Hi, my name is Anchor, and I’m addicted to Destiny

Today is a special day for me, for one reason and one reason alone . . .
“What is that reason?” you — the imaginary other half of this conversation — might be asking at this time! Well, I’m glad you asked because today is the day I’ve had marked on my calendar all summer.
Today is the release of a new Destiny 2 expansion: Forsaken!
And OH MY GOSH AM I EXCITED!!!
For those who don’t know, the Destiny franchise has been a part of my life for five years now (longer if you consider the build-up to Destiny as a part of it), and the developers behind the Destiny franchise (Bungie) have been a part of my life since I was six — being the original creators of the Halo franchise.
Destiny, as a franchise, is a lot of things — especially narratively.
On the mechanical level, it’s your typical first person, looter/shooter video game, where you’re armed with an assortment of different weapons that you can use to kill invading alien forces, with the ultimate goal being to collect the best loot from bosses. On that basis, Destiny as a whole could be quite boring. However, what makes the game stand out as a unique piece of gaming from the rest of the looter/shooter genre of games, is how it presents a story within this genre.
From a narrative standpoint, Destiny is unique, in that, while it visually paints itself as a science fiction series, where you travel among the stars shooting aliens, the story and gameplay draw inspiration from outside the typical genre of sci-fi, and instead, draw from fantasy and mythological tropes to construct their world.
What do I mean by this? Put simply, it’s a story about space magic and light versus dark.
When phrased like that, Destiny could appear to almost be a pseudo-Star Wars copy-cat, piggybacking off of the tropes that George Lucas and more modern directs of that franchise dabble in. That is not the case, or at least, not entirely. (As I said, that was a simple description.)
Destiny pulls from the more modern tropes of Knight, Rogue, and Wizard, high and dark fantasy, and mythologies and ancient histories, and does so in order to dip into realms of surreal questions of existentialism, while at other times diving deep into quandaries of morality and one’s place in the universe. It does this by using these tropes from the typical modern fantasy, placing players as agents to this mystical being who saved us from almost certain death — now lost in slumber — and pitting us against its enemies that tried to kill us as they tried to kill it.
Players are pitted against ancient space Gods — perceived as evil, and potentially truly so, but with complexities to their characters that show that perhaps they started in places similar to where the player started. Destiny plays with the idea of knight’s tales, quests akin to King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail. Destiny dabbles in other mythologies, poking at Greek and Egyptian myth with enemies like Minotaur present, or allies like Osiris beside the player. Within the game’s lore are actual books’ worth of stories I’ve no time to explain or even delve into, tying and weaving all these myths, ideas, and concepts together.
Overall, it’s a story about light and dark, but it’s also more because it draws on these ideas, and expands them in twisted ways. Destiny takes everything I love about fantasy and myth — the parts of literature that I enjoy — and makes the concepts new and interesting in a new backdrop.
And with that said, I’m excited about this next Destiny 2 expansion. I’m excited for more story — more lore! And with that all said and done, I’m off to drink a Rockstar and pound through the rest of the day’s school work, that way I can dedicate literal hours to this game and its world. So to you, I say adieu!
