Where It Fits
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is the third game in the series to be released. In the story, it comes after Borderlands, and before Borderlands 2.Plot
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is the video game equivalent to a blue rarity weapon. It's okay, but not as good as the other rarities.Athena, a character from the The Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC from the first game (I didn't mention it in the Borderlands plot because it's not very good), has been captured by Lilith and the Crimson Raiders.
She is questioned by the Crimson Raiders as to why she was working for Handsome Jack. She begins to tell the story, which is the framing device of the game.
The entire game is used to tell the origin story of Jack and how he came to be a murderer.
jack finds another vault on Elpis, Pandora's moon, which turns out to just be Australia.
He hires three vault hunters (five with DLC) and Claptrap to help him find it, but before the search party can begin, a bunch of Dahl soldiers takeover Helios, Hyperion's space station.
Character selection time:
- Wilhelm, the enforcer, who deploys two drones that heal him and attack for him.
- Athena, the gladiator and canon choice, who has a shield that takes all damage for a bit until she throws it at people.
- Nisha (who later become the sheriff of Lynchwood and Jack's girlfriend that you kill in Borderlands 2), the lawbringer, who's skill aims for you for six seconds.
- and Claptrap, the mistake, who relies on RNG.
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Jack, the doppelganger, who's Jack's body double that we later learn is named Timothy, and deploys multiple holographic clones.
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and Aurelia Hammerlock, the baroness, who throws an ice cube that seeks out enemies and freezes them.
That's one of the only redeeming qualities of the Pre-Sequel; Jack's transformation from kinda bad to totally bad is very subtle, and the writers don't just make him a bad guy halfway into the game.
Jack takes you to get off the space station immediately, but when you try to leave, your path is blocked by Colonel Zarpedon, our villain and leader of the Dahl Lost Legion, and some kinda alien thing that can block bullets and calls you "naughty."
Jack decides the only way to get you on Elpis is to shoot you out of a cannon, so you Furioso Dreadnaught, and go to Elpis while Jack stays behind.
You crash on Elpis and meet Janey Springs, who proceeds to give you a gun with the American flag on it despite her being Australian.
Zarpedon is using the Death Star laser to slowly blow up the moon, so you need to go to the town of Concorida to enlist the help of the Meriff (mayor + sheriff).
But before that, you have to kill Deadlift to fix the car spawny thing, because every area in the game is 100 miles wide.
You arrive in Concordia, but the Meriff doesn't want to help you, so you have to get someone else.
Lilith and Roland are there, but they don't wanna play the Pre-Sequel, so you ask Moxxi, from the first game's Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot DLC (once again, not interesting enough to speak about), instead.
She talks a lot and tells you to kill Red and Belly, so you do, then you come back to confront the Meriff with Jack, who somehow fled Helios.
The Meriff apologizes for being useless, but then he tries to kill Jack, but he misses horribly, so Jack kills him instead.
Jack wants to build a robot army to retake Helios, but to do that, he needs a top-of-the-line military-grade A.I., which translates to a disembodied female voice.
Janey knows one, but it will come at a terrible cost: talking to Pickle.
A crashed warship that's being run by The Bosun has the A.I. on it, so you barge in and kill hundreds of his men because some little kid told you to.
A disembodied female voice named Felicity starts talking to you and begs you to save her from The Bosun's grasp.
You kill The Bosun, and you use her for your military. Seeing as she just betrayed her captain, I'm sure she's very trustworthy, and won't betray you.
You head to a factory to build your army and meet Gladstone, a super smart science guy who has a PhD in standing still while spewing exposition for five minutes instead of just opening the door.
Felicity seems hesitant to be installed in a military machine, which is weird because it's her sole purpose as she's a military A.I., but you do it anyway and, suprise-suprise, she betrays you.
Gladstone reprograms her and you shoot her a bit, and everything's okay.
With your army built, you, Jack, Lilith, and Roland use a fast travel to teleport back to Helios.
When you get to Helios, you have to fight a bunch of Dahl soldiers to get access to Jack's office.
Jack tells you to save a bunch of Hyperion scientists, and one can't stop talking about how much his son misses him while he's at work, so it's a mystery what'll happen to him.
Jack finds out the scientists are complaining about all the crunch hours they have to work, so he does what every CEO wishes they could do, and personally executes them.
You go to shut off the laser, but Zarpedon shows up and blocks you path again, and tries to kill you with Shadow Mario's paintbrush.
You weaken her, and she starts talking about how she's seen what's in the vault and how dangerous it is, and blah blah blah.
Jack, sharing the reaction of the player, gets bored and kills her in the middle of her speech.
You find out that Jack has been using the eye of the Destroyer, the first game's final boss, to charge his laser.
Moxxi tells you to overload the eye with eridium, which Jack thinks is a horrible idea, but goes along with it anyway.
The eye explodes, and turns out Moxxi was trying to kill Jack the whole time. Jack obviously doesn't like this, and throws his Apple IIe out the window.
The alien guardians have joined forces with Dahl, so you shred through them and get to the vault, which looks like the inside of a Halo spaceship.
You fight an alien that pulls babies out of it's abdomen, which is really unpleasant to watch, and finally enter the vault.
Within the vault, you fight the Sentinel, a quintesson-looking guy, with several phases, which are all really annoying if you're severely underleveled like I was.
After you shoot him a million times, Jack steps up to see what treasure the vault holds, but it's just the Borderlands logo. He touches it and gets the Borderlands 2 speedrun record of 2 seconds, but then Lilith falcon punches it into his face and teleports away.
Jack gets the Borderlands logo branded to his face, goes crazy and talks about how he's gonna awaken the Warrior and purge Pandora, and Athena's like "yeah, no thanks, I'm out".
Except she's not out because she still has to play the DLC.
To sum it up, Claptrap is a mass murder that burned down a church, and Jack kills every Claptrap in existence, except for the most annoying one.
Back in the present, Lilith decides she's heard enough, and wants to execute Athena for no reason. Brick and Mordecai tell her not to, but she does it anyway.
When the firing squad tries to kill her, the alien that called you naughty stops the bullets and teaches everybody how to get along by alluding to a giant war that everyone thought was Borderlands 3, but I hope it wasn't because, if it was, that was an underwhelming war.
The final cutscene shows Jack strangling his boss to become the new President of Hyperion and finally fulfills his lifelong dream of making every Hyperion product yellow instead of orange.
That's the end unless you choose to play it again twice more, but you probably won't because the game was abandonded before they could give it a satisfying endgame.