Borderlands 2 is pretty high on my list of favorite games. Yeah, it's got big issues with ableism1 and racism2, but on the whole I find the jokes funny and the play engrossing. There really aren't many games that scratch the same itches, and BL2 had maybe the best run of DLC ever for a video game. A bunch of enormous extra regions with voiced characters, culminating in the excellent "Assault on Dragon Keep." When I think of playing a co-op game, it's often BL2 that comes to mind.
It's not a game for everyone, even if you aren't someone who (reasonably) finds its callous and sometimes cruel humor intolerable. I was a fan through the original anti-Anthony-Burch Gamergate hate and the more recent and more justified anti-Randy-Pitchford hate. I was sad to see that BL3 didn't seem to understand the good parts of the series. And now the film is terrible, as it was always destined to be, and it's encouraged people to bravely declare that they never liked the game, anyways.
The game is loud and crass and takes the approach of throwing as many jokes as it can at you in the hopes that something sticks. I don't expect everyone to like it. But I do. It's a game with a genuinely compelling and evil villain who nonetheless has comprehensible motivations. It has a feminist and queer-friendly heart that was rather notable in the ancient year of 2012. It's got a ridiculous and sloppy approach to skills and weapons that more games should adopt. I've put over 150 hours into it and still sometimes I think about reinstalling it.
-
The game thinks little people are inherently funny. Changing their label from "M----t" to "Lil' ____" for the Pre-Sequel or "Tink" for BL3 does not fix this problem. It also finds crazy people inherently funny, which is one of the few examples of the game's humor punching at a form of marginalization I possess.
-
For example, as various folks have pointed out, one of Tiny Tina's "wacky" behaviors is talking in an approximation of AAVE. When we get into DLC, the "Savage" enemy type is completely indefensible.