpectedly) mixed feelings playing this game. My reactions when I started playing went from:
“Woah, this is gorgeous! Wait, are we just gonna be stuck in medieval fantasy? Ugh, this meta humour is so forced. This story is kinda boring. WOAH — the ocean, like, EXPLODED!!! This is so cool! Wow, so much more to explore! Okay… is the story gonna do something interesting too…? Still waiting for the twist… Oh, that’s the twist? That’s not a twist! Oh. Okay. Endgame now.”
Now, I know that some of you reading this are thinking: “It’s a looter shooter — the story really isn’t that important.” And yes, there is some truth to that. Having spent almost a thousand hours on Borderlands 3 (the Borderlands game I’ve played the most) I do forget about the story once I get immersed in the endgame. Once you finish all the missions, maps just become loot sources you travel to to farm the next piece of gear. I haven’t spent quite as long playing Borderlands 2 but it’s a similar affair.
This, however, isn’t a reason why we should expect or excuse a weak story in this genre of video game. Nor is it precedent that Borderlands has uncompelling stories —quite the opposite. The DLC Wonderlands is based on has a brilliant story! Even the less-loved stories like Borderlands 3’s are still narratively effective.
I never felt bored during when playing the story of Borderlands 2, 3, or the Pre Sequel. All the stories have their flaws, but I never thought: “Can we just get this over with?”. I felt immersed and invested in what was going to happen. In Wonderlands’ predecessors, I felt like there really was a race on to stop the end of the world — there were stakes because the villians had shown they were ruthless and always a step ahead. And the stories were full of surprising twists and turns. Remember when we learned Angel was working for Jack, and, oh yeah, she’s a siren too?? Remember when we learned that Typhon Deleon was still alive and that we were going to Nekratofeyo? I couldn’t wait to see where the stories were going to go next because of the imaginative ways the narratives unfolded.
Wonderlands never had me invested in its plot. Why? Well, think the story’s focus on being meta fails as a story-telling device when we don’t also have the narrative setting of an ‘overaching game’ to suspend our disbelief. To understand the problem, let’s have a look at the Assault on Dragon Keep.
Why Assault on Dragon Keep Worked
Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep made the story of a board/role playing game the coping mechanism for Tina’s grief over Roland. It was a nuanced, insightful take on how we all process grief in different way. All the in-universe players were in some way struggling to manage their own grief around Tina’s coping strategy — the story she’d created as Bunker Master. The story was meta — it was a game within a game after all — but it wasn’t too meta.
Think about it this way: For the in-universe characters (Lilith, Brick, and Mordecai) Bunkers and Badasses is a game. We (the player) know that Bunkers and Badasses is a game within the wider Borderlands 2 game, but because we play Tina’s story in first person, we feel like her fantasy is ‘a real world in its own right’. So, when Tina does her ad hoc story twists and character development, we’re only pulled out one level to the level of the in-universe characters. We’re at the level of the ‘Borderlands 2 reality’, which means we still feel like we’re in the Borderlands universe. That makes the story beats grounded because when Lilith and Tina argue about Tina being in denial, we think back to what we just saw in the Borderlands 2 story. We’re reminded that Bunkers and Badasses is Tina’s fantasy world, but we’re not pulled so far out of it that we think about Lilith and Tina both being characters in a game we’re playing.
In my opinion, meta-ness works when we’re removed one level from what we’re doing. A lot of the Borderlands humour is funny because it reminds us that we’re playing a game. Think about when Maurice says at the start of his Borderlands 3 side-quests: “Come alone, or with no more than three trusted accomplices”. I’m going be a bore and explain why this joke is funny: this line works because it could pass as an in-universe line (why wouldn’t Maurice also allow a Vault Hunter to bring their accomplices) but we, the player, know that it’s a jab at the Borderlands multiplayer mode.
Moving more than one level away from what we’re immersed in is where problems start to creep in. It becomes harder to suspend our disbelief. The Designer’s Cut DLC in Borderlands 3 is a prime example of this. Our immersion lets us believe we’re playing in a reality-TV battle royale in the Borderlands universe. But when we hear Sal and Axton say things like (paraphrasing): “For some reason, the Murdercane stops shrinking at regular intervals,” we’re pulled two levels away from what we’re doing to the fact that we’re playing a video game. There’s nothing in the Borderlands universe to explain why a Murdercane would behave that way — the explanation lies a level above that at the ‘it’s a video game’ level. Now, this isn’t to say that the Designer’s Cut DLC has a bad narrative (I actually think it has quite a solid one), but it is a good example of how going more than one-level of meta away from what you’re doing can cause problems.
Going back to the Dragon Keep DLC, as we’re already invested in the Borderlands 2 universe, when we go one level deeper into a game within the universe, there isn’t a problem being brought back out. In fact, being brought back out actually propels the narrative of the DLC because it reminds us that we can’t just pretend Tina’s fantasy where Roland (aka The White Knight) is alive — we’re in denial, or at least playing along with the fact that Roland is alive.
I think making the DLC a boardgame within a game was a stroke of genius — using the psychology of how we suspend our disbelief when engaging with stories to parallel a denial of reality. But for this to work, the writers needed to have an ‘overarching reality’ to set the game in. The Dragon Keep DLC worked so well because it was set within the Borderlands 2 universe that we had already explored.
Why Wonderlands’ Meta-ness Doesn’t Work
Wonderlands, by contrast, doesn’t have an overarching reality. It’s a standalone game. Sure, if you’ve played enough Borderlands you know enough of Tina’s back story and the general lore to fill in all the gaps and project the universe above the story. But I don’t think that’s enough to sustain a story of the meta-ness Wonderlands tries to create. (I don’t want to get into whether this game would work without the other Borderlands games — I don’t think it really matters because those other games do exist.)
Wonderlands tries to capture the ‘two-levels down’ magic of Dragon Keep. But in this standalone, we don’t have the Borderlands universe to fall back on. I had to do some deep dives into my memory to recall Tina’s backstory (that the meta-plot heavily relies on) and the new characters of Valentine and Frette are blank slates— they don’t bring their own stories to their Bunkers and Badasses characters. So, while Wonderlands wants you to feel like you’re playing a game within a game, really, we’re just playing a game. The clearly humorously-intended ad hoc plot twists just fall flat because it pulls us all the way out of the story to where we’re sitting in front of a screen playing a video game. It’s the two-levels problem I talked about earlier. The cutscenes don’t propel the narrative — they stall it.
The overarching story being told is of Tina’s fear of loneliness, tied to her continuing trauma over the death of Roland (who isn’t named, but gets a voice cameo). But we don’t feel this because it isn’t something we’ve gone through with her in this game. Sure, when I thought back to Borderlands 2, I cried when I heard Roland affirming Tina in the epilogue. But that feeling is distant, removed by two whole video games. I didn’t feel the way I did because of what the game itself did — I had to do the emotional work myself.
I feel that if we had more of time where we stepped out of the Bunkers and Badasses to learn about Valentine, Frette, and Tina — maybe learn about their budding friendship — I would have been totally invested in the moments were Tina breaks down with anxiety that Valentine and Frette don’t actually like her. Because when those cutscenes/voiceovers happened, I was really struggling to empathise with Tina. For Wonderlands’ story to earn its emotional moments, it needs an overaching reality that we, as the player, have an investment in.
Wonderlands does try to use the same ‘psychological mechanisms’ as the Dragon Keep DLC to prople its narrative, but it ulimately isn’t as successful because it lacks the immersion of the DLC. With Dragon Keep, we were as invested in Tina’s fantasy as we were with the universe of Borderlands 2. When we were pulled out of the board game, we were forced to confront the reality we’d been hiding from. But with Wonderlands, we’re pulled out of the board game into… nothing? There’s nothing to the ‘cutscene reality’ beyond the room that the three NPCs are playing in. Consequently, all the meta-ness does is pull us out of the story in a way that is unhelpfully disruptive to our immersion.
Plot Criticisms
The faulty meta-ness of the story telling compromised the emotional moments and general immerisiveness of the story, and it compromised the plot as well. I have seen several reviews that have been singing the praises of the plot, but honestly, I can’t understand why. To say the plot is predictable is an understatment. The entire narrative is spelled out for us in the opening cutscenes: We’re going to have to defeat the Dragon Lord — and that’s it.
I think we can interpret the Dragon Lord as a manifestation of Tina’s social anxiety and grief over Roland’s death. When she she first played Bunkers and Badasses with Roland and made a mistake with her character choices, she consigned the Dragon Lord to the ‘evil plot device bin’ so that he could propel her ‘perfect’ narrative. In a way, she’s bottling up all of her insecurities into the Dragon Lord and using him to create a world in which she can escape and ‘make everything the way she wants’. As the Bunker Master, Tina can control everything she wants and her friends, playing with her, ‘fix’ her anxiety by killing the Dragon Lord. This is subtle, and layered, and I really like this concept.
The problem, however, is that this doesn’t really figure explicitly into the plot — even when it’s spelled out that Tina ‘made the Dragon Lord a villian’, it isn’t clear why. The plot is all motivated by defeating the villian, but the villian doesn’t have any clear reason for existing or for doing what he does. Worse, we know the Dragon Lord is Tina’s creation. We know he’ll do exactly what she wants him to do — be the big, bad boss. So, nothing the Dragon Lord does is surprising. Whenever he radically changes the story (like when he decapitates Butt Stallion) we just go: “Okay, cool,” rather than: “What???!!!!” (like when Troy killed Maya in Borderlands 3). The meta-ness of the plot doesn’t work because we can’t suspend our disbelief at what’s happening.
Going back to my point on stakes in the Introduction, the fact that we kept on being reminded about the final encounter really diminished my investment in the Dragon Lord’s existential threat. That isn’t to say we can’t know the ending of a story to be invested in it. In the Pre Sequel, we knew that Jack would be betrayed by Lilith, Moxxi, and Roland. But the we didn’t know exactly how it would happen, nor did we understand exactly how Elpis figured into the narrative of Borderlands 2. There were mysteries to uncover, which kept the story engaging.
Likewise, in the Dragon Keep DLC the plot got us invested because while we knew the conclusion would be Tina finding closure for Roland’s death, we didn’t know how. We also didn’t really know who the villian (also the Dragon Lord) was until basically the final act — it wasn’t telegraphed to us how the White Knight and the Dragon Lord would interact. The motivation for the final confrontation was clear (Tina’s desire to keep Roland ‘alive’ as long as possible), but it was open-ended what his fate would be.
Without a clear reason for why Tina keeps introducing obstacles and quests to frustrate our progress in reaching the Dragon Lord, it felt like the writers are just padding out the time to the inevitable conclusion to justify the game’s existence. The annoying thing is that there is a reason for the obstacles — Tina wants us to keep playing because she can’t bear to be alone — but this reasoning was never made explicit enough in the plot to feel like a motivation.
If we had more of a connection to the overarching reality, the motivation for the plot would have taken care of itself. We knew in Borderlands 2 that everyone was affected by the death of Roland. And Tina, who had grown up with Roland as a central figure in her life, would have been devastated. So just mentioning “Roland” was enough to key us into the overarching theme of the story. In Wonderlands, a bit of refresher on Tina’s backstory and some active insight (story missions, as opposed to cutscenes) into her relationship with Valentine and Frette would have have gone a long way to making the ‘real’ story apparent.
I think the creative team should have recognised that, as a standalone game, Wonderlands couldn’t follow the same ‘straight into it’ format that DLCs use. We needed time to learn about the in-universe characters before diving into a boardgame with an ad hoc story. We needed a ‘real’, ‘established’ story first. Instead, it feels like the narrative became so preoccupied with reminding us that the story is ad hoc that it forgot to actually ground the reasons for that ad hoc-ness.
Some More Musings
Could a defence be made that this is itself a meta commentary about how looter-shooters are so endgame-focused that the story just pads itself out to justify a $60+ release? I don’t think so. For one, if it is trying to do that, it’s too subtle to be compelling. I’m a big fan of ‘show, don’t tell’, but there comes a point where you’re not doing enough showing or telling. Sometimes, you have to spell things out for us to believe that’s what you’re trying to do. The metaphor of the Dragon Lord being Tina’s insecurity and the whole campaign being about her ‘fixing’ it is already too subtle. It would be entirely understandable to walk away from the game thinking the story is a light-hearted fantasy-flick about killing the Big Bad and resurrecting Butt Stallion.
For another, a statement written by the developers before the credits makes me almost certain that they were not trying to make a meta commentary on the looter shooter genre. They wrote about how making this game during the pandemic underscored the importance of their friends and family, and the feeling of isolation. This story, then, is about exactly that — personified through Tina. I don’t think there is another meta message hidden within that.
Reading the developers’ statement actually makes me really sad. They had a message they wanted to give — an incredibly important and powerful one — that they just didn’t communicate effectively through the story.
This is made all the more frustrating by the success of Dragon Keep and the brilliantly meta Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck DLC in Borderlands 3. I won’t go too deeply into the Krieg DLC (I have another article planned on that), but suffice to say it tells a meta-story of trauma, mental health, (self) love, grief, and loss while being a fantastically engaging narrative about repairing Krieg’s mind. Arguably, the Director’s Cut DLC in Borderlands 3 also handled (in-game) meta themes very well.
The Dragon Keep DLC was not a one off! It was just one example of a brilliant team delivering a whole series of quality (meta) stories. The whole history of the Borderlands franchise is litttered with examples of their talent.
The only reason I can think of why Wonderlands failed to deliver on that meta story is because it is a standalone game. I can’t help but wonder if the same problems I’ve discussed are apparent to people who haven’t played Borderlands 2 but have played the standalone release of the Dragon Keep DLC. I can’t help but feel the same problems would arise. Without the overarching, played universe to set the in-game game, investement in the story just can’t happen. Obviously, I can’t give an opinion on that because I have played Borderlands 2, but I’d be interested to hear if people who have only played the standalone release of the DLC resonate with my thoughts.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Wonderlands fails to capture the magic of the DLC that inspired it. The fact it exists as a standalone game but uses such a similar structure to the DLC compromised its ability to deliver on emotional moments and a compelling plot. All of these things rely on us having ‘lived’ the universe the game-within-the-game is set in — something we get almost nothing of from Wonderlands itself.
This isn’t to say this game is bad, far from it. As I said at the start, there is a lot to like about this game. Would I recommend this game to a Borderlands fan? Absolutely — this game has perhaps the best gameplay of any Borderlands so far. Would I recommend it to a newcomer? Yes, but I’d tell them to play the other games first —this is undoubtedly ironic, given I said I was writing this for an audience that already knew the games, but you get the point.
Am I going to keep playing this game? 100% — but I don’t think I’ll play the story again.
The problem I have with this game is fundamentally to do with its narrative concept. I’m not saying this game shouldn’t exist — quite the opposite — I just think that this game’s narrative has major flaws that could have been rectified with a different implementation. If we had a bit of time with Tina, Valentine, and Frette in-universe, outside of Bunkers and Badasses, I think this game could have delivered all the meta emotion it wanted to.
In the end, I must conclude that, sadly, and despite its technical excellence, if you want the brilliant meta-ness of playing a game within a game in the Borderlands universe, you should just replay Borderlands 2 and the original Tiny Tina Assault on Dragon Keep DLC.
