Recap pages are Spoilers Off by default, so all spoilers were removed. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned
"Hey, kiddo. Jack here – President of Hyperion. Lemme explain how things work here: Vault Hunter shows up. Vault Hunter looks for the new Vault. Vault Hunter gets killed. By me. You see – seeing the problem here? You’re still alive. So, if you could just do me a favour and off yourself, that’d be great. Thanks, pumpkin."
Handsome Jack, at the end of "Blindsided".
"My First Gun" and "Blindsided" are the first two chapters of Borderlands 2's story. Both chapters take place in the same area: Windshear Waste.
The intro of the game has the four new Vault Hunters (Siren Maya, Commando Axton, Gunzerker Salvador and Assassin Zer0) aboard a Hyperion train, at the sound of The Heavy's "Short-Change Hero", when a group of Hyperion robots and engineers attack them, each of them showcasing an ability while avoiding their teammates' fire. Then they access the train's main cabin... only to find a cardboard figure of Hyperion Corp.'s owner Handsome Jack, alongside several packs of dynamite.
The train, then, explodes. Most of its occupants died.
Several days after, Claptrap was cleaning up the mess the explosion left, and found the surviving Vault Hunters. He then gives them looted, hard-resetted ECHO communicators and asks them to accompany him to his house nearby the crash site. At the same time, the Vault Hunters begin receiving instructions from a mysterious being that turns out to be 1's Guardian Angel. Once they reach Claptrap's home, a Bullymong named Knuckle Dragger appears and rips Claptrap's eye socket.
The objectives of this area are a) meet Claptrap, b) help Claptrap recover his eye and c) kill Knuckle Dragger. This area also contains a Badass Challenge, "Cult of the Vault".
These missions, the intro cinematic, and Windshear Waste itself provide examples of:
- Amusing Injuries:
- Everything that happens to the bandits in the intro cutscene.
- The intro has a skag getting maimed by a vehicle. The vehicle is then, in turn, demolished by a monorail train.
- Claptrap gets his eye ripped out, crashes into all kinds of things, falls off several cliffs, and gets electrocuted. All played for laughs, of course.
- Backtracking: The The Lord of the Rings Easter Egg requires you to start from this location and bring a ring in Claptrap's house all the way to a certain part of the Eridium Blight late game area without dying, using Fast Travel or a vehicle.
- Bag of Spilling: A case of Gameplay and Story Segregation, the opening sequence shows Axton's Sabre turret almost fully upgraded, including the magnetic upgrade that allowed him to deploy the turret to the ceiling. He also had a really sweet looking Maliwan Rocket Launcher. The opening is designed to show off what each character can do, but it is kind of disappointing to see what the sabre turret starts off as when you've already seen what it can become.
- Developer's Foresight: If you die even before getting to Claptrap's place in the first level (Possible in a New Game Plus if you let yourself killed using explosions from your transferred weapons), you will get a free New U Station.
- Disc-One Nuke: Subverted with the Hornet pistol, if only in the Normal and True Vault Hunter modes (as Ultimate Vault Hunter mode levels up your enemies to your level). Compared to other pistols of the same level, the Hornet really does live up to its Legendary rarity, but it has a boosted chance to drop from Knuckle Dragger, the tutorial boss. This means it will always spawn as a Level 1/30 variant and will become outclassed very, very quickly. Furthermore, its always-corrosive nature hinders it at a point in the game when every enemy that isn't Boom or Bewm has health instead of armor.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Claptrap's eye suddenly turns back on after it was torn out of him. He tells the player that he sees the two of them... and immediately realizes that it means the bullymong that ripped his eye out must be very close.
- Eye Scream: One of your first missions is the result of Knuckle Dragger tearing out Claptrap's eye.
- Foreshadowing:
- During "My First Gun", Claptrap is confounded by stubborn Hyperion tech. It comes into play at the beginning of "The Talon of God", the final story mission, when you're in Eridium Blight and need to enter into Hero's Pass by messing with... stubborn Hyperion tech.
- At the end of "Blindsided", when Angel hacks a door for you, she uses an ability called "Phaseshift." That is awfully similar to Phaselock and Phasewalk, Maya and Lilith's respective Siren abilities.
- Grave Robbing: Claptrap is doing this when you meet him.Claptrap: [rummaging in a pile of snow with limbs sticking out] Here! Take this ECHO communicator which I totally didn't loot from one of these corpses.
- Kilroy Was Here: The symbol that completes the "Cult of the Vault" Badass Challenge in Windshear Waste is located inside of Claptrap's house, in a very small bathroom.
- Lightning Gun: Invoked in the quest completion text for "My First Gun":"You just moved five feet and opened a locker. Later, when you're killing skyscraper-sized monsters with a gun that shoots lightning, you'll look back on this moment and be like, "heh.""
- Look Both Ways: Just like in the first game, a Skag meets its end because it walks into a road. Soon after, the vehicle that hit the skag even more abruptly gets hit by a train. One bandit somehow survives this stands up on top of the train only to immediately get clotheslined when the train goes under a sign. Life on Pandora ain't pretty, folks.
- Once Upon a Time: Angel's message after completing "My First Gun", telling the Player Character the past:Angel: Once upon a time, four Vault Hunters changed Pandora forever. But their time has passed — thanks to Handsome Jack, Pandora needs a new hero. I know that hero is you.
- Patchwork Map: In the intro, shots of the train's ride shows a desert next to an snowy arctic environment. The Vault's opening and the spread of Eridium is said to have altered the planet's (already hellish) ecosystems a lot.
- Self-Deprecation: A meta example: in the opening of the game, the narration gives a nod to the reaction to the ending of Borderlands saying that "To the warriors who opened it, the Vault was just a container of tentacles and disappointment".
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: The ECHO device that Claptrap gives you at the start of the game, he totally didn't steal it from a corpse. That you actually see him digging out from the nearby corpse-ridden snow.
- Tempting Fate:
- As he takes you to his shelter, Claptrap says bullymongs will tear your eyes out and mentions an especially fierce one called Knuckle Dragger, but expresses confidence that you'll be safe at his place. Seconds later, Knuckle Dragger bursts in at Claptrap's House and tears Claptrap's eye out.
- Near the end of "My First Gun", Claptrap boasts about how he was made to open doors. Then he causes said doors to lock down even further.
- With This Herring: The crappy gun you receive at the very start of the game."When you're fighting a skyscraper-sized enemy with a gun that shoots lightning, you're going to think back to this moment and be like "heh.""
- Your Mom: Claptrap pulls one at the tail end of "Blindsided", after a small earthquake."They say Jack's drilling operations are causing those earthquakes. That, or your mom just got outta bed. ZING!"
