Destiny 2: The Final Shape Review - The Ending We Deserve

I didn’t think Bungie could pull it off. How do you wrap up a decade-long story in a way that provides a satisfying conclusion while still keeping the door open for things to continue? How do you recover from the mistakes of Lightfall and get back on track in just a year? How do you make Destiny more enticing to players than it's ever been when so many consider this expansion to be the game’s last hurrah?

After Lightfall, the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:callous layoffs at Bungie, and the reports that the studi𓆏o is under threat of a total Sony takeover, I didn’t see how The Final Shape could possibly deliver. Under ideal cir🐼cumstances, it would have been a miracle if The Fiꦯnal Shape was half as good as it needed to be at the end of the Saga of Light and Darkness. Realistically, it just seemed impossible. I’ve never been so thrilled to be so wrong.

The Final Shape is a triumph for Destiny, for Bungie, and for the players who, like me, signed up for this wild experiment of a game and hoped it would all come together in the end. Somehow, it did. Between the campaign - a biblical showdown with the Witness ten years in the making - the incredible and game-breaking new Prismatic subclass, a patrol zone 𒈔worth exploring, ridiculously cool loot, and one of the best raids ever made, The Final Shape is firing on all cylinders from beginning to end - and then well past the end. We’re two weeks in and it hasn’t stopped firing. With The Final Shape Bungie has proven once again that when its back is against the wall, it can pull out all the stops and do remarkable t🍬hings.

Keith David Steps Into Commander Zavala's Boots Beautifully In Destiny 2's The Final Shape

Lance Reddick is impossible to replace, but Keith David's turn as Zavala brings dignity and respect to t꧂he cꦯharacter and late actor.

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We’re still at the start of The Final Shape, and the consequences of its story will continue to unfold over the next year, but I’m certain its campaign will be talked about for years to come in the same way that Destiny players still reminisce over The Taken King and Forsaken. What se🅘ts The Final Shape apart from those expansions is the build-up. Everything that’s happened has led us to this: the moment we enter the Traveler’s Pale Hearts and take on The Witness once and for all.

This final chapter isn’t particularly complex: we explore the Traveler, find our friends, discover The Witness’ weakness, and take it down. It's the way that that story is told and the time that it spends exploring what this battle means to each character that makes it so effective. There’s a bit of a slow start over the first few missions as we explore the Traveler and find the rest of the Vanguard, but that time is necessary.

Taki🌺ng the time to give each character the spotlight and reflect on their journey over the last decade raises the emotional stakes and makes this more than a simple battle between good and evil. Ikora, Crow, Cayde, and Zavala have been through so much, both separately and together, and Bungie was wise to let us spend a lot of time with them here at the end, to reflect on the journey so far before heading into our grea🐻test battle yet.

Note: The reintroduction of Cayde might have come across gimmicky, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:as I’ve written elsewhere, he plays a crucial role in The Final Shape’s story. He’s so core to the events that unfold that I can’t imagine how this stor♏y could have been told wit🗹hout him.

There are a handful of narrative conveniences that would be easy to nitpick. Zavala’s erratic behavior can be hard to grok at times, especially since he has a different voice than the one we know (though 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Keith David does an incredible job stepping into Lance Reddick’s impossible-to-fill shoes). That recklessness eventually leads to the death of a character we’ve never met before, which evokes Rohan’s death in Lightfall. It’s easy to draw comparisons to previous storytelling mistakes, but The Final Shape succeeds even when it takes shortcꦰuts by centering every event on the emotional core of the characters. What happens is meaningful to them, ꩲso in turn it’s meaningful to us.

Of course, the story doesn’t end when the campaign does. After discovering the Witness’ weakness (a reveal that provides payoff for old mysteries), our allies arrive and it's time to prepare for the final battle. Between Tuesday and Friday of launch week we were let loose in the Pale Heart to complete the end game missions and build up our power for the raid. Once the raid was complete and the Witness was severed from the Traveler completely, the Excision activity unlocked: Destiny 2’s first-ever 12-player mission that had us make our final assault on the Witness alongside all of our allies for an Avengers: Endgame-style finale. This is the kind of had-to-be-there experience that makes Destiny such a unique and special game. It was more than just a boss fight at the end of a game, we all got to be part of the story by taking down the villain together. That’s such an important part of the Destiny 2 fantasy, and The Final Shape nailed it.

This expansion has an end game that just keeps on giving. Between the endlessly replayable Overthrow activities, the length hunt for Khvostov that takes you to every corner of the Pale Heart, The Craftening-inspired Ergo Sum sword farm, and the incredible Dual Destiny co-op mission - the best exotic mission Bungie has ever made - I feel like I’ll never run out🥀 of rewarding things to do. There’s a balance of variety,replayability, and reward that Bungie has been trying to find for years, has occasionally found with activities like The Menagerie, but has mastered The Final Shape.

It’s a shame that launch day was marred by so many server issues, and I have sympathy for those that missed important cutscenes without even realizing it because of those issues. Those problems were fixed the first day, but for a game like Destiny, that first day really matters. The game creates a shared experience that people want to be part of, and a lot of people wanted to but couldn’t. I don’t want to𓄧 harp on temporary server issues - these thinꩵgs happen in all online games - but it was unfortunate that things were so bad because that has left a mark on a lot of people’s experience with the story.

There’s still room for improvement, of course. The Pathfinder system works well for Pale Heart activities, but adds too much friction to playlist farming for my taste. I’d like to see a bett𓃲er spread of objectives or more flexibility in the future, because no one likes to feel forced to complete an entire activity to finish one simple objective. I a☂lso think it’s time to get rid of crafting once and for all now that weapons have enhanceable traits. I want to care about my drops again, not just farm for red boxes.

I’ve been emotionally preparing myself to hang up my Arbalest and ride off into the sunset after The Final Shape. Destiny 2 is a game that means a lot to me, so much that I’m not prepared to watch it slowly turn into a shadow of what it once was. But this expansion restore൩d my faith in Destiny and made me eager to see what the frontiers🐽 the future has in store. There’s been ups and downs over the years, but this proves the trajectory of Destiny 2 is onward and upward. It proves we can expect Bungie will learn from mistakes and that there are bigger and better things in Destiny’s future. I worried this would be the end, but now The Final Shape just feels like the end of the beginning.