The irony is that Helena Pierce was an actual "strong and independent woman" that pulled it off without being obnoxious, shoehorned, or out of place, and Burch fucking killed her off-screen early in the game. Talk about irony; I liked her too.
My opinion was always that Borderlands 1 had an excellent atmosphere and setting, but the plot was generic and bare-boned. The writing itself in the quest textboxes, however, was pretty good and contributed to the consistent worldbuilding. I liked that we played as actual antiheroes who didn't give a shit about doing the right thing or saving the world, but were all, instead, just trying to get rich or acquire money, fame, power, guns, etc. And that was the point - Borderlands was a 'wasteland story', a genre where characters are static and the point it makes is that everybody is chasing after the same shallow pursuits. Among the many problems introduced with BL2 was that it was all written by somebody who didn't understand the first game, and from a few rumors I've heard, hadn't even played it. And to make the matter more infuriating, the suits at Gearbox did this not because he had an impressive resume or previous track record in vidya writing, but because they wanted to appeal more to redditors and they thought Burch was just the guy to deliver them their damned Reddit audience.
I also disliked BL2's shift towards being even more cartoony. BL1 was also cartoony, but it was at least balanced out with gritty tech elements like something out of an early-2000's sci-fi flick. Pandora looked consistently like a cross between The Dirty South and West Africa; in BL2 they went with the generic "ice-world-fire-world-dark-world" shit that plagues almost every MMO. They instead should have gone with variety under the theme of "over-polluted trailer park trash-planet" like they adhered to in the first game. There were plenty of good environments left to explore in a sequel - mud oceans, trash mountains, plastic beaches, irradiated swamps, desert wastes where the carcasses of abandoned spaceships jut out like ribs from the sand, dried-up giant coral reef beds and undersea mines from before the planet's oceans were drained - there was plenty more that could have been done with such an exploited world if they just had an ounce of creativity.
In the sequel they went too far with the CUH-RAZY aesthetic. The guns in BL1 looked like relatively regular guns with tacky glowing sci-fi shit glued on to them, but they were still serviceable. In BL2 they made them completely obnoxious, I'm sure some of you have seen that pic of that sniper rifle that made zero sense.
Gameplay-wise, BL2 had some good innovations, such as being able to crawl around in Fight For Your Life Mode, soe more enemy types, expanded skill trees, and some new classes such as the Krieg, but overall, it went backward in quite a few areas. The guns had way too many gimmicks and the tiers were so rigid that they made guns sub-legendary practically worthless while purple and blues from BL1 were still viable if not able to outperform legendaries and pearls. The drop rates were also fucked, making it feel even grindier than the first game. The scaling, too, was also poorly done, where the enemies had health regen that was able to negate most DoT damage and returned so much damage that they only way to progress was to cheese it with certain Krieg and Sal builds.
I honestly wish they went with this sort of progression too. But sadly I think the tendency towards sponges is due to simple dev laziness.
As much as I loathe Burch, I honestly do feel bad for him at times. He's a heavily, heavily repressed millennial who "just wants to do what's right", but "what's right" was determined by lazily and mindlessly accepting what everyone around him told him - his ultra-liberal peers, professors, teachers, parents, etc. and as a result he became a miserable, cuckolded, self-hating laughing-stock where his anger and frustration boils under his skin, and he tries in vain to pass it off as biting wit and sarcasm.
