Posted by Destiny 2‘s The Final Shape expansion released almost two weeks. I was hoping to get a review of it out last week, but due to circumstances I’ll explain momentarily, I had to delay my initial impressions for a week. This is not a comprehensive review. There’s still a lot left in the expansion for me to do, so I’m planing to revisit this topic next week. For this week, I’m just going to focus on the story, raid, and the Pale Heart destination.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
The Final Shape contains the best story and campaign of any Destiny expansion to date. The calibre of the story is right up there with the best of Forsaken and The Witch-Queen, but The Final Shape rises above them. The story is relatively simple: enter the Traveler, explore the Pale Heart within, regroup with your allies, figure out how to defeat The Witness, and do it. The result is a fairly linear campaign where you progress through the Pale Heart destination meeting up with a revived Cayde-6, Crow, Ikora, and finally Zavala. After regrouping, Zavala acts recklessly and sends you after some nearby high value targets in the hopes of discovering how to stop The Witness. He eventually goes off on his own for answers, and you need to track him down. You learn that because The Witness is the gestalt amalgamation of an entire species, not all of the voices are unified and some rebel against it. Many of these voices have been cut out and turned into the now iconic statues present in the pyramid ships, but inside the Traveler they are still one. The Traveler is able to arm you as you begin to destroy these dissenters and wound The Witness. Once injured, The Witness lashes out and forces us to retreat, leading into the Salvation’s Edge raid.
Salvation’s Edge is brutal, and the reason I pushed this review off for a week. The way the final story mission is locked behind the world’s first completion of the raid made me feel like the only way I could experience it was by first clearing the raid. This progression is by no means mandatory, nor would I personally recommend. I’m happy that I did it that way, but I would strongly caution others from doing it just because of how hard Salvation’s Edge is. I’m an experienced raider. I’ve cleared every raid in Destiny (both on Normal and Hard and all of the challenges that came with them except for the Aksis Challenge in Wrath of the Machine) and every Destiny 2 raid with the exception of Crown of Sorrows. Whenever a new raid released, I would go in with friends and clear it within a night or two depending on the circumstances. Salvation’s Edge took us about a week to clear. We fell into a groove of clearing one encounter a night because it was often that difficult. As a result, I have a mixed opinion of Salvation’s Edge. On the one hand, I really enjoyed the raid and the challenge it brought because there’s a serious sense of satisfaction from clearing it and its difficult encounters. On the other hand, sometimes the difficulty borders on feeling unfairly hard. My friends and I ended up spending the most amount of time on encounter two because the timing and mechanics were just too tight sometimes. The central mechanic of the raid is ping-ponging resonant energy back and forth between players by stepping on plates. Mechanically, it’s not bad. The timing takes some getting used, especially when closing the ping-pong nodes, but it’s manageable. Now factor in enemies that can slow you with stasis and stop you from getting to the plate. This single reason is why second encounter took us so long. Salvation’s Edge is also a raid that requires everyone to know what they’re doing. There’s no mentally checking out and just doing add clear like in Root of Nightmares. For example, both second and third encounter requires all six players to play ping-pong. That being said, I’m going to need to play the raid more to develop my opinions on it. I understand the first three encounters very well, I have a decent grasp of the fourth encounter, but the final boss is where my knowledge becomes the most tenuous. I have beaten the raid as of Friday night (I also wanted the raid jacket so I felt incentivized to clear the raid as soon as I could), but I need to keep running it both for the loot and to familiarize myself with it. The raid loot itself strikes me as strange. This raid is the culmination of a ten year journey. In terms of difficulty and challenge, it succeeds. But in terms of reward, it feels a tad lacking. The armor strikes me as pretty meh with a few exceptions here and there like the Warlock helmet and Titan gauntlets. The weapon roster consists of a strand smg (there are a lot of these already in the game but I suppose this is the first craftable one so that’s cool), an arc bow that can roll voltshot, a solid looking solar two-round burst pulse rifle with a good variety of strong perks, a void glaive with some potentially interesting combos (such as chain reaction), yet another stasis sniper rifle (but this one is an aggressive frame and it has some interesting possible perk combos), and an arc sword that aesthetically looks cool but doesn’t really seem to have a whole lot going for it. I’m definitely excited to get some of these weapons and mess around with them, but none of them strike me as game changers with the possible exception of the pulse rifle. The raid exotic, Euphony, is a strand linear fusion rifle that gets buffed by threadlings and would work perfectly in my strand Warlock build, especially because it’s a special weapon and not a heavy.
After beating the raid, my friends and I hopped into the final mission: Excision. Excision was something special. When compared with the rest of the campaign, the mission is short and mechanically simple. What makes Excision stand out is the fact that it’s a 12-player activity that also features important NPCs fighting side by side with you to finally destroy The Witness. It’s an epic conclusion and the cutscenes that follow make for the perfect conclusion to a ten year journey, even if I wasn’t there for everything. The Final Shape and its campaign completely exceeded my expectations.
The campaign was emotional and felt climactic as many characters reached conclusions to their character arcs. Zavala experiences intense doubts about the Traveler and its power, which really started to appear as a plot point during Season of the Haunted, and it culminates here as Zavala acts recklessly and suffers the consequences. I would also like to say that while Keith David does a great job voicing Zavala, the characters feels noticeably off from Lance Reddick. Ikora confronts her grief surrounding Cayde’s death when he returns. Crow finally accepts the mantle of Hunter Vanguard. All of our allies, including Savathûn, come together for the final battle. It felt like the epic conclusion it was supposed to be. In addition, Bungie actually did a good job of explaining The Witness’ plan: use the Traveler’s light to freeze all of existence into perfect statues trapped in eternal stasis. Going into The Final Shape, I was worried about what it actually meant when characters were saying, “The Witness is trying to create the Final Shape.” After the first few cutscenes, it actually makes sense, which is a huge step up from the atrocious Lightfall campaign where “The Veil” and “Radial Mast” are thrown around constantly like they’re supposed to mean something when they’re nothing more than ill-defined MacGuffins. Herein lies one of The Final Shape‘s greatest strengths: the story is well-defined. We as players quickly get to understand the stakes, and the progression of the story makes logical sense. We spend time regrouping and finding information and attack when ready, unlike previous campaigns where we just kind of do nothing (i.e. Shadowkeep and Lightfall).
Turning to the new Pale Heart destination, I’d say it’s probably the best destination in the game. It offers so many hidden secrets and events and areas to explore that I’m not even close to being done with it, and I shouldn’t be. The DLC has been out about two weeks. If I’ve already done everything the new destination has to offer, that’s a problem. My favorite feature of the Pale Heart is the Overthrow mode. Overthrow is present in the three major areas of the map, and your goal is to run around and kill enemies, gather resources, and complete events. As you do more, you accumulate points, which allows you to progress to the next tier, eventually culminating in a boss fight after clearing all three tiers. Overthrow is great because there’s no timer; you progress as quickly or as slowly as you want to. There’s also a ton of variety in the different events and activities. The weapons in the Pale Heart are very strong as well, especially the new strand rocket sidearm. Everything about the Pale Heart, from the loot to the secrets, makes it one of the most fun and engaging destinations in the game.
SPOILERS END
Overall, The Final Shape is Destiny 2 at it’s best. The story has felt the most well-connected and meaningful yet, and it caps off a ten year journey perfectly. The amount of new content to do and explore has made me the most excited to play the game in a long time. The number and quality of quests is fitting and appropriate. I don’t want to talk about them too much and spoil them, but we receive some great character arcs for Caital and Mithrax too. The new loot is exciting and worth chasing, so far the exotics and new subclass abilities feel powerful, and the new enemies are absolutely infuriating to fight (in the good way, at least most of the time). The Final Shape delivered, and I acknowledge that this review won’t do it justice. If you’ve been a fan of Destiny in the past and haven’t experienced the DLC yet, or if you played the game but eventually grew dissatisfied with it and dropped it, now is the best time to return.
Broad Scope Entertainment 