Recap / Borderlands 2 C 19 The Talon Of God

Recap pages are Spoilers Off by default, so all spoilers were removed. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned

"Jack, Lilith, and the Warrior are in Hero's Pass. So that's where we're headed. This is the final fight, amigo - if you gotta prepare, do it now. Go check around the city - these people don't have much, but they still wanna help you. (...) Hyperion's locked the entrance to Hero's Pass. Get back to Claptrap; you'll need him to open the way for you. Brick and I will meet you once you're in. Win or lose, we're gonna finish this together. for Bloodwing. For Roland. For Pandora!

— Mordecai

After getting the destination of the Eridium and, with it, the most plausible location of The Warrior, the Vault Hunters get ready to take down Jack once and for all.

After collecting the weapons all the citizens of Sanctuary have gathered, they go with the Claptrap back to Eridium Blight, right at the southeast point, where a huge gate blocks the entrance to Hero's Pass. So it's up to Claptrap to unlock it... only to find (one of) his greatest weakness(es): Stairs!

So, from now on, it's up to the Vault Hunters to do the deed, for which they go through Hero's Pass, with the help of Brick and Mordecai, who joined right after entering the level... and eventually get shot down.

And, finally, the Vault Hunters reach the Vault of the Warrior, a ginormous Hyperion-built complex set in a location full of fire, lava and brimstone. And they finally reach Jack, who has Lilith tied up. Promising to avenge his daughter, he faces, with the help of many holoclones, the Hunters, to no avail. At the edge of death, he finds out the key was finally charged, and he finally releases the Warrior, an ancient beast...

Handsome Jack: You're too late, bandit... I WIN! The greatest alien power Pandora has ever seen - and it's MINE to control! WARRIOR! Kill!

After a ferocious and tenuous battle, the Warrior is also destroyed, throwing Jack's plans to the trash bin and later being killed by either the Vault Hunters or Lilith. Afterwards, Mordecai and Brick appear, only to be scuffled by Lilith, who wants to end the deal with the Vault Key once and for all... only for said key to reveal a lot of vaults scattered across the universe. And the Adventure Continues...

This mission takes place in the "Hero's Pass" and "Vault of the Warrior" areas, which host no side missions, but instead host the following challenges:

• Hero's Pass: "Cult of the Vault", "When Nature Calls" and "Environmental Protection".
• Vault of the Warrior: "The Warrior's Way", ""Cult of the Vault" and "Dying of the Light".

In addition, once the main game is cleared, Tannis has a mission for you: go to Thousand Cuts and unlock with Eridium the path to Terramorphous the Invincible, a 50-foot Thresher that serves as the game's Superboss. The related mission is called "You. Will. Die. (Seriously.)", and Terramorphous's Peak itself contains the challenges "Terramorphous the Not-So-Invincible" and "Cult of the Vault".

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This mission, the related sidequests and challenges, and the "Hero's Pass" and "Vault of the Warrior" levels show examples of:

• And This Is for...: If you let Lilith kill Jack, she'll proclaim the deed was done for Roland.
• Apocalypse How: Handsome Jack plans on using the Warrior to wipe out all human life on Pandora and let those he deems worthy to take over what's left.
• Artificial Stupidity: The Warrior suffers badly of this. There's one vantage point in the entire arena where he can barely harm you with his rarest attacks, which are no more than 3 that he can use only once, and you can easily target his entire body including his Critical weak spots. Said vantage point is the Exit to Eridium Blight. Sit there with your back against it and he will be easier than The Destroyer was.
• Badass Army: Hyperion's actual armed forces are a serious threat. The regular Hyperion Mooks encountered prior to the assault on Control Core Angel are mostly just repurposed utility robots with guns or lightly-armored engineers. The professional Hyperion soldiers and dedicated WAR Loaders and other military units are massively more dangerous, and the specialist military troops like the Hawks (airmobile heavy weapons troops), Infiltrators (cloaked shotgun-wielding assault troops), and Snipers (who, are, well, snipers) are extremely deadly. It can be pretty jarring to run into serious, dedicated, and professional troops wearing full body armor and toting personal turrets and shields and high-end weaponry who can drop you in a couple of shots.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: You fight Jack and the Warrior in a lava-filled Vault. It's also a pretty suitable place for a Classic Villain to die.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Lilith cannot self terminate, but doesn't hesitate telling the Vault Hunters that, if necessary, they should put a bullet in her head if that means Jack will be stopped.
• Big "NO!":
  • Claptrap does one near the end of the game.
    Claptrap: Stairs? Noooooooooooooo!
  • Jack himself lets one out after The Warrior goes down.
• Book Ends:
  • The very last words of the ending cutscene should sound very familiar if you've seen the first game's intro
    Lilith: No rest for the wicked.
  • Your first real mission and the last mission both begin with Claptrap failing to open a Hyperion gate. Despite the second one being much larger, they are very similarly designed and are even re-locked in the same way.
  • In both the next-to-first and next-to-last areas of the game, Claptrap's progress is halted by his greatest weakness: stairs.
• Brick Joke: The Claptrap and its inability to climb stairs. It shows up in a moment that would be crucial or climactic were it not for the low expectations on Claptrap, anyway. It also gets a double-punchline: The staircase has banisters Claptrap could easily roll up if he wasn't freaking out.
• Call-Back: Lilith's final line in the main game, "No rest for the wicked," is a reference to the intro song from the first game.
• Climactic Volcano Backdrop: The Vault of the Warrior is surrounded by lava, and that's where the final battle with Handsome Jack takes place.
• Cutscene Incompetence: In the final battle, Jack is wounded, and then places the artifact in the hole, releasing the warrior. There's a good 15 second window of time where Jack is vulnerable and unshielded; your character, naturally, is offscreen doing their best impression of a block of cheese.
• Disney Death: Most players won't notice this unless they're watching it (and not running towards the next area shooting stuff), but during the final story mission, when Mordecai and Brick are helping the Vault Hunters to reach Jack before he activates the Warrior, the cargo ship Mordecai is on starts taking a lot of damage about halfway through the level. Brick then jumps onboard to try and help, but the ship crashes into the lava below, complete with Brick screaming. Then when you finish the story mission, both men show up at the end, a little bit battered, but no worse for the wear.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Even if Handsome Jack is dead, incomplete side missions where he does the talking will still have him ECHO you because his voice is required.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: You use Hyperion's Lunar Deployment system against Jack on more than a few occasions. Culminating in you using it to finish off the Warrior.
• Increasingly Lethal Enemy: Varkids turn into cocoons, which spit out progressively more and more powerful forms. Unlucky (or lucky, if they're farming it) players might end up fighting Vermivorous the Invincible.
• Kill the Poor: Handsome Jack's plan for Pandora, in a nutshell: All stinky poor people must die! Naturally, you get to introduce him to the fact that Pandora eats the rich.
• Non-Indicative Name: "Terramorphous the Invincible"... can be defeated if you and your friends are tough enough. Even the Badass Rank acknowledges this by naming the related challenge "Terramorphous The Not-So-Invincible".
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: Handsome Jack has one before the final battle:
  Jack: Hey, you're right on time - Key's nearly ready! But before I cleanse this planet for good, I am gonna avenge my daughter!
• Private Military Contractors: Hyperion, naturally, being the richest corporation on Pandora, has its own private army made of human soldiers and robots. At first, you meet lightly armoured Combat Engineers and Gun Loaders, which are repurposed loaders with twin Assault Rifles. Later, you meet the professional Hyperion Soldiers, Snipers (who have ridiculous accuracy and WILL snipe you), Infiltrators (who cloak then blast you with their shotguns if you're not careful) and WAR Loaders, who are basically massive red loaders with incendiary Gatling cannons.
• The Reveal: Claptrap is the last surviving member of his line, which, as revealed by The Pre-Sequel's Claptastic Voyage DLC, was completely deactivated after Jack became Handsome Jack. And because Hyperion was on their way to become the top dog of the universe, and Claptrap was a very visible place of said company, they swept it under the rug, with the result being Claptrap's 0% Approval Rating.
• Sequel Hook:
  • As the vault hunters prepare to destroy the key already used to unleash two Eldritch Abominations, certain that nothing good would ever come out of it, it activates a holographic projection depicting the location of many vaults in different star systems across the galaxy. Nearly instantaneously, they change their minds and decide to track them down. "No rest for the wicked" indeed.
  • Near the end of the game, the identity of another Siren (Angel) is revealed before the Siren dies. With the first game's deceased Big Bad Steele having been confirmed to be a Siren and both Maya and Lilith alive and well, that leaves two Sirens unaccounted for. Cue Borderlands 3, featuring Amara and Tyreen.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Once you defeat The Warrior, the now unprotected Handsome Jack erupts into a long, massive Motive Rant. At any point of his speech, you can choose to shut Jack off before he finishes his rant. If you choose to let him continue and end, you'll be given the option to let Lilith kill Jack for you. Speaking to her after this causes her to kill Jack using her Siren powers.
• Spanner in the Works: Angel's insistence on helping you throughout the first two-thirds of the game ultimately causes Jack's plans to backfire and fail. Without her own plans working against Jack, he likely would have stomped out the Crimson Raiders after a couple more battles.
• Storming the Castle: There is a proud Borderlands tradition of having the game go linear when shit gets real. Fighting through "Hero's Pass" to get to the final showdown with Handsome Jack, for example.
• Superboss: Terramorphous the Invincible, a beefed up Thresher fought in a zone below Thousand Cuts called Terramorphous Peak, costs 8 Eridium units.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Claptrap boasts he was made to open doors. Then he causes said doors to lock down even further.
  • Claptrap also gets one huge conga-line of these. First his heroic speech is rendered completely meaningless as the gate's reinforcements scare the virtual crap out of him, then all of his attempts at opening the door only summons more enemies and bar the door further. It gets to the point that when he finally does something, even he's surprised that it actually worked. It gets to wound-salting levels that when the door finally opens it reveals a huge line of stairs, meaning that Claptrap can't actually proceed any further (his monowheel can't climb stairs).
• This Cannot Be!: Said by Jack once you finish both him and the Warrior.
  Handsome Jack: No, no, no... I can't die like this... not when I'm so close... and not at the hands of a filthy bandit! I could've saved this planet! I could have actually restored order! I wasn't supposed to die by the hands of a child-killing psychopath! You're a savage! You're a maniac! You are a bandit AND I AM THE GODDAMN HERO! The Warrior was practically a god. How - HOW in the hell have you killed my Warrior? You idiots! The Warrior could have brought peace to this planet! No more dangerous creatures! No more bandits! Pandora - it could have been a PARADISE!
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • Claptrap successfully manages to hack a door and celebrates it in the "Eridium Blight" level... only to be faced with a set of stairs next, its only weakness:
  Claptrap Stairs! NOOOOOOOO!
  • Claptrap is also vulnerable to electrocution, explosions, gunfire, rust, corrosion, being kicked a lot, viruses, being called bad names, falling from great heights, drowning, adult onset diabetes, being looked at funny, heart attacks, exposure to oxygen, being turned down by women, and pet allergens.

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