'Destiny 2' Opens With a Surprisingly Touching Trip Down Memory Lane

I tend to roll my eyes at a lot of the more overwrought self-mythologizing that Destiny is guilty of. The whole "create your legend" thing, in a game where most of the time I was collecting "kill 12 monsters with headshots" quests from a chatty robot and whose fiction seemed mostly cobbled-together from an Epic Fantasy Name Generator. Destiny's own solemnity seemed well-intentioned, but completely at odds with the day-to-day experience I had playing it with friends.

But there are moments that Destiny's sincerity really pays off, and the opening of Destiny 2 is one of them. Not the opening level or cutscene, but what happens before you even get to the new stuff: when it revisits your legacy with a slideshow of your biggest achievements in the original game.

It's beautifully done: a series of monochrome sketches presenting a stylized impression of each major location and event from your time with Destiny. Oryx's broken sword standing alone in a pool, where you defeated him at the end of The Taken King. A group of Guardians looking down on the Black Garden, probably the most beautiful and haunting place in the original game. With each image, there's a date and a group of player tags, showing who was with you at each milestone. It runs during the intro, but you can revisit it any time from the login page by clicking on an icon below your list of Guardians.

What I find fascinating about it is that captures the negotiated nature of Destiny's world. It's a game that remembers what we did there, but imparts an entirely different meaning to each memory. With each new card, Destiny 2 is telling the story of our legendary Guardian's canonical exploits against the enemies of the Traveler… but it's also reminding you of those late nights and early mornings with friends and strangers, the goofy manic laughter of a raid team when they realize they're going to have to run a particularly brutal section again from the top, and everyone has to go to work in six hours.

Somehow, though, it all just works. I don't have the memories Destiny 2 insists that I do—I could not tell you the first thing about exactly what I was doing at the Black Garden or what I stopped there—but its flattering enthusiasm totally fits with the impression Destiny left on me. By treating its own history with a kind of exaggerated reverence, Destiny 2 manages to consecrate its own players' memories of their time in that world, and the people they shared it with.