Review: Destiny 2: The Final Shape

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I’ve been trying to figure out why I like Destiny – or if I even do – for the better part of the last five years. I go through periods of burnout with the game; deep, intense stretches of what I truly believe is hatred that gradually starts to wind down after a time and is replaced by that familiar pull – what’s happening in Destiny 2 now?

I thought I was finally done with The Witch Queen. Even as everyone else seemed to love that expansion, I felt like I was trudging through it. Everything made me miserable. I wrote maybe my most hateful piece of writing out of it. And then that hate dissipated. I reinstalled the game. I started playing the seasonal content all at once. I found myself getting invested in characters like Eido and Mithrax, Ana and Rasputin. Even Season of the Haunted, the season where Eris Morn uses Hive magic and Egregore to do psychotherapy on Crow, Zavala and Cabal Empress Caiatl, won me over eventually. I went into Lightfall on a high, and suddenly I found the tables turned — I liked an expansion everyone else seemed to hate.

My feelings about the seasonal content this time around didn’t change that sense of positivity toward the game. Everything last year was solid, and I thought Bungie was getting pilloried unfairly – first by the fans, and then by publisher Sony, and then by the devs’ own management – for a bad economy and a soured first impression. But as summer rolled into fall and the bad news started really flowing out of Bellevue, I admit I started to worry. The Final Shape’s four-month delay and the seeming mad scramble to put out interim capital-C Content only added fuel to that fire.

Let’s get this out of the way now: The Final Shape is incredible. An absolute barnstormer of a narrative. Just fucking gorgeous to look at. The last (at Bungie) complete banger score from Michael Salvatori. Every fucking voice actor, including newcomers Keith David (Zavala’s new VA) and Pooya Mohseni, who plays Micah-10, an Exo Hunter who volunteers as a “den-mother” for partnerless Ghosts, knocked it out of the park. Nathan Fillion’s understated reprised performance as Cayde-6 lent the right amount of gravitas to his character’s sudden reappearance after almost six years.

The campaign is long and challenging. The raid was the hardest contest mode and raid race ever. There’s so, so much shit to do after the campaign is over, so many exotic weapons and gear pieces to collect, a host of new powers – it’s taken something like 18 straight days for the first posts of people complaining that there’s nothing left to do to show up on the game’s subreddit, a fact which I think speaks for itself. There are new enemies, new activity modes, a whole bunch of secrets left to uncover. Even the first two weeks of the new seasonal model, “Episode Echoes,” have been delightful, if slightly rote, romps across Nessus with our best girl Failsafe, who now has a remote perch in the HELM and access to news about what’s been going on in the universe.

I don’t feel my good feelings toward the game as it stands going away yet, but I know it’s probably coming.

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Games aren’t supposed to be played forever.

In the time it’s taken me to agonize over these words, I’ve played and completed Little Kitty Big City, Still Wakes the Deep and the Night Springs DLC for Alan Wake II. These breezy, brief experiences have all left a positive impact on me, yet I don’t experience the searing need to go back and play them again and again and again, even if there were small things in the background I missed. Final Fantasy XIV‘s new expansion Dawntrail is out in a couple weeks; I’m not spending any time grinding for better gear or weapons like I did in Destiny 2 leading up to The Final Shape. Dozens of games and demos have come out and rather than play them, I’ve been tooling around in Destiny 2‘s new destination, The Pale Heart of the Traveler, not even necessarily doing anything in specific.

Why does this game have me in a headlock? Why am I drawn to play it at the expense of everything else? What’s going to happen when inevitably in a few months I finally burn out on Destiny 2 yet again? Maybe there’s something wrong with me.

But listen: the Pale Heart is stunning. It is without doubt one of the most beautiful video game environments I’ve ever walked through. Doing runs of Overthrow to get seeds and motes of light and other goodies is trivially easy, but the radio commentary by Micah-10 and a rotating cast is always interesting to listen to. The areas are wildly varied both in terms of activity and terrain; the environmental artists went absolutely wild with the surreal and slightly horrifying landscape, increasingly made up of hands, bodies and faces the closer you get to the Witness’s Monolith at the center of the Pale Heart.

Maybe I just find the game fun? Maybe it’s not any more complicated than that. Maybe I won’t hit burnout anymore. I don’t know.

I knew I would always be here at the end, though. Even if it was the worst game ever made and the player community was in shambles as a result, I knew I’d still play this fucking thing. And I knew even if every other narrative beat fell flat, I would still cry at its dramatic lows and its highs and laugh ever so slightly at the cringe jokes. It exceeded my expectations. It seems like it also exceeded everyone else’s. I don’t know what this means for the devs who almost surely crunched to make The Final Shape and its run-up so successful, but I genuinely hope Sony takes the heat off and lets them continue to cook.

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Okay, okay. I have one criticism to make. To make this criticism I’m going to have to get kind of deep in the narrative weeds, so this is the spoiler area.

At the end of Excision, the new 12-person activity/final campaign mission released after a team spent almost 20 hours slamming their heads against the wall of the Salvation’s Edge raid, we summon our Ghost and the Traveler channels all of its Light into it, focusing a beam of energy straight into the Witness’s now-vulnerable heart and shattering it. We watch the Witness fall to its demise, no longer an existential threat to the universe. Life can go on. There will be no Final Shape.

With that, our Ghost falls to the ground, lifeless. A moment that should be unambiguously joyous has turned sour as our constant companion, a friend and support system through some of the darkest moments, is suddenly no more.

The Final Shape is very heavily concerned with “purpose.” The Witness is single-mindedly driven toward what it believes its purpose to be, which is to force the entire universe into the expansion’s namesake, never changing, never growing, never learning from mistakes, held in perpetuity at the moment of one’s greatest triumph—or sorest defeat. The Ghosts likewise have a single purpose: raise an immortal, unattached army that can withstand the Witness’s assaults on both body and mind.

But as we see with our Ghost, as well as Targe, Zavala’s Ghost, Glint (Crow’s Ghost) and the dozen or so Ghosts under the care of Micah-10, they also have other thoughts and worries. Some Ghosts, being unpartnered, spend the time they don’t use searching for their Guardian to pursue other interests. Other Ghosts fret over keeping their Guardians alive. Our Ghost’s entire purpose was to help us take our first furtive steps out of the Old Russia Cosmodrome into the world, where we could eventually become legend and defeat the Witness once and for all. For large portions of our journey, they’ve even been our voice to the Vanguard and other parties. We – they – we were made for this moment.

And so when our Ghost falls down dead, having spent every iota of Light it has access to in the pursuit of its purpose, there were two directions the story could’ve gone.

The first direction would’ve been our Guardian, now a mortal human or Awoken or Exo, cradling the shell of our Ghost in our arms, begging for the Traveler to revive it, and in the Traveler’s not-uncaring silence, eventually, tearfully, standing up and vowing to keep moving forward in the Light without our friend. Maybe we get our Light powers back; maybe we don’t. Maybe we can still become Transcendent or Prismatic, maybe not. Maybe we retire; maybe this really is the end of the Light and Darkness Saga, and now it’s time for others to take up our mantle.

The second direction is the one they took: our Guardian, now mortal, cradles the shell of our Ghost in our arms, begging for the Traveler to revive it. However, rather than the Traveler responding in silence, someone appears in our limbo space: Cayde.

Cayde-6 was returned to life with no access to the Light that made him up thanks to the side-effects of a Wish Dragon’s wish-granting that let Crow through the portal. He misses death dearly, because that is where he got to be with his beloved Ghost, Sundance, awash in the Traveler’s Light. He realized he had a role to play in the final confrontation, but it wasn’t his place to return to the role of Hunter Vanguard and resume his old life like six entire years hadn’t passed. So he appears before us in the white void. And he sacrifices himself to revive Ghost. And he tells us not to mourn him, or let others contest his decision. “Nobody makes my fate but me,” he tells us as more tears start flowing and his Light pours into our Ghost’s shell. “And don’t tell anyone, but you’ve always been my favorite.”

And like – I loved the moment. I cried at it. I’m crying about it now just thinking about it as I write this. And I understand why they ultimately went in the direction they did – namely, Destiny 2 is a live service game about an immortal god with incomprehensible powers who does silly dance emotes after beating the shit out of eldritch horrors. But man. Can you imagine the bold move it would have been if suddenly everyone who finished the expansion had to become mortal? Even temporarily? Even if they had to do like, a short mission chain to try to get their Light back and revive Ghost through other means? It would have really nailed the themes home for me.

But I can’t ding Bungie for not taking that path.

Anyway; The Final Shape good. This is all I got in the tank right now; believe me, I’ve tried squeezing this out for almost three weeks. Maybe I’ll come back to Destiny some other time. There’s fun shit to talk about here for sure. Or maybe I’ll retire it as an object of criticism entirely and just sort of live in the world Bungie made for us, head empty. Who knows. But I do love this game, and I’m glad I made it to its first ending.