Oh wow… Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy has definitely been one heck of a rollercoaster for me and I know I’ve had my ups and downs with this series, however ultimately as a whole experience, I like where it stands. I am definitely going to miss the guardians now that this game is over and here is to a season 2 someday … hopefully soon.
Now let me tell you that the entire series was going up and down in verdicts and I did have some issues here and there, however … the finale was just a power stomp … I.FRICKING.LOVED.IT. I couldn’t have asked for a better finale. And it doesn’t matter that episode 4 felt as a filler, because episode 5 more than makes up for it.
Now here is the deal, and this is where you start feeling the gravity of your choices in the past. You are left with yourself (as Peter Quill) and one more guardian, depending on whether you let Drax sacrificed himself, which then Rocket will stay with you or refused Drax’s moment of sacrifice and then Gamora will stay with you. Either way, you also get your rock worm pet (Blue in my case), if you took him with you. I shall tell on the story from this point on as it was for my playthrough, and I will mention where there are differences based on the choices you made before. So Quill, Gamora and Blue find out from a news channel that Hala is wreaking havoc on the universe basically, in search for Star-Lord, because he destroyed the eternity forge (this is a bit different if you kept the forge). So now we have to go reunite the Guardians in order to face one heck of an angry Hala. Fortunately Mantis and Groot return to us on their own and with the help of Mantis we get to locate Rocket and Drax (or Gamora and Drax, based on choices). I pretty much enjoyed the diversity of this sequence with the memories, because you get a different memory from the previous 4 episodes, depending on what emotion you pick, however no matter what you pick (even if it’s negative), you will be led to the location of the 2 missing guardians and then you get to pick who to fetch first. In my case I went to find a drunk rodent first and helped him vent out a little bit, then got to spar with a very annoyed Drax. However all is well when it ends well and the Guardians of the Galaxy are reunited once more! Huzzah!
And here comes the awesome part where we see why the Guardians have such great synergy with each other. We devise a plan for action and have to assign roles to each Guardian with PQ having to place some explosives on the weapons of Hala’s ship. Basically here you can assign the roles however you want and they still would be performed, I didn’t play around too much with this, but basically I did Rocket as the hacker, Gamora to protect him, Drax to cause a distraction and Groot to steal Hala’s helmet (to be fair, Drax’s attempt of a distraction was too hilarious). After a motivational speech (which was amazingly funny at times) given by PQ, off the guardians go to face the last battle.
Anyway, plan goes pretty well and we get to fight Hala as a final boss. The last fight was so amazing. Just to see how the Guardians are working together so well and doing battle as a team, helping each other out, I would say that was a worthy last battle (even better than the one vs Thanos in episode 1).
Now here the ending would be different depending on whether you kept or destroyed the forge, but in my playthrough, I saw one last memory of Quill and his mom and then got the talk to Hala one last time and ggwp Telltale for making that comeback in the last conversation between Hala and Peter, where she ends up just being a mom, who cared deeply for her son (especially when you can comfort her and tell her what you told your own mom, one flashback earlier). That was definitely a good moment. If the forge is kept, there are some stuff around with Bal’Dinn, whether he likes you or not and also Nebula can have a different fate here, based on choices made.
The ending is pretty much the Guardians celebrating their victory and Mantis giving us one last memory of our mom, if we choose to have it. I like the little details in that moment, like what you choose to tell your mom and what song to listen to last. If you preserved the forge you can choose whether you want to bring someone back to life (between Nebula, Peter’s mom, Kamaria or Lylla) or not and then if you did they get to have a little sentimental moment with their close person.
What can I say … I pretty much loved the story of this series and even though some choices took a while to kick in, there was that kick I was hoping for and we even get different endings for that one major choice in the whole plot.
The gameplay segments were one of the most diverse I’ve ever experiences in a Telltale game. Now I’ve played a lot of their stuff and by a lot I mean like 90% of their episodic games and trust me when I say Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy had one of the most varying gameplay sections I can ever imagine, because each episode you were doing something different in a new way. The only one trying to catch up is Batman’s new season, but that still has 2 more episodes for me to be able to judge. While some episodes were lacking in gameplay more than others, this one had a great balance too and managed to polish a nice end to it all.
As some final details before I move on to verdicts, I gotta say that character development was amazing (all the guardians got their emotional flashback scenes and we saw them develop from episode 1 to episode 5), not even gonna mention the music … again … since it’s on par as always (I just love Guardians’ retro music choice) and top it off we get 50% more replayability value than other Telltale games, mainly cuz of the ending.
Okay, since this is the final review of this series and I am kind of sad to let it go, because I will miss it, I have decided to do something more with the verdict. I am going to give a score for episode 5 separately and then score the series as a unit. The good and the bad segments are also going to be for the game as a whole.
So first off, and this is actually without a doubt, I will give episode 5 as a separate entity a 10/10. Just like Batman: the Enemy Within’s strong start, this series had an even stronger ending and I am so pleased with it. Indeed, I can say that it all led up to this moment and it was all I was hoping for.
As for the whole series…
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