When people ask me, "what's your favorite game?" I will usually rattle off a list, because I hate picking favorites. Different games do different things well, and I'm the kind of person who can't play the same game for too terribly long. Even so, I wouldn't think to list Borderlands 2 as a favorite - but the hours don't lie. I've played this game all the way through multiple times, and even revisiting it recently feels... fun. It's a nice game. Lightning in a bottle, even. After 1's kind of raw crusty low-budget feel, but before 3 (a game that I maintain to this day was not all that bad and whose gameplay is an improvement over 2 in some ways), this game is kind of a tentpole. Sure, there are problems, the game's randomly generated guns lead to situations where theoretically good weapons are hamstrung by some statistical quirk or by being a Torgue weapon, but there's something oddly unassailable about the game to me. The story is nothing special, though it is so competent and memorable for the low standards of video games that everyone's jaw seemed to drop anyway. I can't say whether the game has made me feel something strongly or question myself, or challenged me in an especially unique way, but even after all these years I sometimes come back here, get hooked back in, and despite the trashy reputation of the game, and Gearbox, it's something that few games can be for me: weirdly, "home." And I will live with that.

Also the humor is not as cringy as everyone says it is lol