It's hard to believe that it's been over 10 years since I earned my first trophy in this game. Since then, Borderlands : The Pre-Sequel, Tales of the Borderlands and Borderlands 3 have landed, and we've seen 2 subsequent generations of console hit within the same time period.
That seems like a long time for a game that ultimately falls within the middle of the difficulty spectrum, but it'll make sense why in due course. It hasn't been a journey without it's bumps in the road, and this is ultimately a titled I re-visited multiple times.
Borderlands 2, a direct sequel from Borderlands 1, follows 4 new vault hunters, as they attempt to prevent main protagonist, Handsome Jack, from taking over Pandora and it's inhabitants. It turns out that Handsome Jack has a plan to farm Eridium in order to forcefully open another vault, which will only open without intervention every 200 years, meaning the Eridium is being used to immorally accelerate this process. Your goal is to stop him, and naturally, as a vault hunter, claim the vault as your own instead.
The game looks and feels fairly similar to the original Borderlands title. It still has a unique cell-shading art design, heavy RPG mechanics such as looting for weapons/equipment, levelling up and spending skill points on character development and tons of quests/side content.
There are some small tweaks here and there, but for the most part, it's more of the same, and I think it's a formula that works. The graphics are great and the variety keeps the game fresh - From enemies, environments and weaponry - everything feels like it changes regularly enough to keep things feeling dynamic and more like you're part of a big, vast open world game. The trump card for Borderlands has always been it's characters, and they're still vibrant and full of personality here, right from the cast of playable characters through to the enemies you'll encounter at ground level as you progress through the game. The dialogue is funny and the main characters throughout the story are fleshed out with great care and attention from how they look to what they say. It's the game's biggest strength by far and contributes to a enjoyable ride, even if the trophy list doesn't.
Speaking of which, the main game contains 51 trophies across the main list, all of which are related to the main Borderlands 2 story experience. The only variation you get within this entire package is to what extent you play through the story with others, allowing for up to 4 players to complete the game together in co-op mode. Outside of this, it is purely a Single Player experience and does not contain any other added game modes - Just how it was in Borderlands 1.
There isn't any sort of mandatory requirement to play any part of this game in Co-op mode, and you can achieve the Platinum trophy purely as a solo player, despite some of these trophies being designed for Co-operative play. The condition to this is that you will need a second controller to be able to play in split-screen to achieve some of these said trophies, as well as using it as an aide in other ways, which will be explained in further detail soon.
The "Cool Story, Bro" trophy, awarded for Defeating Jack, is the main trophy within this list, and will be awarded upon completion of the main questline. There are no options for selecting a difficulty level and I didn't run into any real challenges on my way towards the end of the game. Enemy levels will scale in accordance to your own for most of the way and you always seem to find generously distributed loot that continuously makes you stronger, meaning you're always ahead of the curve. The challenges from this list definitely come from outside the main story.
Just as a side note to the story, I did originally start this game in a Co-operative party with a group of mates, and shelved the game half-way through when they got bored. I came back to it at a later date in an attempt to finish it, got side-tracked by some additional trophies which proved too frustrating to persevere with at the time, and shelved the game for a second time without still having beaten the story. I finished it eventually on my third re-visit. The list contains a further 15 trophies related to natural progression within the main story via beating certain quests, which is ultimately a large chunk of this list.
The "Challenge Accepted" trophy, awarded for Completing level 1 of all non-level specific challenges with a single character, is one of the aforementioned trophies which were the source of frustration whilst attempting to complete this list.
The challenges feature provides the player with a huge list of in-game challenges, related to a variety of different things within the game. Each individual challenge is stacked into and up to 5 different levels, increasing the cumulative total for every level. For the most part, they're fairly simple, and naturally achievable as you progress through the game, and the trophy only requires you to fulfil the first level of each challenge. On paper, it doesn't sound too bad.
However, this is also where most people have come unstuck with this Platinum, specifically over 1 challenge. The JEEEEEENKINSSSSS!!! challenge requires you to kill Jimmy Jenkins, a Jet Loader who randomly appears when opening certain types of crates. There are various methods plastered around testifying to their success rate, but this just ultimately comes down to aimless grinding and luck.
When I said above that I stopped playing the game on my second visit to Borderlands 2 because of frustrations with certain trophies - This is exactly what I meant. I settled on a method which involved taking a route around Opportunity and opening around 14 of the crate types he can usually be found in, quitting and reloading in order to start the route again after every unsuccessful run. I did this for 3/4 hours, on 3 separate sessions before getting completely bored of it and quitting. The worst thing was, I knew this was purely a case of sweeping the mess under the carpet, and it would still be there to clean up later, and even when I came back to the game for the final time, it still took me a handful of hours until I eventually managed to find him.
It's also important to note, you have to reach the highest level of some challenges, in order to unlock level 1 of different challenges that aren't accessible from the beginning. Amongst this, you'll be required to kill 750 enemies from point blank range with a shotgun and 200 enemies with rocket launcher splash damage. They're really tedious requirements and I'm not sure why every challenge isn't instantly accessible from the beginning, for no other reason than to annoy the player.
The "Capped Out...For Now" trophy, awarded for Reaching level 50, requires you to achieve the highest possible character level in the game. This is exactly the same as Borderlands 1, which also contained a trophy for reaching the maximum possible level.
As was also the same in Borderlands 1, it doesn't look like you can achieve this in a full entire playthrough of the game. Even after beating the main questline and every single side quest, I only managed to reach level 34. The amount of experience required to reach the top is just shy of 3.5M, which is obviously alot. In Borderlands 1, this would have extended into around halfway through a second run of the game, but I used the DLC content to help me grind the remainder of the way. There's a recurring side quest in the Mr. Torque's Campaign of Carnage DLC which awards almost 10,000 experience per run for a 1:45 race, which is the most effective grinding method.
This seemed like a much more viable option than running through the game on New Game+ to continue levelling up, even though the car handling mechanics are truly awful in this game. I get they're not a core focus, but as someone who ending up taking advantage of the racing side quests to level my characters, it needs to be mentioned how bad they are.
The "Thresher Thrashed" trophy, awarded for Defeating Terramorphous the Invincible, mirrors vibes of Crawmerax the Invincible from Borderlands 1. Crawmerax was added later in as part of the Secret Armoury of General Knoxx DLC, but was a raid boss designed to be tackled by a full Co-operative party at the highest level with the best equipment available.
Terramorphous is the exact Borderlands 2 equivalent to this, except contained within the main game. Once you beat the main story, you'll gain access to this raid boss as part of separate side quest called "You. Will. Die. Seriously". How would you expect someone 10 years down the line to beat a raid boss specifically designed to be beaten by a party of 4 players maxed out to the highest level?
Thankfully, there's a method that still allows a solo player to do this. If you invite a second player into the game via split screen, you can occupy a certain space on the battlefield where Terramorphous cannot reach and subsequently harm the player. This is crucial because, for as long as at least 1 player is within the boundary of the arena at any one time, Terramorphous health will not regenerate, which is the key to defeating him. It allows you to idly sit the second player here for the entirety of the fight, whilst my main character kept going back in and chipping away at his health bar.
The downside to this approach was it still took me around 5 uninterrupted hours to do this solo, using the weaponry I had to keep gradually taking away his enormous levels of health, succumbing very frequently to his overly powerful attacks. Dying alot doesn't matter as long as the idle player is sitting safely in the right spot and the fight becomes a matter of perseverance. He did drop some exceptionally good loot that allowed me to take down some of the DLC raid bosses which were giving me trouble, and there's no way I would have been able to get a full party of players this far down the game's life cycle, so it's a big stroke of luck that this method works.
Just one final thing to note, in Borderlands 1, the trophy list encouraged you to dabble with each of the 4 playable characters by making you earn a certain amount of kills with each of their relevant action skills. This was a fairly easy task, which returns in Borderlands 2, but on a much greater scale.
The "So Much Blood!" trophy, awarded for Gunzerking continuously for 90 seconds, will require you to reach level 25 with the Gunzerker in order to spend enough skill points on the skill tree in order to Gunzerk for 90 seconds.
You'll also need to do the same thing for the Assassin, reaching level 25 in order to acquire enough skill points, which will allow you to stay in Zero's deception mode for 10 seconds straight. Zero was my main character, so I didn't need to worry about doing this, but if your main character is the Siren or Commando, who only require you to reach level 5 to unlock their action skill and earn their character-specific trophy, then you'll need to playthrough the game twice to level 25 with the other 2 characters, which will be painful to do.
After the amount of time I'd already spent on both this main list, and the DLC amongst it all, it just about summed up my experience with this game to realise I still had one final obstacle ahead of me - To get another character to level 25 to earn his action skill trophy, though I was thankful I had already picked the Assassin as my main, and therefore did not have to do this twice. I used the same method of race grinding outlined above to level up, which meant the journey wasn't too bad, but probably still tacked on an extra 10-12 hours.
Upon overall reflection, I think there are alot of parallels to draw between Borderlands 1 and 2. Incidentally, I gave Borderlands 1 a 6/10 difficulty rating and anyone who wanted to make a case for this being slightly tougher than Borderlands 1 wouldn't get much pushback from me. The horrendous RNG around finding Jimmy Jenkins, as well as the Terramorphous raid boss, would easily be enough justification to suggest this as a slightly tougher Platinum, despite much of the remainder of the list being very similar. I'd also love to be able to put a time estimation on this, but the multiple re-visits over an extended length of time and the consistent blending of DLC makes it impractical for me to commit any sort of timescale with conviction. It wasn't a short journey though, that's for sure.
For those reasons, I think a 7/10 is justifiable. It's a soft 7, but the amount of time I wasted on finding Jimmy Jenkins can't be understated, and whilst it's important to note that this won't apply to everyone, I felt like I got the rougher end of the stick with the amount of dead time I had to put into this trophy in the end, and that's just what luck can do to you sometimes. It was also extremely annoying having to put in an extra 10-12 hours on another playthrough just to get one of the character-specific trophies by reaching level 25 with the Gunzerker, and if it wasn't for the fact you can cheese Terramorphous using a split-screen, second controller method, then there's a distinct possibility we might not even be discussing this Platinum at all.
Notable Trophies -
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| Cool Story, Bro -Defeated Jack. Challenge Accepted - Completed level 1 of all non-specific challenges with a single character. Capped Out...For Now - Reached Level 50. Thresher Thrashed - Defeated Terramorphous the Invincible. So Much Blood! - Gunzerked continuously for 90 seconds. |
Hardest Trophy -
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