Mysteriouslier and Mysteriouslier

We’re going to be covering content for Borderlands 3 out of order from their release date in large part because if you go back in and play the game now, it’s all going to be jumbled anyway. While Borderlands 2 set stuff out pretty well, with each expansion, and later head hunter packs, each into their own little territory you’d open, all segmented out in the world traveling section, and their missions were similarly organized the same way. But Borderlands 3 doesn’t handle its mission that way. Instead, as soon as you get into Sanctuary III, all the expansion missions unlock alongside the main missions, and everything is jumbled together under “main”, “side”, and “complete”. And that’s it. If you don’t realize what’s going on then you wouldn’t even realize you were doing expansion content.

This is especially true when it comes to the second season of content released for the game. Various packs were put into the game that added additional missions and zones for exploration, but unlike any of the normal expansion packs, which at least had the grace to be off on their own planets, this content could be run during the main game and you absolutely wouldn’t even realize you were doing things “out of order”. I speak, specifically, about the Borderlands 3: Director’s Cut and its “Mysteriouslier” missions.

“Mysteriouslier” is a series of four missions that were added during the second season and function as a new side-plot for the main story of Borderlands 3. In it, new character Ava (who we will have to have a discussion about soon) had a podcast and she really wants your help in getting listeners for her cast. So she sends you down on missions to various planets having you explore mysterious, seemingly supernatural, murder cases. Except, for at least the first few cases, nothing is really mysterious at all. The clues are obvious, the killers are easily found, and none of it is supernatural at all. That is until, suddenly, it’s all connected and it actually relates back to the Sirens, the Guardians, and the great mysteries of the universe.

It’s also boring as hell. I’m not going to lie, I audibly groaned each time one of these missions unlocked during the main game. We’d be off, running around, trying to get a vault key, and then when we went back to the ship there was Ava with another request to help her with her stupid podcast. Then we’d go down, do an overly long mission where we ran down some hallways, killed some dudes, and eventually had a lackluster boss fight before everything wrapped up and we could go back to trying to save the universe. It didn’t really make sense why we were even doing this.

Of course the reason we were doing all this was because, in the end, it actually tied in to the Sirens and the Guardians, both of whom are big parts of the later plot of Borderlands 3. Except you wouldn’t know that from Ava’s earlier missions, or really even the main story of Borderlands 3, so we’re stuck in these missions wondering why we’re even here, with Borderlands 3’s awful writing making everything much worse. Every time Ava showed up with another one of these I really questioned why I was doing them at all (and there’s a good chance if I ever play the game again I’m going to skip them when they come up).

What makes it worse is that the plotline, as experienced when you play through the game now (and not as its own piece if you were already at the end game before going in) doesn’t really tie in well to the overarching narrative. This will be spoilers for Borderlands 3 so if you’re somehow reading this and haven’t played through that game yet, consider yourself warned. In the game Maya has Ava as her apprentice (this despite the fact that Maya is a Siren, Ava isn’t, and there’s no reason for Maya to have Ava as an apprentice, whatever that would even mean). Maya then dies, with Troy Calypso stealing her powers. Ava’s first “Mysterilouslier” podcast happens before this event, and then her second happens immediately after, leading to some terrible tonal whiplash. She goes from mourning the woman that is effectively her mother figure to, “hey, help me with my podcast about shitty mysteries that aren’t really mysteries.” It simply doesn’t work.

Spoilers out of the way, let’s also talk about Ava in general because, my god, she is annoying. In fairness all the characters in Borderlands 3 are annoying, even the ones from the previous games that you at one point liked. Yes, they now suck, too. But the new characters in the game are even worse, and Ava is among the worst of the worst. She’s obnoxious, whiny, needy, and no fun to be around. She’s a teenage girl, which I get, but it feels like the writers for this game leaned into the trope of “teenage girls are obnoxious” and said, “we can do that, and so much more.” At some point Ava eventually fades from the main story and Borderlands 3 is better for it.

In effect, nothing about the “Mysteriouslier” side plot works. Not at all. It’s a small batch of not-really-end game content that sucks more fun out of the game than it adds. If this hadn’t come out as part of the pack I doubt anyone would care. But, “Mysteriouslier” isn’t the only content added via the Borderlands 3: Director’s Cut because the pack also contains a new raid boss: Hemovorous the Invincible.

If you know the previous games you know that end game raid bosses were a right of passage for players. These were massive, ungodly dangerous beasts that could kill your characters fast. You had to try and find a way to kill them quickly before they got you first. I managed, in my time, to kill a few of them, although none of them were easy and all of them took a lot of work. It was a matter of finding the right strategy in each case and knowing that if anything went wrong, I’d die instantly. They were a lot of fun.

Hemovorous is the only standard raid boss in Borderlands 3. While there are big bosses in the game, and the takedown packs (which we’ll cover soon enough) added in what could be considered “raid missions” with big bosses as part of their events, Hemovorous is the only raid boss-style encounter like were featured in the classic games. Obviously I had to try and kill it while I was playing through all the missions in the game.

The boss event is pretty straight forward. You head into Darkthirst Dominion, a new area in Pandora, at the behest of Claptrap. There you’ll find a varkid pod which hatches into larval varkids. Once you kill all these a new, invincible pod appears that hatches adult varkids. Dispatch these and the pod appears again to unleash a badass varkid, and then again for a super badass, and then finally we get Hemovorous shows up.

This is a decently tense fight, as the beast has a number of attacks. It’ll constantly spawn larval varkids, for one, and these will need to be dealt with while fighting the main boss. It will also slam the ground, shooting out waves of spikes towards the players. And it will spawn pupal varkids that will fly at the players and explode. It’s a lot to keep track of and that’s before the twist of the fight even materializes. That twist: Vermivorous the Invincible.

If you’re playing on Mayhem levels or have True Vault Hunter active, Hermivorous will summon Vermivorous, one of the raid bosses from Borderlands 2, to join them in the battle. Now you have two beefy raid bosses to fight, and they’ll both attack at you with exploding pupal varkids and physical attacks. At least… that’s how it’s supposed to go. My game was apparently bugged because even though I had Mayhem on, Vermivorous wouldn’t spawn. I’m not sure why that was, but I just couldn’t get the boss to appear. It may just be a case where the game was expecting me to do something more, or maybe despite being on Mayhem (like the instructions online say) I wasn’t doing it at the right level. Whatever the case, all I could do was fight Hemovorous and, honestly, the fight was too easy. We killed her in a couple of minutes and got our special loot. It was a lackluster experience overall.

The content pack does come with some bonus behind the scenes stuff, if you care about that, but I was there to play the game, not watch making-of materials, so I didn’t bother. Honestly, though, if I’d paid the suggested retail price of $14.99 for this, one bad set of side missions and a raid boss that doesn’t even load right, I would have been pissed. But I got it all for a cheap price when I bought a full set of the game off Steam during a Summer Sale, and that at least felt better. It still feels like a waste of time, but if you can get it on sale at least it’s not a waste of money too.