Video Game / Batman: Arkham Knight

Spoilers for all Batman: Arkham Series games preceding this one will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

Be vengeance. Be the night. Be the Batman.

"This is how it happened... This is how the Batman died."

— Commissioner Gordon

Batman: Arkham Knight is the 2015 direct sequel to Batman: Arkham City and the fifth and final game in the Batman: Arkham Series, though not the last set in its universe. The game is developed by Rocksteady, the originators of the Arkham Series, after Arkham Origins was developed by WB Games Montreal to provide more time for them to make Arkham Knight.

One year after the death of the Joker (Mark Hamill) in Arkham City, crime in Gotham is at an all-time low. But that all changes on Halloween, when Scarecrow (John Noble), previously thought to be dead, reunites Gotham's villains with one goal in mind: kill the Batman. Gotham is evacuated after a threat to detonate bombs filled with fear toxin across the city, and criminals run rampant through the streets. The Dark Knight (Kevin Conroy) must now fight through his rogues gallery one more time, while also facing off against a dark mirror to himself, the mysterious "Arkham Knight" (Troy Baker).

In addition to a Wide-Open Sandbox much bigger than previous games, Arkham Knight introduces three major gameplay additions to the franchise. "Fear Takedowns" allow Batman to ambush up to three enemies at once before starting a fight (and four and five with upgrades); full use of the Batmobile for navigation and combat; and a dual-play system that allows Batman to swap out for Robin, Catwoman or Nightwing at select points in the game.

Unlike the previous three games, Arkham Knight is exclusive to the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PCs. It is the only game in the Arkham series to receive a Mature rating from the ESRB and 18 from PEGI^note With the exception of Batman: Arkham VR, also making it the first Batman video game to ever receive both ratings. It was released on June 23, 2015 on all platforms, then taken down from Steam for a period of 4 months, until October 28th, 2015.

A Season Pass for multiple DLC packs was announced. This included pre-order DLC as Red Hood and Harley Quinn. This was followed by a Prequel set before Arkham Asylum (A Matter of Family) starring Batgirl, several challenge rooms and Batmobile race tracks. This in turn was followed by additional post-launch content, with episodes featuring other members of the Batfamily and a villains pack (The Season of Infamy) featuring Killer Croc, Mr. Freeze, Ra's al Ghul and the Mad Hatter. On December 15, 2023, the suit from The Batman (2022) was added to the game as the final piece of post-launch content, two weeks after debuting in the Nintendo Switch port.

A macOS and Linux/ SteamOS port was also planned for release in Late-2015, and was to be released by Feral Interactive, but plans were scrapped and canned in Early 2016. A Nintendo Switch port was released on December 1, 2023 as part of the Batman: Arkham Trilogy, along with ports of its two precedessors, Arkham Asylum and Arkham City.

Previews: Father to Son, Evening the Odds, Batmobile Battle Mode, ACE Chemicals Infiltration, Scarecrow Nightmare Missions, Gotham is Mine, Officer Down, All Who Follow You, Time To Go To War,

---

The game contains examples of:

#-H

• 100% Completion: It's how you get the Golden Ending. It's not hard, just beat the Scarecrow by going through story missions. Oh, and don't forget to collect the 200 Riddler trophies around. And catch the eight or so other supervillains attacking Gotham, it only takes three or four so all-out brawls to catch one of them. After all that, you only need to sweep the City clear of mines, and you're done... besides the military outposts that line the city with constant surveillance. And once that's done, there's a supertank you need to fight. Then you're done.
• Abandoned Hospital: As the climax shows, by the time of the events of this game, Arkham Asylum has been left to rot and things are falling apart.
• Accidental Truth: A conversation between two Militia members has them realize that Batman must have a huge amount of money for his gadgets, which they suggest something like government funding. They then joke that Batman is Bruce Wayne.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: The Batmobile's taser would absolutely be lethal in real life, but while Batman can be trusted to not run over pedestrians, the player can't, and Harmless Electrocution is easier to swallow than mooks surviving being mowed down by a tank.
• Achilles' Heel: Killer Croc's mutation is played much more realistically. As a result of the experimentation on him, he becomes even taller and much stronger but now requires all four limbs to run, he moves much slower while attacking and simply walking, and in the tight confines of his boss fight, dual team takedowns easily bring him down if the player merely avoids him.
• Actor Allusion:
  • The E3 trailer for Arkham Knight has Scarecrow declare that he'll drag Gotham into oblivion, alluding to John Noble's role as Unicron in Transformers: Prime.
  • The Penguin's new front is called North Refrigeration.
  • After completing the first Gunrunner mission, while trapped from the goons' ambush if the player takes too long to figure out what to do, Hallucination!Joker tells you by saying the line "Use the car, Bruce".
  • As Professor Pyg, Dwight Schultz once again plays an insane man who frequently likes to sing opera while working. Albeit the difference is that Murdock was a good guy and is often implied to be faking his insanity just for a place to live at the Veteran's Hospital.
• Adaptation Distillation: The game combines a number of plot elements from previous Batman stories in the comics, films and animation series.
  • Scarecrow leading a Villain Team-Up of the Arkham Asylum inmates comes from Forever Evil: Arkham War.
  • Gotham's villains being broken out to wear Batman down was a plan previously used by Bane in Knightfall.
  • A lot of things, naturally, draw inspiration from The Dark Knight Trilogy:
    • The Batmobile combines the military styling of the Tumbler and Batpod ^note Itself based on the Riot Swat Tank design in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns with the sleek car from Batman/Batman Returns, and the neon trimmings from Batman Forever/Batman & Robin.^note One of the Batmobiles in the game IS the Tumbler!
    • The game takes the plot point of a well-trained army of mercenary soldiers invading Gotham from The Dark Knight Rises, along with the concept of a source of clean energy being transformed into a WMD. Batman also forsakes his identities and appears to die in a massive explosion at the very end of the game, though this time solely to keep any further harm from coming to his allies, and giving the legend of Batman a mythic quality from his "ashes".
    • The designs of Gotham's monorail system and the Wayne buildings are taken almost directly from Batman Begins, as does said energy device, the Cloudburst, being used as a vapor dispersal unit for Scarecrow's fear toxin.
  • Arkham Knight/Jason Todd's feud with Batman incorporates elements from the Under the Hood storyline.
  • The flashbacks that deal with Jason Todd take the idea of the Joker kidnapping him, beating with a crowbar, and killing him from A Death in the Family, while details such as Todd being tortured in Arkham Asylum and Joker mailing a video of his treatment to Batman comes from Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, including Jason breaking down to the point of nearly revealing Bruce's identity, though here Joker seemingly shoots him before he blurts it out.
  • The game also uses elements from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in addition to a tank-like Batmobile, including Bruce Wayne being outed as Batman and the destruction of Wayne Manor by Bruce and Alfred.
  • The Riddler's physical appearance◊ here is reminiscent of his look◊ in Batman: Earth One Volume 2 look, minus the muscles.
  • While not a direct adaptation, many elements come from the DC Animated Universe episode Over the Edge: — A Scarecrow-vision showing Barbara's false death, the fact that Batman hiding her association with him from Commissioner Gordon creates a wedge between them, Scarecrow throwing Barbara off the top of the building. Likewise, Batman's identity is outed, Wayne Manor is gone and he's driven underground.
  • The theme of Batman refusing to trust his allies, alienating them and isolating himself, is carried over from Batman Beyond.
  • A dying Joker leaving behind a legacy by infecting others to become similarly insane was done in a comics story titled "The Joker's Last Laugh".
• Adapted Out: Here the League of Assassins and Jason's mother play no part in the origins of the Red Hood, at least in the main story.
• Adrenaline Time: The Fear Multi-Takedown causes time to slow to a crawl after Batman knocks out an enemy, then it rapidly speeds up when the player picks their next target. The slow-down give the player time to take in their surroundings and decide which mook to take down next.
• All for Nothing: All the Joker clones that Batman assigned Robin to protect at the Panessa Studios get killed by Henry Adams, who was not quite immune as they believed. The fact that there is no cure for the Joker Blood mutation and that Batman kept Robin working on a "Shaggy Dog" Story rather than serve as an effective ally in the field is rubbed in Batman's face by the hallucinated Joker.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • Batman has three hideouts: Panessa, the clock tower, and his office. Each of these is occupied by just one of Batman's allies, two tops. All three are easily stormed by villains because there are no guards and the only security measures seem to be bio-metric recognition, which we see can be easily faked. Even the GCPD is attacked, but it takes a small army to make the attempt.
  • Harley Quinn takes over Batman's secret hideout at Panessa Studios and frees all the people he has Robin holding there. This forces Batman to actually let Robin help him as the two travel through the three major areas of the studio to take out the three escapees through cooperative stealth, dual-play combat, and flamboyant bomb defusal.
  • Near the end of the main story, Scarecrow raids Oracle's clocktower hideout in order to destroy all her data, and later stages an all-out assault on the GCPD headquarters, throwing every drone, tank, and militia member he's got at them.
• Alone with the Psycho: On a city-wide scale. Civilians have been evacuated from Gotham in the wake of Scarecrow's takeover, leaving Batman, his vigilante allies, Lucius Fox, and the GCPD in the city with Batman's rogues gallery, hundreds, if not thousands, of armed criminals, and the Arkham Knight and his mercenaries.
• Ambiguous Situation: When Batman discovers that Scarecrow is at ACE Chemicals, Gordon mentions that it should be impossible since he put a team there when the evacuation started, leading Batman to conclude that Crane either bought them off or killed them. Though their deaths are confirmed later, it's never made clear if the officers at ACE were corrupt; another officer at the GCPD even says that the ACE Chemicals team were bought off, only for another to chime in that they can't assume anything since the team is dead now.
• Amoral Attorney: It's mentioned in a story unlocked by a riddle that Harvey Dent, the best lawyer the city had ever seen, was responsible for running the class-action suit that got the villains released from Arkham City.
• Anachronism Stew: As with Batman: The Animated Series. Gotham has the 1930s-1940s gothic art-deco architecture, clothing from the 1940s-1950s, 1960s-era yellow cabs, and other cars from the 1970s. Further, the police have 1980s black-and-white cruisers and uniforms, and the villains use 2010s assault rifles.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Mr Freeze's City Story indicates that Nora is at least partially conscious despite being cryogenically frozen since it's told from her point of view.
  • Scarecrow ends up injected with enough of his Fear Toxin to be left a speechless, quivering coward that can barely look left without being paralyzed in fear.
  • Possibly The Joker, depending on whether or not you believe it was actually The Joker's spirit or not that Batman threw into the jail cell in his mental Arkham Asylum. See Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane below.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: There are about ten separate characters you control, including Batman and his allies:
  • The opening has you play, in first-person, GCPD Officer Owens, who briefly patrols a retro bar, observes everyday life in the city, and guns down the patrons in a chemical-induced panic attack.
  • The dual-play mechanic allows you to switch over and play as an AI companion in the middle of battle. It's flashy and makes quick work of enemies, but it's only available in specific areas when there's a mission there. Occasions include any part of the Penguin's side mission (where Nightwing dual-plays), the Riddler's puzzles (where you dual-play with Catwoman), and the Panessa Studios level (where Robin acts as a dual-play partner).
  • The DLCs allow you to play as Harley Quinn, Red Hood, Batgirl in story missions as well as extra story missions dealing with Batman's Allies (Robin, Nightwing, Catwoman).
  • A flashback early on has you play as Commissioner Gordon as Batman introduces him to one of his secret bases.
  • Azrael's side-mission involves him having to pass tests set by Batman to prove his worth as a successor. You play as Azrael during these tests.
  • In one side-mission, Batman changes into his Bruce Wayne persona to enter Wayne Enterprises, who has none of the same equipment or combat abilities as Batman. Unless the player notices the slight facial scarring or the somewhat off voice, the fact that it's really Hush may not be evident until he finally assaults Lucius Fox for his retinal scan.
  • There's also another character exclusively playable in the final part of the campaign: the hallucinated Joker, armed with a giant shotgun in first person.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Among the new alternate costumes for Batman in Knight are an unblemished version of the suit he wears from most of the game, Justice League 3000, the Michael Keaton Batsuit, his costume from the Gotham Knight short "Field Test", Zur-en-Arrh, Dick Grayson's second Batsuit^note Dick's batsuit during Prodigal was the same costume Bruce was wearing at the time, Flashpoint (DC Comics), The Dark Knight, and a modified version of the Beyond suit. Returning costumes include his costumes from Asylum and Origins, TDKR, Year One, Batman Incorporated, Noel, his first appearance costume, the Neal Adams suit, and the Adam West suit. In December 2023, the costume from The Batman (2022) was added.
  • Robin's alternate costumes include Tim's classic and One Year Later costumes, and Dick's costumes from the New 52 and Batman (1966).
  • Nightwing's alternate costumes include his New 52 costume and the costume from City.
  • Catwoman's alternate costumes include her purple costume from the 1990s as well as her costume from the '60s Batman show.
  • A later update can allow players to play as Harley Quinn in her iconic jester outfit from the "A Matter of Family" DLC and swap Red Hood's outfit for another skin they had lying around: the Arkham Knight's outfit.
• Animal Theme Naming: The drones used by the Arkham Knight are all named after reptiles of some kind: venomous snakes for the tanks (Rattler, Mamba, Diamondback, King Cobra) and mythological creatures for the aerial drones (Dragon, Serpent).
• Antagonist Title: The game's subtitle, Arkham Knight, is the name of one of the main antagonists in the game.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • At one point, you have to scan some security camera footage to determine the right combination of numbers for a door's locking device. If you can't figure it out and keep getting wrong numbers, Batman will just punch the machine and make the door open.
  • If you die towards the end of some of the longer combat encounters - ie, having already KO'ed most of the opposition - you'll respawn into an alternate version with fewer enemies.
  • The Riddler will make a few of his challenges easier if you keep failing at them; during "Flight School", for example, he'll open part of a wall up, replacing the current jump you had to do with a much more achievable one.
  • Similarly, the player has to finish three laps to beat a Riddler course. That number doesn't reset if you fall short on a second or third lap- if you've successfully completed two laps and then fail on the third, you just have to complete one more, instead of going back to zero. Additionally, falling off the course or the Batmobile being destroyed doesn't trigger a game over screen, so you can get right back into the action.
  • When fighting the giant drill tank, you only have to complete each course individually. If Batman is killed, it merely resets you to the course you finished last. Similar circumstances apply to the battle with the Cloudburst tank, with the game creating a checkpoint after you complete each phase of the battle.
  • During the showdown with Johnny Charisma, it is possible to defuse every bomb except one while hiding behind it.
  • If you perform a fear takedown, but everyone but your initial target moves away before you can take them out, you keep your charge since you only took down one target. This doesn't apply if you just refuse to chain takedowns, everyone else must be unreachable.
  • During Predator challenges, floor grates that are in view of at least one enemy will be highlighted in red, showing the player where Batman can be spotted by the enemies.
  • If you just happen to stumble upon an Riddler trophy while roaming or accidentally solve a riddle while browsing in Detective Mode without the locations being unveiled, the Riddler informants won't reveal them on your map if you interrogate them so you don't waste time going after something you already found.
• Anti-Grinding: Unlike previous games where all the gadgets could be upgraded by instigating random street brawls, here XP is only earned with fights, objectives and upgrades necessary to advance the plot or side missions. Picking fights with random rioters, while likely fun and satisfying, earns no XP.
• Anyone Can Die: Since this is the last game in the series (at least as far as Rocksteady is concerned), they are free to start killing people. Joker, corporeally dead at the end of Batman: Arkham City, now exists as a cerebral infection, manifesting in hallucinations, taking over Batman's mind until he's finally overcome and "killed" for good. Poison Ivy dies. Black Mask is killed by Red Hood. Nora and Victor Fries leave Gotham with only days left to live, and either Nyssa Raatko or Ra's Al Ghul will die depending on a choice you make (though Ra's won't die immediately). And finally, Batman as the world knows him dies — whether Bruce himself dies is open to interpretation (it's unlikely but open-ended), but his days as Batman seem to be over. His legend, however, definitely lives on.
  • In the DLC, Nora Fries's cryochamber fails and she wakes up, then begs Victor to stop destroying himself to try and save her, but to let her live... which of course means she'll die.
• Apocalypse How: From the beginning, Scarecrow's fear toxin places Gotham at Regional Societal Collapse, leaving the streets almost deserted, except for thugs and militiamen. By the time the Cloudburst tank arrives, its activation and detonation of the Cloudburst bomb have raised the class up close to Planetary Species Extinction, where ash falls on the city, plants start to die off, and the streets are completely empty save for many Joker hallucination thugs, militia and tanks. Plus the fact that the blast was intended to spread the toxin across the entire American Eastern seaboard, had Batman not managed to contain and restrict it to Gotham. This will only remain until all the Cloudburst toxins are purified from Gotham, after which the class gets brought down again.
• Arc Words:
  • Gordon says the same thing twice, once at the beginning of the game when Joker is cremated, and again at the very end when Batman activates the Knightfall Protocol, blowing up Wayne Manor with himself and Alfred inside.
    "This is how it happened. This is how the Batman died."
  • Batman has two Fear Toxin-induced flashbacks to when the Joker hurt someone close to him, and both time the flashbacks end with the same menacing quote, one that motivates Batman to distance himself from his friends and families and descend further into paranoia.
    "[This is]/[You've seen] what happens when you drag your friends into this crazy little game of ours."
  • And repeatedly from Scarecrow:
    "There is no savior. No more hope. No more Batman."
  • And for Poison Ivy, even serving as Bookends:
    "Nature always wins".
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Attacks using clubs and bats ignore shields, stun batons, and brute armor that normally block standard attacks from Batman and co.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: After Batman talks to Firefly at the GCPD, we get this gem from the Joker:
  Joker: Look, Garfield, fire's great and all. But what about acid? Electricity? PLIERS!? Come on! Open your mind, man!
• Art Evolution: A lot of small details are different since previous installments — some due to being on a different generation of consoles, and others due to taking some inspiration from Batman: Arkham Origins, developed by a different studio.
  • Poison Ivy has a more natural human skin tone and a duller shade of red hair (due, in part, to the plant life of Gotham slowly dying).
  • Gordon has a slimmer face, similar to his younger Origins counterpart, and still has some brown hair left (versus white in prior games).
  • Joker's hair, despite being attached to his rotting corpse, is spikier and a darker shade of green, which reflects his appearance in Arkham Origins rather than his most recent in-universe appearance, Arkham City.
  • Killer Croc only appears briefly towards the end of the main game, but he looks even heavier and more animalistic, reflecting an exchange made in Origins that Croc's mutation is progressive and will continue throughout his life. However, he will be a villain in the Season of Infamy DLC.
  • Other things such as Batman's suits and vehicles are explained in the story as him always tinkering with new designs (the suit he starts the game with looks very close to the Asylum and City design, but actually has segmented armor similar to Origins).
• Artifact Title: The game makes a token effort to justify the Arkham Knight's moniker, so the subtitle fits in with the series' theme naming, but it's not particularly convincing since the Arkham Knight's connection to the Asylum is breezed right through, and he himself never actually explains why he took the name. This is meant to mask the Double-Meaning Title, as the Arkham Knight isn't the literal Arkham Knight character, but rather a symbolic title given to Batman over the course of this game as his sanity worsens.
• Artificial Brilliance: Enemies are much smarter than your ordinary Arkham thug.
  • Enemies will flee indoors if Batman gets inside his Batmobile.
  • Medics will stay out of the fight and either revive knocked-out enemies or charge up conscious enemies' armor, but they have a limited amount of revives.
  • Combat Experts will utilize their environment in some attacks, leaping off nearby walls or getting a boost from their allies to swipe down at Batman from above; naturally, Batman can counter them mid-air as well, jumping up and kicking them to the ground.
  • To an even bigger degree than the previous games, enemies will adapt to your takedown tactics (even given an in-story explanation!); use the grates for too long, and they'll flush you out with explosive charges, pick off single enemies and the rest will pair up, mooks will toss disabled weapons for other ones, sentry guns will be placed at your recurrent spots of attack, and so forth. They'll even adapt to rarer takedowns, like the ones involving ledges, and will take a page out of Mr Freeze's book and attack weak walls if they see an ally get taken out by one, or if the person contacting their headsets catches wise and informs them to do so.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Considering that Scarecrow no longer has any actual lips, he shouldn't be able to actually pronounce about half of the consonants of the alphabet. "B" and "p" sounds are the most egregious, but it's most noticeable with his trademark "fear" since his teeth and lips can't meet to create the "f" sound anymore - it's particularly visible in the video before Batman turns himself in to Scarecrow, where Scarecrow keeps saying "fear" and we can clearly see he's only moving his teeth.
  • As Batman explains to Gordon, the Panessa Studios inmates and as we later see, Batman are said to be suffering from a form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a prion infection that's basically the human variant of Mad Cow Disease, after getting a transfusion of Joker's mutated blood. Batman claims the strain is "mutated beyond anything on medical record" to explain why the inmates are mutating into different forms of Joker as Robin works on developing a cure. There are several problems with that:
    • All prion infections are caused when a specific protein in the nervous system misfolds in some way. ^note It's confusingly called the "prion protein" even when it's perfectly healthy. For reasons medical professionals don't understand, the body can't break this protein down like other misfolded proteins. This protein then causes the healthy proteins to fold into the misfolded kind, killing brain and nervous cells and causing increasing mental and neurological problems, until an inevitable death. While the mutation angle is there to Hand Wave CJD's real world lethality, prions can't mutate as they don't have DNA or RNA. If they had CJD they wouldn't mutate to resemble Joker, adopt his personality traits, or hallucinate his memories or his spirit as Batman did. They'd likely have already died within 8 months from the initial infection.
    • Ultimately, Batman cures himself by taking enough Fear Toxin to learn the Joker Hallucination's fears and symbollically lock him away in the recesses of Arkham Asylum's Extreme Isolation. Needless to say, one can't 'out-think' a prion infection, as it's a lethal buildup of diseased proteins, not a split personality trying to hijack the body.
• Artistic License – History: The Order of Saint Dumas claims they have watched over Gotham for more than five hundred years. This is quite a feat, considering the first permanent European settlements in America were established in the mid-16th century.
• Ascended Meme:
  • The oft-quoted and famous MY PARENTS ARE DEEAAAAAAD! meme actually gets a Shout-Out by Johnny Charisma during his original number, "Look Who's Laughing Now". The line itself manages to be both hilarious and a Kick the Dog moment rolled into one.
  • Some of the later trailers use the tagline "Be vengeance. Be the night. Be the Batman", referring to Bats' famous Badass Boast from the animated series. The phrase itself is used verbatim in the very last section of the game, as Batman's furious rebuke to Joker. For extra ascendedness, the original line was from the episode that introduced The Scarecrow in that series, whereas he's the Big Bad of the game.
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • King Cobra drones and the Arkham Knight's own tank are too strong to attack head-on, requiring 60mm cannon strikes at strategic targets on their chassis. But missiles also work.
  • In Batman's first face to face encounter with the Arkham Knight, the Arkham Knight tells his men to, instead of shooting the tempting gigantic target on his chest, a very specific set of points where Batman's armor is weakest.
  • Furthermore, during the encounter with the Arkham Knight in the Miagani Tunnels, the knight knocks Batman to the ground and puts a bullet in his stomach through an unarmored spot in the Batsuit.
• Audience Surrogate: Some brave soul has the balls to ask Two-Face the question we've all been wondering: if everything got split down the middle during his accident. In what's probably for the best, we don't get an answer (probably because said brave soul is the Joker, whom no one else can see or hear because he's in Batman's head).
• Awesome, but Impractical: Any Batmobiles that aren't just palette swaps of the original. They look awesome and can do anything the car mode of the normal Batmobile can, like cruise around Gotham or takedown APCs, but their inability to transform means they can't fight drones, use the winch, or power generators. Many missions are outright impossible unless you switch back to a normal Batmobile.
• Back-to-Back Badasses:
  • The Dual-Play Mechanic is all about this. You can switch in real-time in the middle of a fight between Batman and an AI Companion seamlessly, which will be Nightwing, Robin, or Catwoman.
  • This game is probably the first and only time this trope has been applied with a customized tank and giant plant monster, thanks to the uneasy alliance between Batman and Poison Ivy.
• Bad Boss: Scarecrow never tells his men that their equipment cannot protect them from his latest version of fear gas. He also doesn't give them nearly enough warning to get clear before he tries to disperse it.
• Bad Future:
  • At the very end of the game, a hallucination sequence shows exactly what Joker intends to do now he's taken over Batman’s body - killing all his fellow Rogues and Gordon before burning the city to the ground.
  • Immediately following that is a scene when it suddenly goes black, and when the Joker turns on the flashlight, he sees a bad future for him: darkened catacombs, crematorium and mausoleum getting smaller and smaller; his grave/monument being forgotten, overgrown with weeds and vandalized; the catacombs becoming dilapidated and empty; a line of candles leading to only Harley attending his wake at a shrine; an empty abandoned shed with news of the Joker being dead and forgotten in newspapers and radios (Batman's arch-nemesis is Penguin, which leads to a museum dedicated to their struggle, and Riddler and Harley are expecting a child together); a neglected cemetery with so many Batman statues appearing one by one; an abyss of further destruction with only a worn-out portrait of Batman fighting the Penguin; and finally, a hallway of deep blackness with only an exit switch that activates one of the hanging cells leading him to oblivion.
• Bag of Spilling:
  • Downplayed, unlike prior games Batman has most of his arsenal already available to him, including the line launcher, which as typically appeared partway through the campaign, although the REC, disruptor and Remote Hacking Device (which replaces the Cryptographic Sequencer) are not initially available and have to be acquired during the story, and the Freeze grenade also has to be acquired from the movie studios, though the player is never prompted to do so. The former three are somewhat of a justified, it is mentioned that Batman surrendered the REC to the GCPD after Arkham City while the RHD and Disruptor are new upgraded versions.
  • An unexplained one in New Game Plus, at the moment that Batman has to go and take control of the bridge from Bleake island to Miagani Island, the RHD disappears from Batman's itinerary and does not return until the airship sequence.
• Bait-and-Switch: During "A Friend in Need", Batman takes the underground elevator to his office in Wayne Tower. On that floor, the doors open to reveal that he changed out of the Batsuit to become Bruce Wayne. Actually, that's Hush, and the scene is a flashback showing how he captured Lucius.
  • In the late game, you observe a militia meeting with one of the soldiers wearing a suicide vest that explodes when the wearer is knocked unconscious. This is presented a lot like how special thugs like Medics and Drone Controllers are introduced, so you're led to believe that vest thugs will start appearing. Batman defuses the bomb and the vests never show up again.
• Balance Buff:
  • Some gadgets that only knocked down opponents in the previous game(s), such as explosive gel and snap flashes, can be upgraded to render them unconscious. Catwoman's previously lower armor is now on par with everyone else, and her caltrops regenerate. This is because predator challenges can have double or even triple the number of enemies when compared to the previous games (the record is 17 enemies). Using explosive gel on punch-through wood walls also now knocks opponents out.
  • As the DLC characters weren't originally playable outside of their DLC campaigns, the character selector update adds some new tricks, such as armor and knife dodge takedowns.
• Bank Robbery: In a classic bad guy move, Two-Face's men can be encountered plundering Gotham's three largest banks. You can head to each bank and take down all of Two-Face's men to finish his sidequest. Uniquely in the game, the bank's alarms are loud enough to prevent the robbers for hearing any of Batman's takedowns, allowing you to be as unstealthily as you like so long as armed enemies don't see you.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: The victims in the Perfect Crime sidequest seem to be arbitrarily missing their genitals, and the females don't appear to have breasts. Rather squickily justified when it's revealed that removing indications of sex is part of Pyg's 'perfection' process.
• Batman Gambit: Scarecrow's message warning about the fear gas bomb was one - he needed to get the city to evacuate in order to ensure that Ace Chemicals would be virtually empty, and he needed their facilities to make the bomb.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: The final Joker hallucination, culminating in locking him away in the deepest, darkest portions of his memories, where he'll never harm anyone again.
• Battle Trophy: Defeating and apprehending one of Batman's rogues adds some of their paraphernalia to the GCPD Evidence Room, such as Firefly's jetpack and flamethrower, or Two-Face's guns and coin.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: The militia invading Gotham and giving Batman the most problems has two leaders:
  • The Scarecrow, who leads the Villain Team-Up and is responsible for the bombs all over Gotham City. He does most of the planning and has the most to say, mainly about fear, hopes, myths, and bats.
  • The Arkham Knight, a new villain created for Rocksteady by Geoff Johns to be "the ultimate test for Batman". He's the one throwing tanks at Batman and he shows up to scuffle with Bats before making threatening him and fleeing to get more tanks ready.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Alongside the militia knocking down Gotham's door, Batman's own fear is damaging enough to name it as an antagonist, and one that isn't always there to help Scarecrow's army. The Joker hallucination created from Scarecrow's fear gas personifies this fear. At first, it just mocks and bullies Batman, but eventually tries a Split-Personality Takeover, planning to turn Batman into a reborn Joker.
• Big Damn Heroes: At the very end, when everything seems lost, Jason Todd / Arkham Knight resurfaces as the Red Hood and saves Batman from Scarecrow, giving him the chance to take down the Big Bad once and for all.
• The Big Guy:
  • Several Elite Mook types called "Brutes" which require extra effort to beat.
  • Albert "Goliath" King of the Joker Infected.
• Big Red Button: At one point in Riddler's sidequest, if you linger instead of going back to the orphanage, one of Riddler's billboard messages will tell Batman to get back there, or he'll push the big red button that'll detonate the explosive attached to Catwoman. He then says that he didn't need to make the button big and red, as he was perfectly capable of remembering where he put the detonation switch. But he says that explosives deserve a bit of theatrical flair.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Batman manages to bring an end to Scarecrow's rampage and save Gotham, but in the process was forced to reveal his identity before the public to save Robin. However, Bruce's fate is left unknown after Wayne Manor is destroyed by the Knightfall Protocol with him and Alfred in it.
  • Each of the team-up Most Wanted missions operates this way. In their endings, while the villain of the piece is apprehended, Batman notifies the person that this will be the last time they ever meet, signifying how he is well aware this is to be his last night as Batman and he will have to activate the Knightfall Protocol.
• Bizarrchitecture: Gotham City's road network makes no sense.
• The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: Both played straight and, strangely enough, inverted. During the fight with the opera killer Professor Pyg, he stays behind his operating table and throws knives at Batman while his minions attack. While it is noted that he is an expert knife thrower, butcher's knives are not exactly optimized for throwing. As for the inversion, successfully countering the knife throws means Batman catches the last knife and throws it back at the killer. However, Batman being Batman, consistently hits with the hilt.
• Blamed for Being Railroaded: At one point, Tim Drake (the current Robin) discovers Batman is infected with an incurable toxin that will transform him into a clone of the Joker and urges him to voluntarily be incarcerated while he deals with the situation. Choosing this causes a flashback to Jason Todd being tortured and murdered by the Joker, followed by being presented with the choice again. You have to lock Tim in the cell and be cursed out by him to continue — there's no option to take him with you as Alfred has repeatedly urged you to do. Barbara reams you out for it later.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: Toward the end of the game, when Scarecrow realizes that Batman is now immune to his fear toxin and prepares to shoot him between the eyes, a red laser points at the gun, and Jason Todd/Red Hood shoots the gun out of Scarecrow's hands as well as Batman's handcuffs.
• Book Ends:
  • With an event that happened before the events of the series actually. The beginning of the Batman franchise in general, and the Golden Ending to this game, both involve a rich family getting mugged in an alley. The difference here is that there's a mysterious successor to Batman (which is heavily implied to actually be Bruce himself after faking his death) protecting the family.
  • Also, the story ends where the series began: in Arkham Asylum. The scene where Batman is transported to the building and wheeled in by Scarecrow deliberately parallels both the beginning of, and the final fear gas hallucination in, Asylum, all the more because Joker, inside Batman, is strapped on the gurney as well.
  • Arkham Origins is chronologically the first chapter of the series, so both Batman's first and last encounter with the Joker end with a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. It also ends like how Origins and City (which saw the physical side of the feud end) did: the Joker singing during the start of the end credits.
  • The Cyrus Pinkney sub-quest reveals the beginning of the Cobblepot family's decline: Henry Cobblepot's more ambitious projects, including a munitions plant, were stopped by Cyrus and Solomon Wayne. In response, Henry tried to kill Cyrus with poisoned wine but failed as Cyrus survived thanks to Amadeus Arkham swapping the poisoned wine with a drugged wine he created. However, Cyrus, now quite vengeful, ran Henry over with a car. Penguin destroyed what was left of the family reputation when Batman and Nightwing stopped his gun-running operation, the Batmobile used to bring him to GCPD.
  • Arguably, the series ends the way it began - with the Joker being locked up in Arkham.
  • There is also the way this game began and ended: With an Unexpected Gameplay Change to a first-person shooter from the point of view of someone under Scarecrow's Fear Toxin. The controls are exactly the same.
  • On a meta-note, the final Batmobile skin for the final DLC package is the original cutscene only Arkham Asylum version of the Batmobile. Like the Calendar Man, it was there at the beginning and it is there at the end.
  • Among the final skins for Batman himself is the suit he wore in Arkham Asylum. Just like the Batmobile, it was there at the beginning, and now it's here at the end.
  • Ivy's interview tapes in Asylum say that her first supervillain attack on Gotham involved releasing thousands of poisonous spores. She dies releasing spores to cure a poison.
  • Killer Croc was introduced into the series as he came out of an elevator. The last we see of him as a villain is him entering an elevator as he's brought in at GCPD Headquarters.
  • Riddler's first appearance in the Arkham games was as an off-screen voice who insulted and manipulated the hero by radio until you defeated his plans, by which time the police captured him and interrupted him in the middle of a villainous speech. Riddler's final appearance in the Arkham games has Catwoman robbing him blind, destroying his robots, while Riddler helplessly tries to order his robots via his "one phone call" in Prison. By the time Selina wipes him out financially, you can hear Riddler being tased by Aaron Cash in the middle of a monologue.
  • One example depends on player choice: if you destroy the Lazarus Machine, then the first time we saw Ra's, he was a corpse in a morgue at Arkham Asylum; the last time we see Ra's, he's on his deathbed in police custody. The ending hearkens back to City as well, with Batman carrying Ra's' dying body away the same way he carried Joker out of the Monarch Theater.
• Boring, but Practical: The best way to rack up higher combos in the game isn't to use Batman's variety of gadgets, special attacks, or environmental takedowns, but to simply punch out your enemies. A critical strike from Batman's basic punch adds 3 to the combo meter (while most abilities add 1) and they can be executed much more quickly and reliably than any other form of attack.
• Born Lucky: One random mook line says that he was at Blackgate, Arkham Asylum, and Arkham City, but never even saw Batman once. Whether or not his luck finally runs out is up to you.
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: A variation; while on Simon Stagg's airship, Batman uses the Batsuit's tech to digitally mimic Stagg's fingerprints, allowing him to bypass biometric locks.
• Bragging Rights Reward: By fully completing both the main game and New Game Plus as well as all four Season of Infamy DLC missions in both difficulties, you unlock the Prestige Batsuit, which is essentially the standard Batsuit with a golden bat logo. Considering you need to do everything in the main story twice to unlock it, there isn't really much else to use it on, although it can still be used in the AR challenges and triggering the ending on New Game Plus.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: After Batman talks to Two-Face at the GCPD, we get this gem from an observer:
  "[Y]ou just bring out the best in everyone! Your enemies, your friends - even your bestest frenemies like Harv, here: He's at least halfway interesting these days and it's all thanks to you."
• Break Out the Museum Piece:
  • At one point, Batman is so desperate to find a trail after a car crash that he uses the Crime Scene Reconstructor for the first time in years. He never uses it again in the main game, though he uses it twice more in the Season of Infamy mission "Shadow War".
  • Batman is forced to reclaim the REC from the Evidence Lockup late in the main plot to aid him in securing the GCPD, although there's nothing stopping the player from smashing the case and taking it back whenever they wish.
• Break Them by Talking: Or rather, "Break Them by Singing"! When Batman confronts Johnny Charisma while he is out to dismantle the bombs, the villain delivers this breaking lecture in a Villain Song made for Black Comedy, about how the Joker's slowly gaining control of Batman's mind. And he damn near succeeds, too!
• Broken Aesop: The game postulates Batman should learn to trust his partners and not try to do everything himself. Except, Batman trusts Jim Gordon, Lucius Fox, and Alfred just fine. Also Oracle. Therefore, the only people he doesn't seem to trust are Nightwing and Tim Drake, which just seems bizarre unless it's to ensure that neither of them ended up like Jason. However, the game constantly shows Batman's allies getting into trouble and needing to be rescued, justifying Batman's desire to work alone in the field.
• Building Swing: Grappling to a perch roughly of the same elevation as the player character often causes Batman to fire his grappling hook up towards the nearest building and swing towards the perch, rather than directly firing his hook at the perch. This happens most often when grappling between gargoyles or street lamps.
• The Bus Came Back: The Scarecrow returns after being absent from Arkham City, paying off his encoded message in that game.
• But Thou Must!:
  • During the sequence where Robin puts Batman in quarantine, he has to choose between willingly locking himself up and putting Robin in the cell instead. No matter how many times the player chooses to confine Batman, the Joker will always show up to chastise Batman and replay the scenario until Batman makes the 'right' choice.
  • Averted for the first time in the series with the Last-Second Ending Choice of the "Heir to the Cowl" sidequest, which changes Azrael's fate and possibly, depending on how you interpret it, the game's ending itself.
• Call-Back:
  • The beginning of Asylum, where Batman brings the Joker into the asylum while strapping him to a gurney, is brought to mind in some eerie parallels late in the game.Scarecrow transporting Batman to the ruins of Arkham Asylum and wheeling him down the halls in a gurney It's all the more potent since Batman, exhausted and almost broken, has almost lost his fight against the Joker's blood.
  • The cell that Batman locks the Joker hallucination into at the end of the game has the same design as the cell Joker used to deliver his first Titan henchman in Asylum.
• Came Back Strong: Disappearing after the events of Asylum, after being maimed by Croc, Scarecrow apparently stitched himself back together, refined his fear toxin to truly nightmare-inducing levels, and a formerly second-tier member of Batman's rogues gallery almost single-handedly manages to start a war in Gotham and be the absolute greatest threat Batman has ever faced (albeit with SIGNIFICANT assistance).
• The Cameo:
  • Victor Zsasz is visible on the clocktower's security cameras early in the game but is never confronted in-game.
  • Lex Luthor makes a voice-only cameo on Bruce Wayne's answering machine, expressing an interest in buying a portion of Wayne Enterprises. "A man like you doesn't need an Applied Sciences division, he needs another billion dollars."
  • Kate Kane makes an appearance in her own answering machine message as well, mentioning keeping up appearances and her engagement to Maggie Sawyer.
  • In a very easy-to-miss one, examining Oracle's computer late in the game shows her chatting to Huntress and advising her to stay on the mainland with "BC".
  • Calendar Man appears in the ending
• Car Fu: If thugs in cars spot Batman on foot, they might try to run him down. It's possible to counter this; Batman jumps on the hood of the car, plants a glob of explosive gel, jumps off, and detonates it.
• Carnival of Killers: In series tradition, you once again fight through a cavalcade of Batman's rogues gallery. This time around includes Harley Quinn, Two-Face, Penguin, Riddler, Deathstroke, Firefly, Hush and the Scarecrow, along with new additions such as Man-Bat, Deacon Blackfire, and Professor Pyg. Though Poison Ivy does appear, her part in the plot is more beneficial.
• Casting Gag:
  • Garrick Hagon voices Henry Adams, who turns out to be tainted by the Joker's blood and even earns admiration from the hallucinatory Joker. He previously played Biggs Darklighter, the childhood friend of Mark Hamill's other famous role.
  • Commissioner Gordon is voiced by Jonathan Banks, whose most iconic role was also involved with law enforcement.
• Cast of Snowflakes: The game has a huge cast of main and supporting villains as well as minor characters, and all of them have unique models; the GCPD Lockup has quite a few unique NPCs, despite most of them being ostensibly Red Shirts. Even Killer Croc, who only appears in one scene and is visible for under 25 seconds, gets a wholly unique, radically different character model with tail physics, rather than a re-skinned version of his City appearance.
• Changed My Mind, Kid: After seemingly running off to enjoy her freedom, Catwoman returns to help Batman take down the Riddler during his boss fight. Then again, this being Catwoman, are we surprised?
• Character Shilling: Or more Mechanic Shilling. In the Voice Actors trailer, the actors deviate from talking about voicing their characters to hype up how great the Batmobile is.
• Charged Attack:
  • Building up your combo adds to a blue bar that when full, let's you either use a powered up version of your normal gadgets (like making your batarangs explosive) or using a special combo takedown.
  • Holding down the stun button causes Batman to do his ultimate stun attack, which knocks normal enemies off their feet and stuns Elite Mooks.
• Chekhov's Gun: In the first appearance of the Arkham Knight, he reveals his in-depth knowledge of Batman by explaining to his men that the big bat symbol on his chest is the most heavily armored part of the suit, which is why he has a target on his center of mass. Later on in the game, Scarecrow gets Commissioner Gordon to shoot Batman, but he deliberately aims for the bat symbol, knowing that this would result in Batman not being seriously hurt.
• Climactic Elevator Ride: One occurs after Batman's last encounter with the Arkham Knight, as he and Gordon prepare to confront Scarecrow on the roof of the Militia's base. During this, Gordon remembers comforting Bruce after his parents were murdered, and calls Bruce by his name while telling them that they'd do anything for their families.
• Clothing Damage: Wouldn't be an Arkham game without it. Although this time around, alternate skins are selectable without having to beat the game first, and they're all immune. When you do beat the game, your reward is an undamaged version of the default suit.
• Clownification: It's revealed that receiving a transfusion of the Joker's Titan-contaminated blood resulted in the recipient's brain being infected with a prion disease that gives them bright green eyes, green hair, bleach-white skin, and a propensity for murder, and since Batman was infected in the previous game, there's also a race against time to find a cure.
• Cold Ham: In a contrast to being a Large Ham in Asylum the Scarecrow definitely is this. He never raises his voice and speaks in a Creepy Monotone, but his word choice is every bit as over the top as you'd expect from a comic-book supervillain obsessed with fear. And he's all the more terrifying for it.
• Collapsing Lair: Upon defusing Scarecrow's fear bomb, the Ace Chemical Plant he took over begins to fall apart and Batman has to race out in the Batmobile before it explodes.
• Combination Attack:
  • During Dual-Play segments, switching characters when your Takedown maneuver is ready has the characters perform a special attack on a nearby enemy as you switch. Generally, the person you're playing as tosses the enemy in the air and the other one jumps in a knocks them out with a single blow.
  • If you're fighting goons with the Batmobile nearby, Batman can launch a nearby enemy into the air and have the Batmobile shoot them with one of its slam rounds for an instant knockout.
  • Late in the main game and early in the Nightwing DLC, the player character can throw enemies into environmental hazards (fences that can be electrified, vents that can shoot steam etc.) and have Mission Control remotely activate them for a technological combination attack.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: This time around, Bruce Wayne looks a lot more like Ben Affleck. This is due to the actor being signed on to play Batman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and other movies in the DC Cinematic Universe. Riddler's new design resembles Charlie Sheen and Robin looks like Eminem.
• Comically Missing the Point: A lot of the mook chatter, such as after Batman has been unmasked that if Bruce Wayne is really Batman, then who is playing Bruce Wayne?
• Computer Virus:
  • One of the upgrades for the Batmobile is a virus that can overwrite the drones' IFF systems, causing them to target each other.
  • Batman also uses a virus to open up the casings of the Militia's armored bombs so he can disarmed them via controlled explosions.
• Conflicting Loyalty: Barbara Gordon tells her father, Commissioner Gordon, she's evacuated the city, while actually staying to aid Batman as Oracle. Bruce feels conflicted about enabling this deception, while Barbara notes that her father is overprotective because he still blames himself for her losing the use of her legs.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!:
  • If you take too long between Riddler's challenges he will send out a broadcast urging or threatening you to hurry up. He will also send out messages as long as there are unsolved riddles, which become pretty annoying when you have to listen to them over and over as you're moving about the city collecting riddles.
  • Subverted at first near the end of the main story by Scarecrow: when he has Robin and Gordon hostage and is waiting for Batman's surrender, should you decide to dally about he will allow it, taunting that Batman should take as much time as he needs to accept his imminent demise and tour the city he's failed. Is eventually played straight as his messages get more impatient the longer the player waits, though he doesn't lose his calm. However, nothing happens.
  • IF you try to do all of the side missions before advancing with the main story, some side missions have parts that only activate after passing a certain point, mandating you to continue the plot in order to finish the side mission.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Arkham Knight has a few nods to Batman: Arkham Origins:
    • The Batcave shown in the "Father to Son" trailer looks very similar to the one in Origins, specifically the Batcomputer. The same can be said for the brief shot in the "All Who Follow You" trailer, which shows a brief shot of Alfred, who looks exactly the same as in Origins, but with glasses.
    • The new Batsuit looks like an updated version of his Arkham Origins Batsuit, with strapped on chest armor, a helmet-Like cowl and using a mixture of metallic plates over a bodysuit.
    • The simulation-style Evidence Scanner is used one time to scan a car crash.
    • Anarky tags can be seen in multiple locations and there's a display case in the GCPD evidence lockup that contains his mask and jacket from Origins. Some of the thugs can also wonder what became of him - Cash says he's being held in a prison outside of Gotham, since the government isn't fond of anarchists.
    • Several thugs reference the riot at Blackgate.
    • Electrocutioner's Shock Gloves are also in evidence, and the voice recording by Cash not only explains the events they were used for but theorizes why Batman doesn't use them in later games; he turned them in to the police because he liked beating up punks the old-fashioned way ^note Batman also tracked 'Cutioner by the EM frequency that the gloves give off, so maybe they were a security risk.. That could also be interpreted as a Take That! to Origins since many believed the Shock Gloves made fights too easy.
    • Firefly was confirmed in the "Gotham is Mine" trailer, and looks similar, but not identical, to his Origins counterpart. Crispin Freeman is also reprising his role as Firefly from Origins and mentions specifically how he was defeated by Batman in their last encounter (being strung up on the Pioneer bridge.)
    • Commissioner Gordon's new design looks like an aged version of his Origins look, still having some brown hair as opposed to having all white hair like in City before.
    • Deathstroke appears in the game driving a tank as part of a job to kill Batman. He references the last time they fought, and also when he ejects from the tank, he's bearing the exact same costume design and voice actor (Mark Rolston) as Deathstroke from Origins.
    • Black Mask in the Red Hood DLC is wearing the same outfit he had in Origins and, as with Freeman as Firefly and Rolston as Deathstroke, he is reprised by Brian Bloom. ^note This is why some fans believe he is not dead since it was established in that game that he was known to use Body Doubles.
  • Bruce's new suit in this game contains elements previously seen in the "Armoured" versions of his prior costumes.
  • Harley Quinn's outfit mashes both her previous outfits. She wears her Naughty Nurse Outfit jacket from Batman: Arkham Asylum over her biker-chick outfit from Batman: Arkham City.
  • Two-Face still has the scars that Catwoman gave him in Arkham City. Catwoman herself has burns on her forehead and cheek after Two-Face blew up her apartment.
  • Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and South Gotham (from Arkham Origins) are visible in Gotham's skyline.
  • Arkham Knight opens with a brief reimagining of the Joker's cremation from Arkham City: Endgame. Shortly afterwards, "Only You (And You Alone)" by The Platters starts playing on the jukebox at Pauli's Diner, a song the Joker got to cover in Arkham City. Near the end, when Joker has taken over Batman's body and is hunting the other criminals, "Only You" is playing again on a gramophone.
  • Pauli's Diner shows up in the opening cutscene of both this game and Arkham Asylum.
  • The stretch Poison Ivy does while walking out of Scarecrow's gas chamber directly mirrors the cutscene where she leaves her containment cell in Asylum.
  • The Evidence Room in Gotham PD has trophies and mementos from the various villains Batman's taken down throughout the games, like Mad Hatter's bunny mask, Electrocutioner's gloves, and Deadshot's rifle.
  • Scarecrow's mask from Asylum can be seen on the floor of the Ace Chemicals mixing chamber.
  • While hanging around on the rooftops, one of Batman's old friends guesses that the Arkham Knight might secretly be Clayface, before dismissing it since it's been done.
  • The opening of Asylum also gets referenced in a quick hallucination in Panessa Studios, as you go down the elevator, the Arkham PA system chimes, and suddenly you're in the elevator with Joker, strapped to a gurney.
  • Before his boss fight, Albert King asks whether he should start with "Getting Your Ass Kicked 101". Joker (or rather, Clayface disguised as Joker) made the same taunt in Arkham City, just before his boss fight.
  • In Asylum, the Joker used "honey, I'm home!" as the cue for Harley to take down Arkham's security systems. Here, it's used by Henry Adams to take down Batman's security systems.
  • After Scarecrow takes away a hostage, he leaves a stylized image of his face above where the hostage was. This symbol, which uses an upside-down bat symbol as its "frown", actually appeared first in Arkham Asylum in the third Scarecrow hallucination.
  • After Batman is injected with fear toxin at Arkham Asylum, the Joker hallucination addresses Killer Croc as "Croc, old boy!" He does the same in the Arkham Asylum game.
  • After completing the main story in Arkham City, you can occasionally hear an enemy say "Blackgate? isn't it a shopping mall now?" Indeed, you can find billboards advertising the Blackgate Mall.
  • Some Enemy Chatter has one of the Arkham Knight's soldiers talk about finding a Riddler trophy and trying to take it as a souvenir, only for it to give him a painful electric shock. The same thing happened in Arkham City if you attempted to pick up a Riddler Trophy meant for Catwoman while playing as Batman.
  • A new type of Riddler sidequest involves thugs with bombs in their heads that are disarmed using electricity.
  • In the post-game, you can find the same thugs that Bruce beat up to escape from Penguin in Arkham City commenting that Bruce's punches were rather familiar.
  • Likewise, the Golden Ending has Vicki Vale outside Wayne Manor reporting on Bruce Wayne's recent actions before something bad happens to him, much like the opening of Batman: Arkham City.
  • In the Knightfall ending, Gordon is seen smoking from the initialized pipe that Batman used to track him in Arkham Asylum.
  • After showing Harley's original costume on display in Asylum, she's finally seen wearing it herself in the "A Matter of Family" DLC.
  • The crates you have to destroy on Stagg's airship appear to be the exact same design as the boxes found in Scarecrow's secret barge in City with a ring attached for the batclaw.
  • Arkham Asylum ends in a Sequel Hook with Batman rushing off to fight Two-Face, who is robbing a bank. In Arkham Knight, the Two-Face side quest involves him robbing banks.
• Contractual Boss Immunity:
  • Elite Mooks and boss enemies can't have their weapons disarmed by the disruptor. In the case of the elite mooks, the game justifies it by having Batman say that disrupting a minigun would cause it to backfire and kill the user, but there's no such justification for why the Arkham Knight's guns can't be disrupted.
  • Averted at the end of Two-Face's sidequest. When you face him and his thugs in predator mode, gameplay-wise Two-Face is treated as just any other mook in the game and can be taken down with a single takedown. Players using Detective Vision for the whole encounter may not even realise they've taken him out!
  • Downplayed with the King Cobra drones, which can be taken out by a Level 2 Missile Barrage or being hacked with the drone virus. They are immune to the EMP, however.
• Convenient Weakness Placement: Justified in the drill machine fight which takes place in the middle of excavations where you have to lure the machine to chase you and ram into huge tunneling explosive charges.
• Cool Car:
  • In this game you can drive around in Bruce's high-tech, jet black Batmobile. Later in the game, you get a skin for it that hasn't been painted black yet, but it's just as effective in jetting around the city.
  • The Jokermobile from the final hallucination - not only is it a green-and-purple Batmobile with an open, laughing mouth (complete with teeth and tongue) for a front bumper, giant chattering teeth for tires, and gloved hands over the front fenders but its special combo move, "The Killing Joke", unleashes a Macross Missile Massacre that blows the entire area into flaming rubble.
  • Besides the regular car, there are DLC skins for cars from the Batman movies, such as the Tumbler or the classic Tim Burton one.
• Counter-Attack: As per usual for the Arkham games, this is an essential piece of free-flow combat. The only real change to the standard formula is that the player can now hold the counter button to have Batman throw an enemy away, launching them into other enemies and earning extra points. However, it is an Averted Trope when it comes to the Batmobile, which can only dodge.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • Not only did Batman commission a Batmobile that can take out a multi-billion dollar army of tanks, he commissioned two in case something happened to the first one, and had the backup get all the upgrades that he ordered for the primary.
  • The Arkham Knight is prepared for all of Batman's usual tricks and has counter-measures ready throughout the game.
• Crazy Sane: Batman defeats Scarecrow by unleashing the Joker personality in his mind and having it be defeated by the Fear Toxin. In other words, Batman stays sane by going crazy.
• Creator Cameo: Several Rocksteady employees appear on wanted posters in the GCPD. Game director Sefton Hill is one of the patrons at Pauli's Diner.
• Creepy Changing Painting: After getting dosed with Fear Toxin for the first time and getting his Joker hallucinations, Batman sees several billboards (and statues) throughout Gotham change to ones adding Joker. Moving away the camera from them might restore them back to normal...until you move the camera away again only for the art to revert to its Jokerfied version.
• Credits Montage: The background of the final credits are a slideshow of key events from all three Rocksteady Arkham games.
• Critical Annoyance: A first in the series. Whenever Batman and/or the Batmobile are within low, blinking red danger levels of health, two variations of looping beep noise play for the two respectively (Batman, for instance, has a heart monitor style version, complete with a flatline for when he dies in combat).
• Cryptic Conversation: When Batman confronts Johnny Charisma, Johnny remarks that there's room onstage for two, emphasizing the number, and insists Batman come up with him — in other words, this is a private performance, and if he ever sees Robin in the act of disarming the explosives, he'll detonate the entire stage.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check:
  • Simon Stagg laments that Scarecrow has the potential to create what could be a cure for most psychological problems, which would easily net him many Nobel Prizes and a considerable fortune, but he's focused on using his knowledge only for cruelty and revenge. This realization is why Stagg tried to betray Scarecrow in an attempt to cut his losses. This is justified in Scarecrow's case, as he has an obsession with fear and usually finds no other meaning in his life than experiencing and causing fear; he wouldn't really want to give people something that helps them feel better and is perfectly fine with being a supervillain/terrorist, rather than wanting to change the world in a positive way. Subverted, too, in that while Stagg mentions the pharmaceutical applications of a retrofitted fear toxin, he also intended to sell his refined version as a weapon of war to whichever opposing army paid more — in other words, his methodology is actually worse than Scarecrow's.
  • And as always, Riddler would spend his efforts and intelligence creating elaborate tests for Batman instead of doing good, such as constructing massive racetracks and making extensive modifications to them literally overnight.
• Cutscene Drop: Defied. As part of a new focus on narrative, Rocksteady went out of their way to ensure that wherever possible, players would be able to transition into and out of cutscenes seamlessly.
• Cutscene Incompetence:
  • Batman encounters both Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight face to face several times, and the two villains ALWAYS get away. While the Knight is understandable, what's stopping Batman from just breaking the Scarecrow's leg or punching him one time in the face to insta-KO him?
  • When Batman discovers that Henry isn't immune to Joker's blood and has shot the other infected. He's simply unable to attack and disarm the geriatric standing a few feet in front of him, even when Henry turns his back to Batman.
• Cutting the Knot: If you mess up the code to unlock the door to Johnny Charisma's lair too many times, Batman simply punches the lock and breaks it.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • A great many of the commands in the game are different from their counterparts from Arkham City, some of which are also different from their counterparts in Arkham Asylum. You'll probably find yourself summoning the Batmobile when you want to turn on Detective Vision for a while (Detective Vision is now activated by pressing "up" on the D-Pad) and you have to press L3 to detonate explosive gel. If you are a PlayStation gamer that didn't play Origins, you'll have a hard time getting used to the fact that the triggers are now used for gadgets. The most frustrating of all is most likely the gadget selection wheel, which required you to press the down button, rotate the right stick to find the gadget you want (and they've changed positions again) then press down again to select it. In the PC version, the special combo moves have also been changed, now being used by pressing alt+(1,2,3 or 4), meaning you may occasionally summon the batmobile while meaning to quickly take down someone, as E was the key for the standard special combo takedown. In addition, the gadget slot previously used for the remote-controlled batarang (+/=) is now assigned to the remote control for the batmobile. You may end up controlling the batmobile when you just want to throw a batarang.
  • The batmobile controls are also a little tricky. In racing games (and in many games in which you drive cars) the button for brakes is L2/LT. You probably engaged the battle mode a few times when all you wanted was reduce speed. In the PC version, if you're used to racing games that have some kind of 'boost', you may end up slowing down when you mean to engage the afterburner, or alternatively, use the batmobile's quick dodge feature when you mean to drift.
• Darker and Edgier: The ESRB has given Arkham Knight an M rating, citing scenes where people can shoot hostages and unarmed enemies, someone getting a car tire pressed on their head for torture and a torture scene with a "bloody operating table". Respectively, the final hallucination sequence gives the player the option to kill a hostage, Batman interrogating a Militia soldier for the Arkham Knight's location by pressing the Batmobile's tire on his head and the last part of the Opera Killer sidequest (which has him mutilating someone on a table). According to the developers, the rating was not entirely intentional, and is mostly a result of the story going to much darker places than the previous entries.
• Darkest Hour:
  • The game's plot is this for the entire Arkham series. All of Batman's foes have joined together under Scarecrow with the singular goal of taking Batman down for good. Most of Gotham has been evacuated, the city's in flames, criminals are running loose in the streets, the cops are overwhelmed, and an Evil Counterpart to Batman is rampaging through the city.
  • Within the game itself, all hope seems lost for Batman when Scarecrow captures and injects him with fear toxin, breaking him down mentally and allowing the Joker to take him over. However, Scarecrow is frustrated by Batman's apparent lack of fear and injects him again, inadvertently defeating the Joker and letting the real Batman return.
• Dark Reprise: A sad version of Joker's song is heard in the end credits (spoilers), lamenting both the end of the series and Joker himself being locked away in the depths of Batman's psyche.
• Dartboard of Hate: The Gotham cops are apparently in the habit of playing darts with the Most Wanted posters.
• Deadpan Snarker: Catwoman's sarcasm is taken up to eleven.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • In this version of Man-Bat's origin story Kirk Langstrom accidentally ends up killing his wife, Francine, during his transformation. He's heartbroken by the revelation when he returns to normal. However, this is possibly subverted as returning to the lab sees that her body is gone and the words "Forever my love" written on a screen; as Francine is a Man-Bat herself in the comics, this leaves ambiguity as to whether she really died or not in this game.
  • Poison Ivy sacrifices herself by overexposing her body to Scarecrow's toxin (via her giant tree) in order to save the city.
  • Black Mask is kicked out of a window at the end of Red Hood's DLC mission.
• Deconstruction:
  • The final Joker hallucination takes apart Video Game Cruelty Potential; first, you have a Jokerized Batmobile that fires live rounds and missiles galore, which feels like Catharsis Factor after the "non-lethal" Batmobile you play in the entire game. But then, you play as Joker in First Person Mode with a shotgun and kill defenseless people lying on the ground while Joker mocks their deaths with pithy comments — not all that different from regular FPS games with wise-cracking main characters who toss off one-liners as they murder people in thousands, only here it's shown to have no point beyond pure sadism or self-preservation. As well, it's only really funny to the Joker, as the horrified screams of his victims prevent any satisfaction to be had. The Batman statues spawning endlessly at the corner of your vision also drives home how repetitive this form of gameplay is, with the same enemies appearing in endless waves, existing only to be shot at.
  • The game takes several aspects of Batman to their logical conclusion. Batman's refusal to kill or allow people to die results in the Arkham City inmates suing Gotham in the wake of Protocol 10. We're never given any exact amounts, but a cop early states that "Protocol 10 wiped this city clean" and a thug actually hopes the city tries to kill them again so he can pay off his mortgage. The fireman sub-mission references layoffs as the result of budget cuts, likely because of the lawsuit. The Arkham Knight and Scarecrow want revenge on Batman, which is related to his letting Joker live: Scarecrow was mauled by Killer Croc during Joker's takeover of Arkham Asylum and the Arkham Knight was tortured by the Joker. Also, a large part of the plot also stems from the fallout of Joker's tainted blood plot Arkham City.
  • Batman's Secret-Identity Identity and his inability to resolve his Bruce Wayne and Batman persona finally leads him to lose both of them when Scarecrow forces him to reveal his identity to the world. His conflicting feelings about wanting to work alone and not being able to trust his partners ultimately causes a wedge between them and actually compromises their safety. In the end, Batman cuts off all remaining ties to his former life and goes underground, the logical end for someone with his guilt and trust issues.
  • The game also takes apart Batman and Joker, and their impact on Gotham, as well as arguably the impact of any one person's legacy. Joker is dead but the hallucination of him does not take this very well and wants to possess Batman. He does but at the worst possible time as Scarecrow then injects him with fear toxin and shows him that no matter how many people Joker killed or how much chaos he caused, inevitably he will be forgotten and people move on. Despite Joker's Straw Nihilist Large Ham tendencies, Joker does not take this well. As for Batman, shortly after, he is forced to (seemingly) kill himself to protect those he loves when his Secret Identity is revealed and in the Golden Ending, it is shown that the city has moved on without Batman as well (though it seems like someone or something might be a new Batman in the ending).
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If the first Riddler race is completed before the first visit to Pinkney Orphanage, the first key will lower the number on Catwoman's Explosive Leash by 2, thereby averting Unintentionally Unwinnable. The Riddler will also make a few comments on how Batman is starting his gauntlet earlier than anticipated.
  • Similarly, the answer to one of the riddles the bomb collar around Catwoman's neck. If you don't scan it before she takes it off, you can still do so when its lying on the floor instead; ensuring you can still answer every riddle.
  • For a minor example, how you respond to the "demons" in the Pauli's Diner sequence will change an incidental scene in Police Headquarters where two other cops discuss how Officer Owens is coping. If you shot at the "demons", Owens will be a broken man because he realized that he killed innocent people, and the two officers explain that he's going to be fired and sympathetically wonder what'll happen to him afterwards. If you hold your fire, Owens will be rattled but still sane and his fellow cops will be amazed that he managed to keep his head even when dosed with fear toxin. If you fired "warning shots" (aimed anywhere except directly at the "demons"), the officers will remark how lucky it is that Owens didn't hit anyone.
  • If you don't take on the Professor Pyg sidequest as soon as it is available, Batman will correctly state that the dead body he finds isn't the one Cash told him about if he stumbles across an undiscovered one of the map.
  • Since Batman can pick up the REC before the plot demands it, his line stating that it will be useful changes depending on whether or not he has it already: he’ll either say that it’s in the GCPD lockup and that he should get it, or he'll say he already retrieved it.
  • Batman has tons of lines that can only be heard if you're trying to do the wrong thing at the right time, usually involving gadgets. At ACE Chemicals, he'll tell you it's a bad idea to drop the elevator you're standing in. After the first Penguin stash, Batman will be ambushed by soldiers and sentry guns, but if you try to use smoke instead of the car to get past them, Batman will tell you sentries can see through smoke. If you try to enter the clock tower after Barbara's kidnapping without retrieving Jim Gordon, Batman will say it's a crime scene that Jim will want to see undisturbed.
  • Trying to continue the Killer Croc mission while Nightwing has been captured by Penguin will have Batman remark that he needs Nightwing to continue.
  • Attempting to hack a Riddler console with the Remote Hacking Device while in the midst of a predator section will net Batman an angry message from the Riddler, who refuses to share Batman's attention with someone else, demanding he finish clearing the room first.
  • Until you get the bridges down on Founders Island, certain side missions that mandate having the Batmobile, such as getting Professor Pyg, or the explosive devices and APC are unavailable, as Batman notes the Batmobile cannot auto navigate to Founders Island due to the bridges being up.
  • Overlapping with Anti-Frustration Feature, some of the Riddler trophies are rewarded for completing a race within the overworld of Gotham City. These races are initiated by stepping on a pressure pad for about two or three seconds, but it's entirely possible to come across the trophies before finding the pad. The developers anticipated this, and as a result, every single trophy of this kind has coordinates to its respective pad spraypainted next to it, which the player can use to find the pad and initiate the race.
  • Using the Batmobile Remote during the battle with the Arkham Knight in his HQ will result in it displaying an error message seen nowhere else in the game. This is because the Batmobile was destroyed in the previous battle and Batman hasn't gotten his substitute yet.
  • Militia soldiers with detective vision tracker will react if they detect Batman while he's standing right behind them.
  • When Oracle/Barbara Gordon is using a computer in the GCPD, looking at her in Detective Mode will properly show that her spine is broken. Similarly, Detective Mode will show that a thug Batman attacked earlier in the evening still has a broken wrist.
  • During a segment where Batman is accompanied by Robin, he'll be attacked by Christina Bell, one of the people infected with Joker's tainted blood. Normally, the attacker will scratch and claw at Robin's face, but it's possible to counter the attack before it happens. The dialogue between Batman and Robin afterward is different depending on whether or not she successfully scratched him.
  • If the player chooses to complete the main story before doing the Hush side mission, Batman and Lucius will have different dialogue.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Batman doesn't pursue his relationship with Catwoman, and breaks up with her in the end.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Poison Ivy dies in Batman's arms as he comforts her in her final moments, admitting that she was a good person deep down.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Batmobile can be pretty hard to control the first time you drive it due to its high speed, sensitive controls, and lack of upgrades. But once you get the hang of it, it justifies why it is considered the most important tool in Batman's arsenal; most attacks that don't come from militia tanks barely scratch it, you can instantly incapacitate enemies by just running into them, you can zip around the city in a couple of minutes to get to objectives, and you can launch yourself into a glide to quickly get from the streets to the rooftops.
  • Harley is pretty difficult to play as in Predator challenges due to having an insane number of drawbacks: she can't grapple (with most Predator challenges nearly requiring the ability to grapple), has a limited pool of moves to work from, and, most importantly, can't Stealth Takedown anyone- only Loud Takedowns for her. As a tradeoff, her gadgets are pretty powerful and her super mode that allows her to dodge bullets and One-Hit Kill enemies makes her pretty strong in the right hands.
  • The "High difficulty" in combat challenge maps. Sure, the challenge becomes harder without counter icons, but you get a hefty bonus score (Your max combo x 100) after every round, and it can add a considerable amount of points on the long run. It's equal to the "Perfect freeflow" bonus, so you can get a nice bonus even if you lose your combo during the challenge/wave.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Under normal circumstances, you don't get the Remote Electrical Charge until you're near the end of the game. But as it's in the GCPD lockup and the cops won't do anything to stop Batman, there's nothing preventing you from punching the glass out and grabbing it early. The same can be said for the Freeze Blast, which is located near the Batsuit capsule in the Panessa Studios' quarantine lab. Both gadgets give you more options in combat early on, and the REC can be upgraded for an area-of-effect stun usable with a full combo meter.
  • Since DLC challenges are always available and give you upgrade points, it's possible to grind some points with the already upgraded DLC characters, even before starting the story. ^note If you do so, you'll need to leave and re-enter story mode after gaining control of Batman for them to register.
  • In the normal gameplay, the Riddler's sidequest begins fairly early into the game, you can complete most of it right when you unlock it (fully completing it, not counting the boss at the end, only requires Batmobile access to all three islands, which takes a bit more time), and the only gadget required is the Remote Electrical Charge, which you can get any time you want as described above. Otherwise you don't need any gadgets or upgrades to complete them, because most of the Riddler's trials are races and puzzles (and the combat sections are pretty easy anyway). Each challenge you complete nets you two Waynetech Points, making this an easy and early way to get a jumpstart on your upgrades.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: Gotham's screens seem to be set up specifically for supervillain threats and communication. Anybody seems like they can just hijack them at will.
• Double Entendre: Riddler slips into these occasionally. After solving a riddle, he tells Batman that he intends to mate him, then quickly points out that he means that in the sense of the chess term and tells Batman to get his mind out of the gutter. Later, when Batman is close to solving the last of his riddles in order to fight him, he says that he is "oiling his mechanisms in anticipation" and hopes that Batman "won't disappoint him".
• Double-Meaning Title: As per Sefton Hill, the Arkham Knight title has multiple meanings. On one hand, it is the title character of Batman's new nemesis, ex-Robin Jason Todd who was tortured in Arkham Asylum for over a year. On the other it also refers to Batman himself, who is slowly undergoing Sanity Slippage throughout the game and dangerously close to going insane and finally ends up wheeled into Arkham Asylum on a gurney after he surrenders to Scarecrow in the finale.
• Dragged Off to Hell: In Batman and Joker's final confrontation inside his mind, Batman beats and forcibly drags Joker into a prison box (with Hell appropriately written on it) to take the clown away for good.
• The Dragon: The unseen militia commander who controls the drones, dispatches forces, and reports the militia's all-around failures to stop Batman to the Arkham Knight and later Deathstroke.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap:
  • Since the Knight's forces make heavy use of drones, Barbara Gordon, expert hacker, is captured and seemingly killed shortly into the plot. And when it turns out she's alive, she manages to find a critical exploit in the drones within minutes.
  • In City Ra's explained that he couldn't withstand the Lazarus Pit's effects again. Indeed his body just couldn't fully heal anymore after the events of City, his wounds still open, exposing his organs. Even if he's saved, he's still a veritable corpse.
• Dramatic Unmask:
  • Exploited by Batman during the Identity Thief side mission — despite Thomas Elliot knowingly impersonating Bruce in front of him, he's not aware that "bring[ing him] Bruce Wayne" is easier than he thinks. The shock of the revelation enables Bruce to catch Hush off guard, Lucius to distract him, and finally for Batman to pile-drive him onto the desk.
  • Bruce Wayne is forced to reveal himself before Gotham and the world in order to save Tim's life.
• Dread Zeppelin: Gotham's iconic zeppelins are the personal laboratories of Stagg Industries, a corrupt pharmeceutical company which tortured and killed innocents to help Scarecrow develop his biological weapons.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • A Gotham City Story reveals that Quincy Sharp hanged himself in prison while hallucinating Hugo Strange telling him to do so.
  • In the ending, this is possibly the case for Batman and Alfred since he blows up the mansion with both of them inside.
• Driving Up a Wall: The Batmobile has a power winch used to drive up and down certain walls in various story missions and Riddler puzzles. And as Lucius Fox says in one of VR missions, the Batmobile is designed with incredible adherence, so if it gets enough speed, it can drive on the walls or the ceiling undisturbed by gravity.
• Dysfunction Junction: Averted. Batman's rogues gallery has finally united for one reason: the Joker is dead, meaning he can't shake things up all the time for kicks. This is shown in the game in comparison to Arkham City, where the villains were fighting each other. Here, Scarecrow lets them run wild and each of them is doing their own thing without getting in the way of each other.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The two thugs seen in the Knightfall ending can be seen sitting at a table in Pauli's Diner in the game's prologue.
• Easter Egg: A lot, to the point a video attempting to display all of them goes for roughly two hours. Of the more notable ones:
  • A time-sensitive one. When speaking to a restored Kirk Langstrom in the GCPD's isolation chamber, he begins muttering fearfully that he thinks another change might be imminent; if the player's system clock is set to Halloween, Man-Bat will once again swipe at Batman while he grapples up a ledge, then disappear into the night sky. Learning back at the precinct that Man-Bat forcibly smashed through inches of glass and evaded small-arms fire on his way back out, Batman notes that he suspected this might happen.
  • There's a hidden elevator in the Adam West Batmobile DLC that will lift the Batmobile up to a projector that's showing a clip of Batman entering the Batmobile from Batman: The Movie.
  • Another secret room can be found, this time hidden in, of all places, the revamped Wayne Manor map in the Community Challenge Pack DLC. If Batman interacts with the grand piano in the study, the Arkham leitmotif plays and a wall panel slides back to reveal that Batman has been researching a mysterious series of murders possibly connected with Penguin and an unknown figure. There's even a cryptic picture of a door with the numbers "4-25". These are all connected to the video game Batman: Arkham VR, which explains these clues.
• Easy Level Trick: Towards the end of the game when some enemies infiltrate the police's parking garage, Batman must face a well-armed squad of militia. Defeating them in combat is difficult and requires mastery of the freeflow combat system and a variety of different techniques and gadgets — or you can just hop in the Batmobile parked nearby and mow them all down in seconds.
• Easy Logistics: Gotham City is, we are told, a city of 6.3 million people. The GCPD manages to evacuate the majority of this in less than 24 hours. While you might grant that if any city in the world would be able to pull off a fast and efficient mass-scale evacuation, it would be Gotham City, a single day is still pretty extreme, particularly when so many people are in a state of panic.
• EMP: The Batmobile comes equipped with an electromagnetic pulse capable of temporarily stopping the Arkham Knight's drones in their tracks. Using it requires destroying a certain amount of drones without taking damage. The more drones you've taken out, the bigger the range and the longer the duration of the pulse.
• End of an Age: With the Joker dead and Gotham under threat of total destruction, it seems Batman's reign in Gotham is at an end, especially with Scarecrow's plan to replace all the hope Batman brought with fear. Bruce accepts this to an extent since he says goodbye to Nightwing and Catwoman telling them both that he will never see them again. As he tells Catwoman:
  "Gotham needs something more, something worse...to defend her. She needs a new myth, a legend more powerful than I can be right now. A legend that can only rise from the ashes of the Batman."
• Endless Game: A few of the AR challenges go on forever unless the player messes up. In each case, the longer the challenge goes on, the more often difficult enemies spawn in.
  • The Combo Master challenge puts the player in a fist-fight against rioting goons who keep on spawning in until the player's combo ends. The mode starts with six or so standard goons, then shield and stun baton enemies start appearing, then ninjas, and finally brutes start appearing around a combo of 70. The player is ranked here on the size of their combo.
  • The predator challenge Endless Knight sees the player tasked with stealthily taking down an ever-respawning team of the Arkham Knight's armed goons. Enemies keep respawning in ever-greater numbers the more you take them down, with the player getting ranked on how many enemies they can take down before they are inevitably killed. There's also a timer which can only be stopped by taking down enemies, incentivising the player to be more aggressive than passive.
  • The fittingly named Untouchable is a Batmobile challenge where the player is surrounded by a circle of tanks and tasked with surviving for as long as possible without taking damage. The mission is also timed, but with each tank you destroy, the more time is added. The higher the timer when you die, the higher your rank.
• Enemy Civil War: One of the stories reveals that the League of Assassins has split into at least two factions: one wants to revive Ra's al Ghul so he can lead them once again, and the other... doesn't. Why, and what Talia's status is in all this, isn't explained.
• Enemy Mine: The last time we saw Two-Face, the Penguin and Harley Quinn, they were engaged in Evil Versus Evil - now they've all teamed up with Scarecrow to take on Batman.
  Poison Ivy: It started with a meeting. Everyone was there. Scarecrow said he had a plan that together we could take you out and Gotham would be ours.
  Batman: Over my dead body.
  Poison Ivy: I believe that was the idea.
• Enemy Within: Even though he's dead and gone, the Joker is still Batman's worst enemy in the end. This time, his infection is creeping along Batman's mind, slowly driving him insane, thanks to the transfusion he gave Batman. The amounts of fear toxin he's been exposed to only make it worse, co-mingling and turning the disease into a self-aware hallucination of Joker himself, mocking Bats at every turn.
• #EngineeredHashtag:
  • In-Universe. Some militia members talk about #CityOfFear trending on social media and encourage their colleagues to upload even more pictures.
  • Riddler attempted to start a shitstorm against Batman called #CrusaderGate after the humiliating defeat he suffered in Arkham City. It was a complete failure.
• Epic Tracking Shot: At the beginning of the game, where the camera pans from the chaos and rioting at street level, all the way up to the Gotham skyline, the Bat-signal, and finally ending on the man himself.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Several of the Arkham Knight's militia state that they are gay. Glad to hear that evil organizations are open-minded in their recruitment.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • A lot of the mooks talk about their kids this time around, saying that they promised to get their kid a present or that they can't be out all night because they have the kids tomorrow.
  • Several of the Militia mention having spouses at home who think they're on a business trip.
  • One Penguin thug in the first gun lockup mentions that he wants Two-Face dead because Harvey killed his brother in Arkham City.
  • The Arkham Knight refuses to harm Barbara while he has her captive and even asks her how Alfred is doing, showing that despite his rage against Batman, he does still miss his other comrades.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • There's some mook chatter from rioters complaining about the Arkham Knight's militia taking over, and even hoping that the Batman kicks their asses.
    Rioter: "I'm almost rooting for Batman too kick their ass, this is our city!"
  • After Bruce's identity is revealed, several express honest disappointment that he squandered his family's fortune the way he had.
  • An optional conversation between two thugs has one telling the other about a time that Scarecrow gassed a school, which they both refer to as "sick stuff".
  • The Militia themselves show honest disgust at Simon Stagg for trying to profit off Scarecrow's toxins behind his back, saying how "men like him have no honor." One troop even says to his face:
    Stagg: Please, I've got so much money, even Batman won't be able to stop us!
    Militia troop: But you couldn't stop yourself from betraying Scarecrow just for a little more.
  • There's an optional dialogue where a Militia member can mention that he agrees with Lex Luthor's opinion on metahumans, at which point his partner will angrily tell him not to mix work and politics.
  • Even the other members of Batman's Rogues Gallery are appalled by the degree of Professor Pyg's insanity.
    Deacon Blackfire: From what hellish pit did you emerge?
  • Some mooks say that the Arkham Knight kidnapping Barbara Gordon is too much, and as much as they hate the Commissioner they'd never dare do such a thing.
    "Gordon's daughter got grabbed? I hate that pig as much as the next guy but that ain't right"
  • If you complete the "Gotham's Most Wanted" stuff with the mutilated bodies before defeating Scarecrow, Joker declares that what Pyg has done to the victims is "sicker than me and Harley's honeymoon tapes." Murder is fine for The Joker, but mutilation is taking it too far, even for that whack-a-doo!
  • Ivy basically told Scarecrow to stick it where the sun doesn't shine because her plants are more important than revenge on Batman.
  • In his audio logs, the Arkham Knight prevents Scarecrow from dosing the captive Barbara with fear toxin. He even threatens to kill anyone who lays a finger on her. It's clear he still has a soft spot for his former comrade.
• Evil Counterpart: The villainous Arkham Knight to the heroic Dark Knight.
• Evil Power Vacuum: The drop in Gotham's crime rate and the return of chaos in the events of the game are both related to one instance: Joker's death. Without him occupying the top of the criminal food chain in Gotham, crazy violence and mayhem have dropped with no equivalent threat to take over. However, the rest of the Rogues Gallery, freed of their internal rivalry and Dysfunction Junction tendencies (which were partially incited by the Joker), can now cohere and organize on a tangible goal: kill Batman, once and for all.
• Extremely Short Timespan: "The Long Halloween" could be a subtitle for the game, given how much Batman can do on a single October 31st night.
• Fake Static: After Batman is unmasked in the finale, Cash mentions that the mayor tried to send an arrest warrant for 'em, but unfortunately, the GCPD's fax machine is broken.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: Chandeliers in various buildings have controls that Batman can hack, dropping them on enemies. Most available in the Two-Face Missions.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The full Gotham we see here is based on New York City. Miagani Island, named after the fictional Miagani native peoples is based on Manhattan which derives from the original inhabitants of the island. It even has a Grand Avenue that is more or less Times Square. Founders Island is based on Wall Street and the financial district, while Bleake Island, which looks more rundown and poor than the other two is a bit like the Bronx or Brooklyn (at least the historical periods rather than the contemporary one). The Giant statue on the island in the middle of the map is of course based on the Statue of Liberty.
• Fingerprinting Air: Reconstructed fairly well. Several doors on Simon Stagg's airships are locked behind fingerprint scanners, so Batman has to replicate his prints on his gauntlet to open them. He watches security footage of Stagg's abduction by the Arkham Knight to pinpoint exact places that he touched, and while it isn't called attention to, the footage shows he isn't simply touching them, he's putting pressure on his hand in these instances to cushion himself or push himself up, so it's believable he'd leave more distinctive fingerprints there. Batman also has to scan four such places to get a complete set of prints, just one spot won't be enough.
• Firefighter Arsonist: As revealed by completing the "The Line of Duty" quests, facing massive manpower cuts due to Gotham City having to provide numerous compensation pay-outs to the criminals who survived Protocol Ten, out of desperation Station 17 Chief Raymond Underhill secretly made a deal with the supervillain Firefly to set numerous abandoned buildings on fire, thus ensuring the city would have to keep all his men employed. This horrifically backfired, as upon the Scarecrow causing the city's evacuation, being a sadistic, unstable psychopath Firefly betrayed him, setting several fire stations alight and kidnapping his men to burn alive.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: Joker, having his Joker Immunity stripped from him in City, is cremated at the opening, just so Gordon and Batman can Make Sure He's Dead. The novelization goes even further by revealing that the ashes were flushed down twelve different toilets just to make sure the ashes could never be bought back together.
• Firing in the Air a Lot: Done frequently by goons riding in cars. Also lampshaded by Mook Chatter.
  Mook: The hell are you shooting at?! Dumbass!
• Flanderization:
  • Firefly goes from simple pyromania to religiously worshipping fire itself. Not to mention the heavy breathing in his voice.
  • Jack Ryder was always rather full of himself, but now he's a glory-hogging narcissist.
  • Riddler's belief in 'brains over brawn' has become a full-on Fantastic Racism against non-intellectuals. Not to mention his belief in his own superiority (proudly boasting that he'll represent himself in court) and his use of robots and the computer he programmed borders on Mad Scientist.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: After invading the Arkham Knight's HQ and rescuing Gordon, Batman has a small conversation on the way up to the roof. While Batman apologizes for Barbara's death, Gordon sounds very nonplussed, and his heart rate in Detective Mode reads "calm". Not exactly the emotional reaction you'd expect from a Papa Wolf who just lost their daughter. Sure enough, Barbara is still alive, and Gordon believes Batman is apologizing for her capture instead of her death as we see just moments after the conversation finishes.
• Flat "What": Batman gives one to Catwoman during an optional conversation in which he asks how she managed to get captured by Riddler and she says he invited her.
• Flunky Boss: In keeping with the game's focus on combos and crowd control, just about every boss is fought alongside a group of their goons. This includes straight-up fist-to-fist fights like the one against Albert King and Harley Quinn's men, predator fights like the one at the end of Two-Face's sidequest, and Batmobile battles like the one against the Arkham Knight's tank and his lackies.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Once again, Batman and Poison Ivy have shades of this during their conversation. Batman even rescues her exactly like how he saved Catwoman in Arkham City. He also personally escorts her to the GCPD safely and protects her from the Arkham Knight's thugs. Thanks to his influence, she even pulls a Heel–Face Turn, teams up with the hero, and dies saving the city for him. She also passes away in his arms with him comforting her. The reaction from Batman implies that he might have started to see her in a positive light.
  • The Jokerised Johnny Charisma and Christina also seem to be a little... admiring of Batman. Then again, they have been Jokerised. Even the hallucinated Joker gets in the act when he compares himself and Batman to Tim and Barbara as Star-Crossed Lovers.
  • And the serenade! Goodness gracious. Joker says he's the only one who gets to serenade Batman and launches into a disturbing song... The number reads like a private show.
  • Throughout the game, the hallucinated Joker is positively ecstatic over being inside of Batman, considering them the new Dynamic Duo, helping Batman during the game at points, even outright stating after Tim's capture that no one had better come in between them. Considering he's largely a hallucination of Batman's, what does this say about how Batman imagines the Joker?
  • Each of the Joker infected got a part of Joker: Christina Bell got his obsession with Batman, Johnny Charisma got his theatrical flair, Albert King got his brutality, Henry Adams got his brilliant scheming... What part of Joker did Batman get that would make Henry Adams think Batman of all people is the best candidate to continue Joker's legacy? Did he get Joker's madness? His sense of humor? His heart?
  • Nearly the first thing Hallucination Joker says when you see him counts (and Batman is lying on the floor with a worm's eye view at this point):
  Joker: Oh, don't act all surprised, Bats. You knew this was going to happen sooner or later. Me, stuck deep inside you.
  • Some of Joker's death taunts towards a fallen Batman reek of subtext as well:
  "Downside: you're dead. But the upside? We've got each other, Bruce! Forever!"
  "Oh, Bats, you big kidder. You don't fool me. (worriedly) Bats? Bats!?"
  "Come on, Bruce. You can't die! I didn't kill you!"
  "You should take better care of yourself, Batsy, there's two of us in there!"
  • There's also a very twisted instance of this between the Joker and Jason Todd in the flashbacks. It can come across almost as the Joker being abusive to a partner and teaching them to "respect" him - it even ends with Jason being ''branded' and calling Joker "sir."
  • A Matter of Family involves Joker trying to get Batman a Valentine's Day gift. Granted, the "gift" consists of killing his sidekicks, but it's the thought that counts.
  • There's also a one-sided version of this between Scarecrow and Batman given the former's obsession with making Batman suffer in every way possible. It doesn't help that in the Nightmare Missions, Scarecrow will occasionally refer to Batman as "My Dear Batman".
• Foreshadowing: Has its own page.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In a callback to Asylum, the E3 trailer begins to glitch towards the end, obscuring some plot and gameplay details - then, ruling out just simple video streaming problems, it switches to Scarecrow, looking directly at the camera while addressing the viewer as if they were Batman...
• Gas Mask Mooks: Many mooks throughout the game wear respirators and gas masks. Justified, due to a big plot point in the game being fear of a chemical attack on Gotham City. Not that it does them much good when Scarecrow uses the Cloudburst
• Gainax Ending: The final scene of the Golden Ending features what appears to be an entirely new character whose identity and backstory are never explained. A pair of criminals have a family cornered, only to see Batman on a nearby roof. But after brushing him off because they know it's just Bruce Wayne now, Batman turns into the demonic version that Scarecrow hallucinated and swoops at the camera.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • The challenge maps are in-universe simulations now; getting all 3 medals as any character gives you an upgrade point to the story mode (one per map if you get three stars). Since DLC challenge maps are available from the start, it's possible to amass a massive headstart if you can beat the challenges without any upgrades. (Fortunately, some DLC characters come with several upgrades "installed"...) ^note  If you collect upgrade points before starting the game, they won't appear until you return to the main menu and back to story mode after gaining control of Batman.
  • During the period where Batman has the Batwing scanning Founders Island for the Cloudburst, the Batwing can actually be seen flying over the Island in the pattern shown on the map in the Batcomputer. Most notably, given how short this period of the main story is active, there's even a possible dialogue exchange where some thugs mention seeing it flying above the city.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • In Red Hood's DLC missions, his takedowns are clearly lethal^note Though an engine quirk means they still breathe when examined close; the same happened when Joker was playable back in Asylum, but in challenge maps, mook dialogue is (relatively) unchanged and they can be revived by medics.
  • While Batman usually needs the bridges down to do certain quests on Founders Island, there are times where he actually doesn't, and will usually call for a GCPD car even though the bridges are still up, such as with the Founders Island firefighters, and the Two-Face robbery on the island.
  • If you've been actively collecting riddles, Eddie may mention where the Militia HQ is located during one of his rants — even if he didn't mention the exact building, he mentions an abandoned shopping mall which should be enough for Bruce to figure it out — before Bruce learns where it is. As this is obviously an oversight, it doesn't affect the story at all.
  • In the Mad Hatter part of the Season of Infamy DLC Bruce makes heavy use of the Remote Hacking Device to disable the bombs planted in the three cop cars. However, if playing from the start the mission unlocks at the same time as the mission to track the tires of the Militia vehicle which was used to kidnap Barbra which occurs sometime before the Airship sequence, where you acquire the RHD. Additionally, the first officer claims that he heard the siren and pulled over before he ended up hypnotized and locked in the trunk, but all three of the cars are found in places that are physically impossible for a car to reach.
• Gayngster: One of the militia soldiers mentions his significant other, who turns out to be a male lawyer who thinks he is on a business trip.
• Genre Blindness: Kirk Langstrom and his wife. Batman even lampshades it.
  Batman: Mixing his DNA with a vampire bat? That was never going to end well.
• The Ghost: Talia is mentioned a few times in the game, and despite Protagonist-Centered Morality, her impact on the world is mixed. Her family and Batman miss her, whereas Cash's entry in the evidence room calls her a terrorist, Alfred calls Nyssa the sanest of the Ghul family, and the Joker hallucination mentions seeing her in hell. The Joker one is especially poignant if you view him as a product of Batman's subconscious: even he couldn't totally deny Talia was evil.
• Gory Discretion Shot: A lot of the worst violence is only suggested rather than shown outright and some of the famous scenes are considerably toned down from their comics counterparts.
  • The Barbara Gordon flashback ends with him taking pictures over Barbara's body still clothed, with the implication of Joker stripping her naked removed or at least obliquely implied^note Joker claims that he used a slideshow rather than a video for his torture of Jim Gordon.
  • Joker's brutal beatdown of Todd with a crowbar isn't shown fully, later Joker branding him with an iron happens offscreen though we hear Todd's screams and then shooting Jason is also shown with far less violence.
  • When Barbara is about to shoot herself, Joker steps in front of the camera and mockingly mimicks what happens behind his back. Batman only sees the end result.
  • If a wrong key is chosen, Catwoman's Explosive Leash explodes offscreen, decapitating her.
• Grand Finale: Arkham Knight is being billed as the final chapter in the Batman: Arkham Series, at least as far as Rocksteady Studios is taking it. The end credits reflect this, with a series of stills highlighting moments from Rocksteady's previous games and a final group shot of the entire team waving goodbye.
• Grand Theft Me: Scarecrow's toxin takes such a toll on Batman that it threatens to override his will and take over his body completely. This is also true for several other characters, those who were also infected with Joker's blood and risk having his personality take over. Most of the Joker blood victims develop a Joker-like appearance, and exhibit personality quirks similar to his, but don't become a perfect mental copy of him, as the Joker infection is more of a personality-altering disease, with no actual element of mind or memory transfer. The only Joker-infected victims who seem to actually "become" the Joker are Henry Adams and Batman, though Henry Adams acknowledges that Batman will be the most perfect version of the Joker.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Joker may be long dead at this point, but his shadow looms over Gotham. His blood "Jokerizing" people and appearing before Batman as a hallucination only seem to cement this. He also turns out to be behind the creation of Arkham Knight/Red Hood. He's not behind the Scarecrow's plot, but he's a large reason why it was made at all.
• Guide Dang It!: Some of the Riddler Puzzles. Riddler of course Lampshades Batman cheating by looking at the internet. But leaving that aside, while most of the puzzles can be deciphered by the fact that it requires a gadget to operate, others are not immediately obvious and intuitive requiring the player to look it up.
  • Quite a few of the puzzles require the freeze cluster grenade, which the game never lets you know that it can be reclaimed after the events at ACE Chemicals concludes, as the interior of Panessa Studios is locked until that event is finished.
  • The Forensic Scanner puzzles can only be activated by the Batmobile's scanner, until it reaches a barrier requiring one to leave the Batmobile, and arrive at a place that the car can be summoned by remote and pick up the earlier trail, which can decay in the interim.
  • The worst offender is the puzzle with the clues that leave only two four-digit numbers. You learn they are map co-ordinates. The real problem is that the game's map gives these co-ordinates tiny lettering that is still hardly legible on a big screen. The map's controls rarely flow naturally to a fixed point on the map, which combined with the bad lettering makes a treasure hunt type experience frustrating. Additionally, while an informant can reveal the location of a scanner puzzle and the map will point to where it starts, for these puzzles the map points to the trophy itself, which doesn't actually tell you where to go.
  • Some of the puzzles outright trick the player mostly by being registered on the map in one place but accessible in another. The penultimate room on Stagg's Beta Airship has a puzzle that literally falls off the ship and lands on a pier on Founder's Island, and it's still marked as a riddle trophy for the Stagg's Airship area. Be prepared for constant backtracking for the Last Lousy Point.
• Hack Your Enemy: The CPU Drone Virus upgrade for the Batmobile allows Batman to hack enemy tanks to make them attack other tanks.
• Hacker Cave: Oracle can be visited in her clock tower base, which appears to be this.
• Halloween Episode: The game takes place on Halloween. Ironically, it's the only game in the series not to be released in autumn/fall.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Bane. Instead of fighting Batman, he kicks his dependency on Venom and returns to his home country to rid it of its corrupt government.
  • Jason Todd redeems himself (sort of), saving Batman from Scarecrow and transitioning himself from Arkham Knight to Red Hood.
  • Poison Ivy dies saving Gotham City from Scarecrow’s fear toxin.
• Helpful Hallucination: Batman’s Scarecrow hallucinations do actually help the player out from time to time - you can often find them lounging near an important terminal or hinting out loud that this might be a good time to use a certain gadget. It’s only until the Joker can take over Batman’s body himself, though. The Joker hallucination is also quite enthusiastic about helping you rescue Robin when he's in trouble, or helping you beat the Joker Infected. But it's mostly because he's the only one who gets to kill Robin/he hates fakers.
• Helpless Window Death: After being kidnapped on Scarecrow's orders, Barbara Gordon is taken to a locked observation chamber with a bulletproof glass window. With Batman unable to get in, he can only watch as Scarecrow pumps in Fear Gas, driving Barbara into such a fit of terror that she ultimately shoots herself in the head rather than face whatever she's hallucinating. However... it's ultimately revealed that Batman was the one hallucinating the whole time, courtesy of his earlier exposure to the gas, and Scarecrow just let him think that Barbara was dead.
• Hero Antagonist: Batman himself acts as one during the parts where The Joker takes over his mind.
• The Hero Dies: The game ends with Wayne Manor blown up—with Bruce and Alfred seemingly in it, though it's implied that He's Just Hiding.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ivy apparently gives her life to rid Gotham of Scarecrow's latest fear gas, absorbing it into herself before disintegrating into dust.
• High-Altitude Battle:
  • Batman can shoot himself into the sky with his grapple hook and fly through the city avoiding gunfire from the Arkham Knight's flying drones. He can retaliate by flying above them, landing on top, and planting a bomb that he can detonate while descending back to solid ground.
  • Man-Bat's sidequest involves tracking him down throughout the city and tackling him as a short cutscene plays of Batman wrestling the monster to the ground before he can take flight again.
• High-Speed Hijack: A cool thing Batman can do in the open-world is jump onto the hood of a rioter's car, throw out the driver, and then jump off before a bomb he planted explodes.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Played with. Joker actually is dead, but he still is a major driving force behind the game's plot due to his absence and continued effect on Batman's psyche.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Crane repeatedly injected Batman with his fear toxin whilst recording the action live on television in order to break him down from fear. Not only does he fail, but Jason Todd then frees Batman, and Batman forces Crane to inject himself with his own toxin, causing Crane to see Batman as a demonic figure surrounded by hundreds of bats, making Crane utterly terrified and breaking him instead.
  • The Joker hallucination spends most of the game using his control over Batman's perceptions to taunt him with his worst fears. In the end, just as the Joker is becoming dominant, Batman takes control of his perceptions and chases him through a nightmare maze of his worst fears. Turns out, Batman is a lot better at scaring people than the Joker is.
• Hollywood Atheist: When visiting the cell of captured villains, it is possible to hear the Riddler mock Azrael and Blackfire's spiritual beliefs.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Two times major battles are rendered unwinnable because of Scarecrow's overwhelming fear toxin.
  • On Stagg's airship, Batman defeats a group of the Arkham Knight's soldier to rescue Stagg, only for Stagg to be replaced by a hallucination and every fallen soldier to slowly rise to their feet. They don't do anything at first, but as you take them down one by one, more keep getting up, appearing, and jumping at you, until the moment Batman is overwhelmed and the hallucination ends to reveal the Scarecrow has kidnapped Simon Stagg again.
  • The penultimate freeflow battle of the campaign sets Batman against an endless wave of enemies that can't be defeated. This endless series of Joker hallucinations only stop coming when the player has Batman kill one of them, letting the Joker win Batman's soul.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The game is set on a Halloween night where all sorts of horrors are unleashed on Gotham.
• Hostage Situation: Practically everyone, save for Alfred, who is close to Batman gets to be a hostage by different villains. Not to mention the 17 firemen hostages scattered throughtout Gotham. And this all happened in a single night.
• Hub Level: The GCPD Lockup serves as this, it is the only secure fortress in the city and is filled with cops that Batman interacts with for interactive conversations as well as holding cells for any thug archetypes and bad guys he captures. It also has an evidence room that displays keepsakes from earlier adventures.
• Hub Under Attack: GCPD headquarters is the safest and most regularly-visited areas in Gotham; apart from Batman's base in the clocktower and Wayne Tower, it's one of the few locations that hasn't been taken over by criminals or the Arkham Knight's militia, and you regularly return to drop off captured supervillains. However, late in the game, Scarecrow sends the militia after GCPD, resulting in a full-scale siege; if you can't destroy the tanks or stop the troops on the rooftop, they will break in and kill everyone in the building.
• Hypocritical Humor: The Riddler refers to Batman during their first encounter as an "image-obsessed narcissist who places Bat-symbols on his hubcaps", despite making it perfectly clear that he himself is an arrogant ego-junkie who compulsively brands everything he owns, including his own shirt and belt buckle, with question marks.

I-Z

• I Am the Noun: Batman pulls one of these at the tail end of the game. As in, right after his climactic victory against both the Joker and Scarecrow:
  Batman: I am vengeance. I am the night. I am Batman.
• Idiot Ball: Gordon gets tossed a huge one. He betrays Batman to Scarecrow in exchange for Scarecrow releasing Barbara, while also informing Scarecrow of Batman's base in the theater where he's keeping the Joker infected. It should come as a surprise to absolutely no-one that Scarecrow goes back on his word, and really, why would Gordon ever trust him in the first place?
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: The last fight with the Arkham Knight becomes this when he reveals his identity as Jason Todd, with Batman desperately trying to get through to Jason and offer to help him.
• Immunity Attrition: The Scarecrow has developed a partial immunity to his own fear toxin. Keyword "partial" as he can take one dose with no effects, a much larger dosage will cause him to hallucinate his worst fear (a demonic version of Batman) just like everyone else.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy:
  • In the reveal trailer, a cop can't hit Harley while she's at point blank range and coming right at him. In the game, this is a Justified Trope, as Harley has Mayhem Mode, which allows her to Dodge the Bullet. How she can actually do that is anyone's guess.
  • An example in the game proper — one flashback shows the Joker claiming that when he shot Barbara Gordon in the spine, he was aiming for her head. Odds are this is another twisted joke, as either he really can't aim or he didn't think to take a second shot at the now paralyzed Barbra.
  • It's not an uncommon occurrence for the drone tanks to shoot each other, even when you don't hack them.
• Insult Backfire: Some of the villains may deliver one to each other when locked in the same cell.
  Two-Face: Your riddles are a cruel waste of time, just like Gotham's courts!
  Riddler: How nice to see you, Dent. Still relying on that coin to make decisions rather than faultless logic and cognitive prowess?
• Interface Spoiler:
  • A subtle yet major case within the character profiles. There are only three profiles with the exact same height and weight as the Arkham Knight: Aaron Cash, Jason Todd (Deceased), and Red Hood—the last of which is unlocked after the Arkham Knight unmasks.
  • For those that bought the DLC season pass, alternate costumes are unlocked for all playable characters. The last one shown is the Red Hood, who has an alternate costume of... the Arkham Knight.
  • The fact that the Deathstroke Fight at the end of the militia side quests is a tank battle as opposed to a brawl or stealth boss can be deduced from the fact that the side quest that houses the final mission is Campaign for Disarmament, the mission focused on Tank Battles.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Batman reveals that Barbara works for him and the high-tech nature of the clock tower to Jim Gordon when Barbara is kidnapped by Crane.
  • In the end, the world finds out who Batman is.
• Interrupted Declaration of Love: Implied Trope; there's a bottle of champagne, two glasses, and a sign saying "Marry Me" neatly set up on a bench overlooking the ocean that's going unused because Scarecrow's attack forced everyone to evacuate the city. Some poor sap planned out his whole proposal and instead got to take his girlfriend on a romantically crowded bus ride away from a chemical weapons attack.
• Invulnerable Attack: The special combo takedowns see the player character launch into an elaborate animation that can't be interrupted by gunfire, stun batons, explosives, or anything else enemies normally throw at you.
• Irony:
  • Thomas Wayne's last will and testament tells Bruce not to waste his inheritance on "fast cars, outrageous clothes, and the pursuit of a destructive lifestyle", but rather to "honor the Wayne family legacy" by dedicating himself to improving and protecting Gotham - which, in part, he has done by pursuing a dangerous career as a cape-and-cowl-clad vigilante with a giant car. Done in an epic series of Gilligan Cuts (fast cars: Batmobile, outrageous clothes: batsuit, and destructive lifestyle: kicking bad guy rear).
  • While these events don't happen in the game itself, one of the cosmetic suits you can select is the Batman: Flashpoint suit. This suit comes from an Alternate Universe where the killer shot Bruce instead of Thomas and Martha Wayne, Thomas became Batman, and Martha became Joker. The Thomas Wayne Batman in the Flashpoint universe is pretty much exactly the same as the main universe Batman, complete with fast cars, outrageous clothes, and kicking just as much bad guy rear as the Batman we know (maybe even more since this Batman is willing to kill).
  • Batman's attitude towards his allies, his general tendency to work on his own and refuse backup finally compromises the safety of Robin, who he had locked up for "his own good" leaving him vulnerable and defenseless when he gets kidnapped by Scarecrow. Eventually, Batman either dies/goes into hiding, cutting off all ties to any of his allies and friends and losing his Bruce Wayne identity for good. He will be working alone forever.
  • The Joker persona in Batman's mind gets stronger the more Batman's exposed to fear toxin, yet is finally banished when Batman is dosed enough to trigger the persona's fear. Which means that even if Batman hadn't re-powered the Batmobile in time while in the fear gas cloud, he'd have been cured much sooner then he did because of constant exposure.
  • In one of the interview tapes, Henry Adams begs Batman to kill the three Joker Infected because they're too dangerous to live. While he actually wants to "purify the gene pool" because he's infected as well, he and the others end up dead anyway.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Along with the usual Game-Over Man, a few sections have specialized cutscenes if you die such as the siege on G.C.P.D by Scarecrow's army. Die at any point and you get a cutscene where the army breaks into the building and kills everyone including Oracle.
• It's All About Me: Jack Ryder. He tries to defend his class-action suit against Gotham due to the conditions of Arkham City (which a number of Gotham's supervillains managed to get included in, allowing them to walk free) by claiming that the true purpose of it was to get himself compensated for being thrown in there. His comments on the Deacon Blackfire investigation center entirely on his hopes that revealing a mass-murdering cult will get him back in the journalistic spotlight without a single word to indicate that he cares about all the people that Blackfire has killed.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Batman, desperate to locate the Arkham Knight, completely loses his self-control in shaking down one mook for interrogation. Said mook is flat on the back of the asphalt, when Batman remotely moves the Batmobile forward and revs up its giant front tire on his skull until the terrified man is pleading for him to stop. It also doubles as a serious case of O.O.C. Is Serious Business, since this is one of the few times we've ever heard Kevin Conroy's Batman get this angry.
• Juggling Loaded Guns:
  • Gordon noticeably doesn't practice the gun safety protocols you'd expect a veteran policeman to use during an elevator ride with Batman, holding his service revolver slack in one hand and pointing it near Batman multiple times — foreshadowing his plan to shoot Batman harmlessly in the chest plate, thus saving both Batman and Oracle.
  • Christina Bell also carelessly waggles a gun for effect in a very Joker-like manner at several of Harley's goons, with the end result being that one of them is shot at point-blank range.
• Jump Scare:
  • Several times in the main game. Sometimes when Batman tries to grapple a building, he'll be pulled face first into something horrifying; first, it's the Man-Bat, then, later, a Scarecrow hallucination imitating him. These are effective enough that any time a player grapples up the building roof, he'll be bracing himself to find something waiting. Also, in the shooter section of the ending, you'll travel down an empty hallway, reach a dead end, and be forced to turn around... face-to-face with a statue of Batman, complete with a violin sting.
  • As mentioned under Easter Egg above, Playing on Halloween after clearing Man-Bat's side quest makes him jump scare Batman again.
  • The final time is on New Game+; in the opening sequence where you cremate the Joker, the Joker will jump to life and scream at the camera, before lying back to down, laughing, to be consumed by the flames.
  • Joker also does it in the main game when he makes his first appearance. As Batman is working to reduce the blast radius of the ACE Chemicals explosion, he turns around... and finds Joker pointing a gun in his face.
  • During Gordon's section in between the ACE Chemical Plant level, you'll be in first-person, checking out one of Batman's bases in the abandoned movie studios. After looking in all the cells, turn around and you'll find Batman staring right at you. Chances are, you'll jump along with Jim when it happens.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: In-Universe, a couple that are eating dinner in the game's prologue talk about the ill-fated Panessa Studios, who churned out low-budget movies based on Gotham criminals to cover the fact that the company was a front for Gotham criminals to launder money and evade taxes. A few weeks after Batman started fighting crime, he completely destroyed the Panessa crime family, closing their movie studios, and leaving their movies only available on a few rare VHS tapes.
• Killed Offscreen: If the DLC is to be considered canon, this is the fate of Killer Moth, courtesy of Red Hood.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • Calendar Man's diary reveals he planned to strike on Halloween, but after Scarecrow reappeared, he abandoned his plans and left Gotham.
  • After Arkham City, Bane abandoned Gotham altogether and returned to his home country. After recovering from severe Titan withdrawal, he decided to focus his efforts on ridding his home country of its corrupt government instead of attacking Batman again.
• Kung-Fu Sonic Boom: Hitting an enemy with fully charged glide tackle causes a giant explosions of orange electricity to erupt from Batman, knocking down any enemy nearby.
• Lame Comeback: The Riddler has a bad habit of admitting how pathetic he is in his retorts to insults.
  Catwoman: Oh, look. It's more of Eddie's homemade friends.
  Riddler: Your mockery is pointless, Catwoman. I don't have any friends at all!
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Literally the first shot of the game shows the Joker's corpse, spoiling his death at the end of City. Also, Batman isn't doing so well mentally.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The first time Batman hallucinates the Joker, he cackles, "Oh, don't act all surprised, Bats; you knew this was going to happen sooner or later!" — a not-so-subtle nod to everyone insisting he would return somehow, either revealed as Not Quite Dead or resurrected as the Arkham Knight.
  • One mook-chatter has one stating they've been through Arkham Asylum, Arkham City and Arkham Knight and wondering what will happen next. Another mook will then say that it's probably time to leave Gotham City, while also noting they had a great run.
  • Another random mook wonders if they're all in some kind of simulation, pawns in someone's twisted game.
  • If Batman stalls during the final confrontation with Penguin, waiting to save Nightwing from being held at gunpoint just to hear the entire conversation, Dick will nervously mention how Batman probably likes listening to this play out, but he doesn't.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: As Bruce kneels at the bodies of his parents, the familiar theme "A Rose for Respect" plays... then the Joker shows up to ruin the moment, and it slows down to a low, eerie string chord.
• Levels Take Flight: One of the major levels in the main campaign is a jaunt through Simon Stagg's two zeppelins as Scarecrow tries to hijack them. The unique mechanic of the level is that Batman can use his hacking device to control the zeppelin and tilt it back and forth, sending crates and boxes sliding out of his way and sometimes even through windows down into Gotham below.
• Lightning Bruiser: Once they spot you, both the Cloudburst tank and the drilling machine beeline towards you much faster than you would expect from hulking machines of that size. On a straight the Batmobile going at full speed can barely outrun them.
• Literal Split Personality: All of the Jokerized blood recipients manifest a different trait of his personality most strongly — Johnny Charisma his preening showmanship, Christina Bell his obsession with Batman, Albert "Goliath" King his sadistic cruel streak... and Henry Adams, the one supposedly immune patient, his intellect and Machiavellian scheming, explaining how he could hide himself amongst them so easily. In the end, Henry murders the others to weed out the competition, but upon learning Batman is infected himself, commits suicide, knowing that he'll be "spectacular", the worst of all of them put together.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Played with. When Batman defeats the last of Scarecrow's forces at ACE Chemicals, the entire facility is primed to blow — by Scarecrow himself, injured but undefeated, who locks Batman in the central chamber and abandons him to die. Batman is even forced to try and contain the blast by mixing neutralizing agents into the core, so that the entire city won't be blanketed with fear gas in the explosion. Further subverted in that Scarecrow, in preparing his master plan, fully expected Batman to find a means of escape and survival, otherwise Crane would not be able to expose his identity first.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Averted, to the point that the player may not even realize it for a while. There are no loading screens in the game other than those seen when restarting from death or loading a saved game. Theoretically, one could play the entire game from start to finish and, if able to avoid dying, would not see a loading screen once. All cutscenes take place in-engine, meaning they all have the same graphics as the in-game models and the action does not pause between them.
• Lonely Funeral: One of the things Joker sees after being injected with fear toxin is his funeral, at which Harley is the only person in attendance.
• Loophole Abuse: After the shit-storm in Arkham City involving Protocol 10, many of the surviving inmates sued Gotham City Hall for giving Hugo Strange the go-ahead for the protocol; many of them got a substantial payoff and were released from prison. However, while most of the prisoners had to be released, the police were still allowed to confiscate their weapons and items. Even though many of them were able to get out of jail, many of them were known to have criminal records and multiple attempts at murder. This, combined with the fact that Arkham City allowed the criminals to run free, and therefore making it one giant crime scene, allowed to hold their items to protect the public.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The Batmobile can fire up to sixteen one-hit kill homing missiles if you build up its fully-upgraded meter to maximum.
• Male Gaze: When Batman puts Harley over his shoulder, which flips her skirt up and displays her bottom in skin-tight tights.
• Man of the City: How Thomas Wayne feels about Gotham and what he hopes that his son will follow:
  Thomas: Invest in Gotham, treat its people like family. Watch over them and use this money to safeguard them from forces beyond their control.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The game doesn't make clear what the Joker in the game is — his spirit and/or memories transferred into Bruce via his blood, or an elaborate hallucination brought about by a combination of fear toxic, Joker blood, and Bruce's own neuroses. For the first option, several Joker sequences have him mention or show Bruce things that Bruce wasn't there to witness himself, seeming to draw on the Joker's own memories. But this could easily be chalked up to Bruce's hallucinations being just that vivid and he's subconsciously filling in the blanks of what he already knew or suspected. It's also possible the "Joker" Bruce is envisioning is his own split personality — it's hinted throughout the series that Bruce is harboring a lot of powerful emotions and concealing a "true self", and he's holding back dangerous and violent impulses. It may be that this alternate persona existed inside Bruce all along and now, through the fear toxin, is visualizing it as a new incarnation of the Joker. Canonicity notwithstanding, the end credits song I'm Not Laughing (a Sad Reprise of I Can't Stop Laughing) is sung by the Joker while he's trapped all alone in Batman's subconscious, which wouldn't make sense if he was merely a hallucination.
• Meaningful Appearance: Used as a significant plot point. Henry Adams, infected with Joker's blood, finally physically manifests the disease when acting like him, his eyes burning with a Sickly Green Glow. When Batman, furious, struggles against Joker telling him to kill the old man, his eyes begin to glow as well, and a shocked Henry commits suicide, knowing Bruce will make an even better successor. In the end, when Batman fights off Joker's mental control and seals him away forever, his eyes fade from bright green to blue, finally at peace.
• Meaningful Background Event: During the fight with the Arkham Knight's helicopter in ACE Chemicals, the Knight himself can actually be seen standing on the roof controlling it. He can even be shot with the Batmobile's slam rounds if you know where to aim.
• Mecha-Mooks: The Riddler has created a workforce of automatons, patterned after the Wonder City mechanical guardians, to aid him in carrying out his schemes, including the underground excavation needed for building his various racetracks. After they lose a few tussles against the heroes, he starts introducing new color-coded variants that can only be fought separately by Batman or Catwoman, and he joins them personally in the final battle, trying to crush and fry the heroes within a force-field-protected Humongous Mecha.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter:
  • Harley Quinn cannot get to vantage points unless they are low enough for her to jump on and can't perform silent takedowns (only loud takedowns, which alert nearby enemies). She can however, turn berserk and dodge bullets once she knocks out enough enemies, and can perform up to 4 special takedowns before the effect ends.
  • The Original Arkham Batmobile. It's fast, but it's also extremely light and handles well. The other Batmobiles win races by drifting the corners to slow down the timer; This one is more likely to spin off the road when drifting, but it's handling allows you to boost through some corners.
• Memetic Psychopath: In-universe, Professor Pyg. Virtually unknown at the time of his capture, every other criminal in the holding cell, either disgusted or fearful, still immediately knows to keep their distance from a guy who appears just as deluded as Mad Hatter, but far more violent and a greater physical threat by comparison. He's so insane that even Joker calls him a nutcase — as a compliment, naturally, lamenting how he's stuck in the GCPD when he could be out creating more mayhem.
• Mind Screw: Fear gas and Batman's damaged psyche combined make for really foul hallucinogenics. There are multiple occasions where events turn out to be a Daydream Surprise or an Imagine Spot, and it's often hard to tell where reality ends and nightmares begin. Then there are the occasions where the hallucinations takes control.
• The Mole: Officer Wicker is The Riddler's mole in the GCPD. You have the option of openly interrogating him in front of his coworkers.
• Mook Medic:
  • The Medics are capable of reviving up to three knocked-out enemies each in a single fight; they can also charge up mooks and make it so that Batman can't hit them without hurting himself. However, if you sabotage their medical gear before starting a fight, it'll explode and knock them out when they try to use it.
  • Albert King can also get mooks back on their feet during his Boss Fight, though calling him a medic would be highly inaccurate. Likewise Killer Croc in his DLC sub quest.
• More Dakka: The new Batmobile. The Arkham Knight is fielding what is, for all intents and purposes, an army, so Batman has responded by making a car that can turn into a super-tank. It has a massive 60mm cannon, an anti-vehicle machine gun, a missile pod, and a rapid-fire riot cannon. The Jokermobile is much the same, the only difference being that he's willing to fire deadly ordinance on live targets, incinerating every goon in the ruins of the old GCPD station with a hail of missiles.
• Moveset Clone: Azrael plays almost exactly like Batman himself and retains all of the latter's abilities, though he lacks several gadgets Batman has like the Voice Modulator and Smoke Pellet. This serves to essentially make him the "hard mode" counterpart to Batman.
• Mr. Fanservice: Batman, Nightwing and Robin are this, as their muscular physiques are prominently displayed bulging out from their skin-tight costumes, revealing their noticable abs, biceps, or both.
• Ms. Fanservice: Catwoman and Harley Quinn split this job. Very noticeable when Batman puts Harley over his shoulder, which flips her skirt up and displays her bottom in skin-tight tights. Downplayed with Poison Ivy. She still has her nice figure, but her skin color has become paler and she's no longer The Vamp.
• Multi-Melee Master: The militia Weapons Experts, brute-level enemies that carry blade, shield, and taser weapons and can switch between them on the fly. Luckily there's only a handful of them in the entire game.
• Multiple Endings: The only game in the series to have them, three in fact. The first is a standard ending, and the second is a slightly extended version by completing the Most Wanted missions and the final is a Golden Ending that requires a 100% Completion.
• Mundane Solution: The Riddler's third room in the Orphanage is supposed to be completed by having Batman and Catwoman guide each other through the invisible electricity maze; once your halfway through, the guide starts spinning for an extra layer of difficulty. Once it starts spinning, there's nothing stopping Batman from just leaping straight to the button, and Catwoman's dodge animation actually glitches the game so she doesn't take damage should she do the same, letting you bypass the second half entirely.
• Mundane Utility: Some people in the GCPD got in trouble with the Commissioner for taking Mr Freeze's freeze gun out of the evidence locker so they could use it to make ice cream.
• Mushroom Samba: Happens way too many times to count, let's just say that Scarecrow's fear-toxin causes a lot of hallucinations; including a perfect recreation of Joker which follows you all throughout the game.
• My God, What Have I Done?: A militia member can be heard muttering this during the portion of the game when the Cloudburst has covered Gotham in fear toxin.
• Mythology Gag: Has its own page.
• Named After the Injury: Played for laughs, in the GCPD Lockdown DLC. Where in one of the mooks working to get The Penguin out is named "Spark". His fellow mooks thought he got the name because he was good with machinery, he actually got it because he was electrocuted by Nightwing's eskrima sticks.
• Nerf:
  • The beat-up takedown takes more punches to start adding to your combo meter, so the player is incentivised to use their basic combos and gadgets more rather than just stunning and beating up single enemies.
  • Catwoman is nowhere as useful as she was in City. Since she wasn't originally playable outside of brief segments, challenge maps dont have any ceilings for her to climb on (With the exception of her story DLC challenges), and double takedowns have been added into the Fear Takedown system, leaving Catwoman unable to do the move herself. She does however, get some extra health (her armor is now on par with everyone else), her caltrops regenerate, and she is still the only character whose run is silent.
• Never My Fault: Utterly rampant. Riddler, Two-Face, the Arkham Knight, Scarecrow, Harley Quinn, and especially the Joker, among others; so many, many people in this game are willing to blame Batman, and only Batman, for every bad thing that's happened to them, or that's happened in general, regardless of where the blame actually falls. Somewhat justified in the case of the Arkham Knight at least. He was tortured and brainwashed by Joker to believe Batman was the source of all his suffering.
• New Game Plus: Collectibles, upgrades and Experience Points can carry over between playthroughs. Sidequest completion other than riddle collection does not.
• N.G.O. Superpower:
  • Batman, in one city itself, has several bases with weapons and state-of-the-art computers, a multi-utility tank with weapons capabilities, a private plane that provides supplies anywhere in the city and is pretty much given carte blanche by the GCPD. At one point, Aaron Cash is bemused at Batman commandeering a police workstation, considering that Batman's been giving them orders all night. Also, one of the Arkham Knight's militia notes how overpowered Batman's arsenal and technology really is:
    Militia: If our gear's top-of-the-line then what's the Bat's? Over the line? On-top-of-the-line? Is that even a thing?
  • The Arkham Knight's militia is no slouch in its R&D department either, having such things as unmanned tanks, roadblocks, mines, flying drones, anti-aircraft weaponry, and being big and powerful enough to effortlessly take over all of Gotham City by themselves. Early in the game, some mooks lampshade it, declaring that the Knight would have to be richer than even Bruce Wayne to be able to amass an army that size.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • Scarecrow inadvertently created Batman's worst nightmare in real life - being turned into the Joker via psychological breakdown. If Scarecrow let him loose at that point he would have completely and utterly WON. Unfortunately, the Joker isn't scared of a shambling corpse with metal cheeks and taunts Scarecrow, who gets pissed off that "Batman" still isn't scared and injects him with more toxin. But since the Joker personality is now the one in control, the toxin affects him, not Batman, allowing Batman to capitalize on the Joker's biggest fear — being forgotten — and seal the last remnants of the Joker away in the darkest recesses of his mind for good.
  • By invading Panessa Studios, Harley had a hand in disposing of the Joker Infected.
  • In the aftermath of the game, the supervillains are bankrupt, Ivy's dead, Mr. Freeze has left Gotham, Jason Todd is back (and killing enemies), Batman's allies are still in the game, and there's a new Batman (which might actually be Bruce). Combined with the above two points, and their combined assault has only helped Gotham.
• No-Damage Run:
  • Azrael's sidequest is made up of a bunch of simulations where Azrael must beat up a group of respawning mooks without getting hit once. If you do, you have to start the challenge over. The AR challenge "Azrael's Atonement" works the same way, except with way more enemies that spawn in.
  • The Batmobile challenge "Untouchable" ends the second a player is hit by one of the tanks surrounding them.
• "No More Holding Back" Speech: The entire game Batman has a hallucination of Joker following him around, mocking him at every turn at his fear of becoming like him. At the end, Batman surrenders to Scarecrow and gets a direct dose of the fear toxin, bringing out his greatest fear, becoming the Joker. Joker!Batman's excitement for destruction catches Scarecrow by surprise, making him give him another dose of toxin, taking the Joker to his worst fear, being forgotten. As he falls deeper into the hallucination, Joker sees how small his grave is and how no one cares that he's gone. Statues of Batman harass him, until this exchange where Batman locks him away for good. After this, nothing is holding him back.
  Joker: " What have I got to be afraid of?"
  Batman: " You're afraid of being ashes. You're afraid of being forgotten. And you will be forgotten, Joker! Because of me! I am vengeance. I am the night. I am Batman!"
  (later)
  Scarecrow: "Don't you see, Gotham? You have no savior. No more hope. No - more - Batman! I've won."
  Batman: "I'm not afraid, Crane."
• Non-Standard Game Over: Letting Commissioner Gordon get kidnapped while escorting him to the clock tower or losing the first Penguin van result in unique failure dialogue from Joker.
  • Similar events happen if Robin or Nightwing are allowed to die when held up with guns by Harley or Penguin respectively.
  • If Batman dies during the attempted siege on the GCPD, there is a brief follow-up animation showing the Arkham Knight's forces entering the police station and killing everyone via a Gory Discretion Shot.
• Noodle Incident:
  • The Joker ran for president once, complete with TV ads. No one's quite sure what that was about.
    Militia: Y'know they never found out how he got on the ballot?
  • After handing Deacon Blackfire over to the GCPD, Joker brings up the idea of apologizing for an incident at the Church of Gotham involving holy water being replaced with hydrochloric acid. All we know of what happened is it resulted in "one hell of a baptism".
  • There's also the story of Paulie and getting killed by the Joker. No one's quite sure the real reasoning he got killed or even how.
• Not Worth Killing: Hell, not even worth fighting. While Batman canonically arrests every villain before dawn, Eddie demands Batman to solve all of his riddles to get the "privilege" to fight him. It's possible to trigger the first ending to end Batman's career instead of fighting him. Catwoman even suggests that they leave him waiting. It's not hard to imagine how Eddie would react if this actually happened.
• Obliviously Evil: From Professor Pyg's dialogue when you capture him, he doesn't even seem to know he's doing anything wrong by turning kidnapped people into Dollotrons - in fact, he considers it "fixing" them.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • While playing as Red Hood in the Bank challenge maps, if you use his Dual Handguns to take down a thug, other thugs nearby will hear it despite the alarm being supposedly too loud to hear anything (including their own guns). This is done for balancing reasons, as silent instant Takedowns from anywhere on the map would trivialize any challenge.
  • Likewise, the "Endless Knight" predator challenge (which features endless waves of enemies with a 5-minute timer) normally gives the player extra time for each enemy taken out, but using Red Hood's handguns to One-Hit Kill enemies doesn't. Takedown animations that use the guns are still fair game though.
• Odd Friendship: Between Two-Face and The Penguin at the beginning. Needless to say, it doesn't pan out at the end.
• Offhand Backhand: Batman can pull a few of these on the thugs about to attack him while he is interrogating the Penguin for information. He can also do this on the fear toxin-induced thug about to attack him while he's replacing the damaged power core of the Batmobile with the Nimbus cell.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: According to some Enemy Chatter from the militia, Barbara Gordon did not come along quietly. One even mentions she had escrima sticks hidden in her chair.
• Offscreen Teleportation:
  • Poison Ivy has plants grab Batman and lift him into the ceiling with no way out. Somehow, by the time she makes her way down the elevator from the skyrise, he is already at ground level waiting for her.
  • Man-Bat's approach to Batman. It's possible for him to suddenly appear on skinny construction bars with no prior indication or warning that he is there or would appear.
• Oh, Crap!: To quote some minions watching the Batmobile (which is a effectively a rocket-propelled tank) in action, "You seen what that thing does to cars?!" "I ain't staying to find out!"
• Ominous Music Box Tune: One riddle requires finding an abandoned building where a creepy music box is playing by a grave. The music being played is the nursery rhyme "Solomon Grundy," with the implication that the undead monster of the same name is alive and well.
• One-Man Army: This game takes this trope to the maximum extreme. Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight literally put together an entire trained army and armed tanks to kill Batman - but he takes down all of them with no problem by himself and his Batmobile.
• One-Person Birthday Party: In the opening prologue, as you walk around in Pauli's diner, there is a lone man at a booth with a small cupcake with his name, 'Noel', on it with a single lit candle. Noel is downtrodden and will give you a dirty look if you approach him. He will then return to looking downtrodden as his cupcake. Unfortunately, this is only the start of his troubles, as the man in the booth next to him releases fear toxin throughout the diner, resulting in the death of Noel and nearly everyone else in the diner.
• One-Time Dungeon: ACE Chemicals can only be played through on your first visit there, as Scarecrow blows it up by the end of Batman's trip.
• Operation: [Blank]: The Arkham Knight activates "Operation Savior" to unleash his army and tanks all over Gotham.
• Outside Ride: Ever notice the giant drones patrolling Gotham's skyline? Batman can glide right onto their back and have them ferry him around. There's no real incentive to do that instead of just blowing them up, but it's there.
• Overly Long Gag: Riddler explaining his rules (all ten of them, each one longer than the other) before the first Riddler challenge. You can skip it though, and he'll be confused.
• Pass the Popcorn: Unlike the TYGER patrol helicopters in City — which could observe and comment on Batman beating up goons while flying overhead, but only stayed as long as the fight lasted — GCPD copters will try to keep up with you visually after a street fight is finished in the hopes you'll start another one, because Batman in his element is apparently just that fun to watch.
• Pass Through the Rings: Several challenges require Batman to pass through a series of rings under a time limit.
• Permanently Missable Content: There aren't enough upgrades in the game to get every ability on a single playthrough. This doesn't normally matter, but if the player does not buy the "disable mine" upgrade for the Disruptor they will render one Riddler trophy impossible to collect on that run. (Fortunately, New game + shares the riddler collection). Averted if the player has every DLC, as they can grind the challenge maps for extra points, as beating a challenge for the first time with all 3 stars gives 1 upgrade point.
• Person as Verb: If you keep getting into the Isolation Cell one of Batman's hallucination will "spell it out for you" and say that going in the cell will lead to Robin being "Jason Todd-ed," or killed.
  "Now, it seems you're struggling with the subtext Bats so let me spell it out: Lock yourself up and Tim Drake will be "Jason Todd-ed". The bird boy needs to be put in his cage."
• Phlebotinum Overload: In an weird sort of sense. Joker only came back as a hallucination thanks to Scarecrow's fear toxin and the more Batman inhaled, the stronger Joker's hold over Bruce's mind became with Bruce just barely managing to mentally keep him at bay. Eventually at the climax of the story, Scarecrow gives Batman another dose of the toxin which finally did allow Joker control of Bruce's body. But then Joker proceeds to... act like Joker, which pisses Scarecrow off since "Batman" isn't acting scared like he wants, so he gives him another dose of the toxin, which ends up affecting the Joker since he's now the one in control, allowing Batman to turn the tables and take his body back.
• Photo Mode: Includes a free-roaming camera with distance rendering, filters and frames.
• Plot Armor: Batman takes a bullet at one point. The Arkham Knight (who knows all his strengths and weaknesses and how his armor is designed) puts a gun right up against Batman's stomach in what he knows is an unarmored area and pulls the trigger. Batman is almost completely immobilized, until he pulls a syringe out of Hammerspace and injects himself with something, and about 30 seconds later he's completely fine and even fighting again. This is given a Hand Wave later when Robin comments that the Batsuit can compress around wounds, but he should still get it looked at, and Batman says something to the effect of "I don't have time now, maybe later".
• Plot Hole: While it is foreshadowed that Barbara's suicide was just a hallucination, this doesn't gel with the story events that transpire shortly afterwards in which both Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight taunt Batman about it. While one could Hand Wave that they know it was a hallucination and are encouraging that belief, that begs the question of how they could know what Batman saw.^note And if Barbara didn't actually commit suicide and wasn't really harmed, what was the point of bringing them to the safehouse and letting Batman see them? The villains couldn't possibly have predicted he would hallucinate such a thing.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain: Victor Zsasz was a recurring threat in the previous games, but it was clear that he had Joker's support because the other villains were too disgusted or scared of him. With the Joker dead, Zsasz has been left to his own devices and is irrelevant to the game's events.
• Police Are Useless: Justified. The police were unable to find all of the tainted blood the Joker sent to hospitals in the previous game. A statewide search and retrieval IS NOT going to go off flawlessly, with mistakes and errors preventing all the blood from being found.
• Power Copying: More like Ability Copying. In the "Heir to the Cowl" sidequest, the player must control Azrael in a series of challenges set up by Batman in order to prove he is his worthy successor. He moves and fights exactly like Batman, as he was able to copy his abilities by watching him in combat.
• Powered Armor: The Batsuit (at least the default one) is a manner of light exoskeleton in this game.
• Precision F-Strike: During the final confrontation with Riddler, who has never cursed in the series (apart from saying "crap" in Origins, which isn't considered swearing anymore) can be heard shouting "Get up, you damn machines!" in frustration to his fallen robots.
• Promoted to Playable: Barbara Gordon/Oracle is a player character as Batgirl in the "A Matter of Family" Prequel DLC.
• Psychopathic Manchild: The Arkham Knight. He's a brilliant tactician but his dialog mostly consists of whining about beating Batman.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: One of Arkham Knight's game over animations.
  Arkham Knight: Look at me while you die, Batman. Look. At. Me.
• Punk in the Trunk: The rear of the Batmobile can open to include a tiny passenger compartment where Batman can strap in rescued hostages, criminals, and even Gordon for transport. They are technically seated (the seats resemble the seats in roller coasters, with a bar that goes over the passenger's shoulders - probably necessary to prevent injury considering the way Batman drives through the city and has tank battles while there are passengers), but the fact that they have no windows and can't move or do anything makes it work like this trope.
• Put the "Laughter" in "Slaughter": The Joker's song "Look Who's Laughing Now" kinda lampshades this, to the point of exaggeration: "Your parents are dead, and I can't stop laughing!"; "I killed all your friends, and I can't stop laughing!"; "Barbara's dead, and I'm laughing! HA! / Jason Todd's dead, and I can't stop laughing! / I'm even dead, and I can't stop laughing!"
• R-Rated Opening: Almost to reinforce that this is a darker, Mature-rated Batman game, Knight opens with the Joker being cremated, showing his skin melting before he's consumed by the fire.
• Rank Inflation: Most AR challenges allow you to earn Rival Points, which are awarded for going over the 3-star target, like every few seconds under a target time. They're solely for bragging rights.
• Reconstruction: The game provides a counterargument to the "why doesn't Batman just kill Joker" question: escalation. Batman's Rogues Gallery put aside differences when they feel their lives are at stake, causing levels of chaos and collateral damage they could never manage individually. In addition to that, the Joker's big fat ego and desire to beat Batman on his own is what keeps the Batman's secret identity from being exposed to the public. Without the Joker interfering, Scarecrow — lacking the ego of the other Big Bad villains, but possessing the ambition — is able to expose Batman as Bruce Wayne; even worse, he feels none of the Joker's compunctions about "ruining the surprise", and so has the foresight to make it a televised public event, avoiding a Death by Secret Identity.
• Recycled Soundtrack: A lot of the music is either reused or remixed tracks from Asylum and City, though there are plenty of new tracks present.
• Retcon: The time gap between Origins and Asylum is now eight years instead of five. A line between Batman and one of the firefighters he rescues confirms that it has been ten years since Firefly's appearance in Origins (assuming it wasn't an estimate), and Knight happens two years after Asylum. Now it seems a bit more plausible that Bruce could go through three Robins and hundreds of villains by the time Asylum rolls around.
• Renovating the Player Headquarters: The more missions you complete, the more GCPD becomes populated with civilians grateful for Batman's aid and villains fuming in detention. Each has unique dialogue for when Batman talks to them, including additional dialogue for after the main story is completed. The Evidence Lock-Up will also become filled with weapons and technology from the game's various supervillains
• Retroactive Idiot Ball: The Joker infected were locked up in one of Batman's hidden hideouts in Gotham, but the hideout was discovered and stormed by Harley Quinn. Except the "Race Track" DLC, released months after the game, reveals that Batman has a secure facility miles away from Gotham that he uses as a race track, which makes one wonder why he didn't think of locking the infected there.
• The Reveal:
  • The Arkham Knight is Jason Todd, who once fought alongside Batman as the second Robin.
  • Turns out that Henry Adams, the only one of the four Joker infectees to be apparently immune to the infection, not only was actually the one most thoroughly affected by it, but he also masterminded Harley Quinn's invasion of the Panessa Studios facility. How he managed to voluntarily prevent the more obvious symptoms (the white face, green hair and open sores) from showing up until the last moment or to do all this while under constant scrutiny is anyone's guess.
• Revenge Is Not Justice: Killer Croc is on a rampage in Season of Infamy, when Batman and Nightwing investigate the scene they find out Croc wants revenge because the prison staff tortured him through scientific experiments and worsened his condition as a result. Nightwing understands why Croc wants revenge but Batman points out that he still killed people and he needs to face justice for that.
  Batman: What happened to you was wrong. But you killed people. You have to pay for that.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • Scarecrow dragging Batman to Arkham Asylum to unmask him and make him contemplate his failed life's work in the middle of Amadeus Arkham's failed life's work.
  • The rescued firefighters in the Most Wanted mission "The Line of Duty" frequently mention prayer, God, and the Devil. Fitting, since they've been battling the hellish infernos of Firefly all along, and Underhill is their reluctant Judas.
• Run or Die: Arkham Knight's Excavator encounter is this, full stop, for blatantly obvious reasons.
  Arkham Knight: You get knocked down, you pick yourself up again. Huh? See, I learned that from an old friend.
• Run the Gauntlet: As per series tradition. Unlike the other examples, however, this one appears to be collaborative.
• Sadistic Choice: Scarecrow forces Commissioner Gordon into betraying Batman to save his daughter, though Commissioner Gordon Takes a Third Option by shooting at the center with the heavily armored Bat Insignia, knowing that Batman will survive the fall off the building. Later, Scarecrow once again guilts the commissioner to remove Batman's mask and reveal his identity by threatening to kill Robin. This time there is no way out and Batman gives permission to go ahead and do it.
  Scarecrow: Do you know what happens when a man refuses to be controlled by his fears? He must face them.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • Batman, while still heroic, isn't quite in the best state of mind. And seeing visions of the Joker haven't exactly helped.
  • The villains haven't been doing well in the sanity department either. Scarecrow really didn't take his encounter with Killer Croc too well, and not only was his body severely damaged from the ordeal but also his mind, and now he pretty much lives to see Batman suffer and be shunned in the eyes of the people. The Riddler also seems to have become a little more unstable since the past incarnations, with more quickly losing his temper and baiting Batman by targeting Catwoman, someone he knows, rather than just random people.
• Save the Villain: In the beginning of the game Batman must save Poison Ivy of all people after Scarecrow has her set to be executed for not joining his team. Unlike other instances, this one does lead Poison Ivy to eventually work alongside him to fight Scarecrow's toxins.
• Scenery Gorn: The city takes quite a beating over the course of one night, and it shows in equal measure, from the toppling ruins of the exploding ACE Chemicals factory to the hellish mindscape of Scarecrow's Nightmare Missions. When Joker walks out of the ruins of the Bad Future GCPD building near the end of the game, he sees the entire city consumed with flame, and cheerfully remarks, "This may be my finest work yet."
• Scenery Porn: This version of Gotham is the most lavishly detailed yet, due to next-gen rendering and game engines; every detail pops, including crumbling stone bricks, the reflections of neon signs on wet streets, and the dangling paper lanterns of Chinatown.
• Schrödinger's Gun: When you enter Scarecrow’s chamber on Stagg's airship, due to the fear-gas there will be two Scarecrows with their backs turned on you, and you have to guess which one is the real to take down and which one is just a hallucination. The one you choose will always be the fake one regardless whether he's on the left or right, and the real Scarecrow will have a shot at you.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • One of the cops at the GCPD mentions that all the officers captured by the Penguin in Arkham City transferred out of Gotham not too long after. Smart move.
  • If you drop down among a large group of rioters, the majority of them will run away rather than try to fight Batman.
  • While some rioters try to run Batman down, a good number of them will simply reverse, u-turn, and drive off.
  • Absolutely everyone (barring Deathstroke and the Arkham Knight) that sees a moving Batmobile. The new guys in town will fire a few shots, but quickly realize it's pointless and start running.
• Secondary Character Title: Though he is a major player, Arkham Knight is second to the game's actual Big Bad, Scarecrow.
• Secret Secret-Keeper:
  • During the elevator ride after the final Arkham Knight battle, Gordon has since figured out that he met Batman at the age of 8 in his civilian identity. Whether he had known for a while or had only just pieced it together by the Arkham Knight referring to Batman as "Bruce" right in front of him is up to interpretation.
  • An possible case. At one point, Catwoman calls Batman "Bruce". This happens after you defeat Riddler, which you can do either before or after completing the main story, in which Batman's identity gets revealed to the whole world. She calls his this regardless of when you complete it, so either Batman already revealed his identity before the events of the game, or she found out now when everyone else did.
• Secret Identity Apathy:
  • Scarecrow acknowledges that he doesn't actually care about Batman's secret identity, but he knows a lot of people do, and revealing to the world that Batman is nothing more than a normal person is key to destroying the hero's legacy. When he does reveal it to the world, his uttering of "Bruce Wayne?" has a tone more of "Huh, would not have guessed that" rather than any surprise or shock.
  • Inverted with the Joker who says that he never really cared who Batman was under the mask—and even said something of a similar effect to Harley in the last game—but now that he does know he's genuinely surprised, going so far as to say he loves the contrast between Batman by night and clueless billionaire socialite by day.
• Sequel Escalation:
  • Batman gets to drive the Batmobile for the first time, and Gotham City's streets have been expanded in order to accommodate it.
  • Batman starts with an upgraded version of his City uniform, then upgrades yet again to his new suit, which allows him to move faster and do moves such as the Fear Takedown and silent takedowns beneath grates.
  • The map itself is five times bigger than City's, and therefore twenty-five times bigger than Asylum's; accordingly, there are a lot more criminals on the streets.
  • Batman can now chain predator take-downs of enemies and use any available items in the environment to help him take down thugs, including environmental hazards like water.
  • There are five times as many thugs wandering around the city compared to Arkham City.
  • All gadgets can be thrown while gliding.
  • Batman will at times engage enemies with an ally on his side (Robin, Nightwing, Catwoman, the Batmobile's cannon and through environmental manipulation, Oracle) introducing a new "Dual Play" mechanic that lets the player switch control between the characters seamlessly while doing so.
  • Zig-zagged with the Riddler Trophies. The number of trophies has been cut almost in half compared to City (from 440 to 243, slightly more than there were in Asylum), but they are much harder to collect.
• Sequel Hook:
  • Or rather, Prequel. The returning Wayne Manor Predator map from City features a piano that can open a section of a wall and reveal a murder case Bruce is working on and the number "4-25". Batman: Arkham VR has "425" in an Arc Number throughout the game, it involves the Joker's blood infection, and part of the case involved Bruce suspecting the victim was killed by someone they knew and VR was a nightmare about a Jokerified Bruce killing Nightwing.
  • Even the game set up as the Grand Finale to the Arkham series as a whole can't resist a potential hook for future installments, as the Golden Ending demonstrates: just who is that mysterious flaming figure?
• Sequence Breaking: It's possible to finish Catwoman's sidequest and fully defeat Riddler before beating the main story, which ends with Batman's true identity being revealed to the world. In the cutscene after beating Riddler, Catwoman calls Batman "Bruce." Whether this is meant to indicate that Selina always knew Bruce's secret or is just an oversight based on the developers assuming the player wouldn't finish the Riddler sidequest until after beating the main story is a source of some debate.
• Sequencing Deception: Towards the latter end of the main story, Lucius stops responding to calls. Batman travels to Wayne Tower in order to check in on him, steps into the elevator in the parking garage... and Bruce Wayne steps out when it gets to the office, met by a confused Lucius. The player is led to believe that he has done an improbably fast costume change, up until the point that "Bruce" slams Lucius into a desk and forces him to unlock the computer.
• Set Behind the Scenes: A major portion of the game sees Batman and Robin battle Harley Quinn's gang throughout Panessa Movie Studios. They battle a goliath on the set of the Old West town of Windy Rock, they sneak through the haunted house featured in The Terror (starring Clayface), and defuse bombs on the stage for an old game show called Price Change.
• Set Swords to "Stun":
  • The Batmobile can shoot bad guys in the head with "slam rounds" and instantly neutralize them during certain combos. As mentioned on Tap on the Head, this is actually very dangerous, and would have a high chance of breaking their necks.
  • He also sends mooks flying with the 'Mobile itself, using a "pulse taser" force field that activates and neutralizes anyone within proximity of the vehicle while it's in motion (in other words, shocking someone with a medium-wattage taser the size of a tank and shooting them ten feet up in the air is somehow far less lethal than a collision with the tank itself). This gets especially absurd when considering that the taser doesn't work on other vehicles, so cars will upend, fly through the air, and even explode without any goons inside being harmed.
• Ship Sinking: The Batman/Catwoman relationship is abruptly ended when Batman breaks up with her in order to end his legacy without her getting hurt. In fact, none of the Batman ships ever get made thanks to the Bittersweet Ending. This may also apply to the Batman/Poison Ivy ship too, unless you believe they're Together in Death.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • One of Batman's hallucinations frequently talks about what a cute couple Oracle and Robin are to get in some cheap insults and guilt Batman over the danger he's put the young couple in. Some hallucinations also encourage Batman to find love with Catwoman before said Joker hallucination takes over and murders her, claiming to have met Talia al-Ghul in Hell, who told him to move on. And then promptly shacked up with Joker herself.
    Joker: Don't worry, I asked, and she's totally cool with Cat-lady havin' a go on the ol' scratchin' post.
  • To a lesser extent, Scarecrow is this for Batman and Poison Ivy based on a few offhand comments. He thinks that Batman was able to win her over by using his charm to gain her trust. Of course being a villain, he hopes they're Together in Death. Since she does pull a Heel–Face Turn thanks to Batman's influence, he may not be entirely wrong.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Joker is disposed of on a "Robinson" cremator. A nod to his creator, artist Jerry Robinson.
  • One of the generic game over-screens has a villain shouting Bats' name three times. Said villain even has their fingers up to their ear like they're listening to a Codec!
  • The death of Poison Ivy, with her body crumbling into brittle leaves while her giant plants release spores all over Gotham, appears to be a nod to Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
  • A militia member expressed fears that Poison Ivy could make the salad he had for lunch burst out of his stomach like an alien parasite, clearly referring to the Chestburster sequence from Alien.
  • Harley's goons mention that, at the tail-end of Albert King's boxing career, when he was no longer in decent condition to fight, the promoters brought in "some Russian guy" for an exhibition match who "beat the crap out of him".
  • The Joker infected victims each possessing a different characteristic of the villain's personality is very similar to Starscream's clone army each having a different quality of his personality as well, becoming a significant threat in their own right too.
  • Johnny Charisma at one point calls himself "Johnny C", one of several nicknames for the protagonist of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. This turns out to be an appropriate moniker...
  • Destroying Cobra drones requires a single well-placed shot to a small exhaust port.
  • The entire game is a shout-out of sorts to The Dark Knight Rises. It has a similar premise... Gotham being taken over by a mercenary group, the lead villain developing a superweapon, Batman being broken, captured, and revealed as Bruce Wayne, and even Bruce faking his death at the end. There are also some parallels to The Dark Knight Strikes Again, which preceded the movie.
  • The Riddler quips Monopoly's "Do not pass Go" reference if Catwoman picks the wrong key that triggers the bomb on her collar.
  • Riddler also gets a Villainous Breakdown during the last lap of the final racetrack when he quotes Frieza from Dragon Ball Z Abridged: "STOP! NOT! DYING!"
  • When the Arkham Knight confronts Batman with a giant excavator, he remarks about it not coming in black, which will make him jealous.
    Arkham Knight: I did ask if it came in black, but then I thought... Ah, you'd just get all jealous.
  • Lastly, what's the name of the Trophy you get by beating NG+? The Long Halloween.
• Showdown at High Noon: The most direct boss showdown in the game takes place on a Western movie set, evoking this trope as Batman and Robin take on the most physically powerful foe in the base game.
• Side Effects Include...: Parodied, of course, by the Joker.
  "*chokes and gags* Fear toxin may be dangerous for you and your loved ones. Prolonged exposure to fear toxin may induce episodes of extreme psychological trauma."
• Signs of Disrepair: A neon sign outside Killinger's Department Store has been vandalized so that only "KILLING" is lit up.
• Skeleton Motif: To show that Scarecrow is not messing around anymore, he radically alters his appearance to resemble an undead soldier ready to spread fear into the world.
• So Last Season: Batman upgrades to his new Arkham Knight armor partway through the game, after his upgraded Arkham City duds aren't enough to take on all of Gotham's villains. He's also upgraded to a new, more heavily-armed version of the Batmobile since Asylum. A mook notes that he liked the old Batmobile better because of its retro design, and more importantly "it didn't turn into freaking tank either".
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: The Scarecrow never speaks above a whisper, and is at his most terrifying:
  "Sshh, it's okay to be afraid."
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The game's opening makes excellent use of "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "Only You (And You Alone)" playing over scenes of The Joker's cremation and Scarecrow's initial attack on Gotham.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In a bit of a twist, rather than being killed off and brought Back from the Dead ala the comics, Jason Todd was instead tortured by The Joker for a period of at least one year, before Joker seemingly shoots him and mails a videotape of it to Batman. However, when the Arkham Knight reveals his identity as Jason, the Joker hallucination plaguing Bruce's mind tells him that he lied about actually killing him and that the videotape didn't show him everything.
• Spirit Advisor: Inverted with Batman's hallucination, who taunts and hinders Batman along the way. Played straight too though, since this Scarecrow-induced hallucination will often drop hints as to the solution to a puzzle or room if you wait around long enough, sometimes even stating the answer outright. Hallucinations of people will also sit or stand exactly where you need to go at some points in the game where there is no onscreen objective marker. It is perhaps the most personable and friendly the Joker has ever been with Batman.
• Squee: One thug seems delighted at the fact that the man who bashed his face in and hung him off a bridge was Bruce Wayne.
• Stalking Mission: Each segment of the Penguin's side-quest starts with Batman hitting one of his gun-running vans with a tracker and tailing it back to the Penguin's nearest weapon depot.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: Done by Batman to Gordon at the beginning of the game, on the roof of the GCPD. Experienced in heart-stopping first-person from Gordon's perspective in the flashback in Panessa Studios.
• Stealth Mentor: In a strange way, the hallucinations from Scarecrow's fear toxin encourage Bruce to soldier on and occasionally drop hints about what to do next to the player.
• Stealth Pun:
  • The achievement/trophy description for defeating Hush: "Face/Off against an old friend."
  • Scarecrow (and Azrael when talking about the prophecy) often uses fire metaphors to describe his attack, and his plan begins with a small-scale attack on Pauli's Diner when Officer Owens notices a man smoking a cigarette, who unleashes the fear toxin. After all, where there's smoke, there's fire.
  • The Joker Infection is stated to be a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob's Syndrome, the human variant of Mad Cow Disease. Which would make the infection Mad Clown Disease.
• Strapped to a Bomb:
  • Riddle employs a variant on Catwoman, to ensure she can't escape Pinkney Orphanage until she and Batman solve his extended gauntlet.
  • Johnny Charisma wires the entire stage and himself with explosives before his encounter with Batman, and yells out that should he ever catch a glimpse of Robin, he'll activate the detonator in his hand; Robin, forced to deactivate the bombs out of sight, removes Johnny's vest and kicks him towards Batman, who headbutts him to sleep.
  • Later in the game, Batman encounters a militia briefing, where one soldier displays their new heart-rate-monitoring suicide vests set to violently explode when the wearer's pulse drops with unconsciousness, thus forcing Batman to back away from any fight, lest he endanger his own life and the lives of others; as a result, he confidently asserts that the Bat's not getting anywhere near him. Batman promptly bursts through the projection screen behind him, grabs him, deftly neutralizes the device, and slams him head-first onto the ground, then proceeds to take out all the other soldiers at the briefing. (The vests are never seen again in-game, quite possibly because nobody else ever found out how to use them.)
  • Some of Riddler's puzzles involves thugs unknowingly implanted a bomb inside their brains, which forces Batman to shock them with a Batarang or REC (or run them over with the Batmobile) to disable them.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: After Batman is unmasked, several thugs and militia men talk about how they could beat up Bruce Wayne. This despite Bruce Wayne being the same dangerous vigilante who's been kicking ass up and down Gotham for over a decade.
• Superhero Trophy Shelf: The Evidence Locker at the GCPD is full of trophy cases containing the signature items of various supervillains who Batman has faced over the years (plus one of Batman's own gadgets). As the story and Most Wanted missions are completed, the gear of the various villains that Batman defeats get added to the collection.
• Superman Stays Out of Gotham: Played with. Arkham Knight's threat was broadcasted worldwide to prevent outside involvement less there be a big crater where Gotham used to be. However, it's still strongly hinted that Superman, who's namedropped by mooks, would have eventually intervened. The events of the game take place so fast that there was no time for other heroes to react.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Arkham Knight's M.O. is quite similar to previous "like Batman, only willing to use lethal force" villains such as Azrael and Red Hood. His heavy use of a variety of cool guns makes him particularly reminiscent of Red Hood. That's because he is Jason Todd/Red Hood, including having a red hood-like visor underneath his Arkham Knight mask. You even get to play as him in his post-Arkham Knight Red Hood persona in one of the DLC missions.
• Sympathetic Villain, Despicable Villain: The two major villains, the Arkham Knight (Sympathetic) and Scarecrow (Despicable) ultimately fall into this duo. The Arkham Knight is eventually revealed to be Jason Todd, the former Robin who was horribly tortured by the Joker and left for the dead. Batman only feels remorse for Jason. Scarecrow, on the other hand, is nothing more than a vicious and sadistic criminal with no redeeming qualities, who only wants to bring down Gotham City and his saviour at all costs. In the end, Jason pulls a Heel–Face Turn and saves Bruce from Scarecrow, the latter gets reduced to an eternally scared shadow of himself with his fear toxin
• Sympathy for the Devil: If you choose to not restore Ra's at the end of the Shadow War missions he will be locked up in the GCPD. Talking to the officers guarding the cells has them comment about feeling sorry for the man and the state that he's in.
• Tagline: "Be the Batman." Later extended into "Be the vengeance. Be the night. Be the Batman." in the TV spots.
• Take Your Time: Bases getting overrun? Friends been kidnapped? Don't worry, you can go off and complete side missions and hunt collectibles to your heart's content before moving. One particularly glaring instance is during a hostage situation near the start, where Batman has time to put on a new Batsuit and do multiple AR training courses before going in to save them.
• Talk to the Fist: Some Riddler informants will attempt this on Batman during their interrogation. If the player doesn't counter the punch, no information is added to the map.
• Tank Goodness: The Batmobile, as well as the hundreds of drones that the Militia use, is more of an armoured car with weapons since it uses wheels instead of tracks, but still fits the trope. Sort of. 'Honest Trailers called it "Arkham: World of Tanks".
• Tempting Fate:
  • "Huh. Guess I'm toxin-proof!" - Joker's remnant, seconds before he's confronted with his greatest fears thanks to Scarecrow's serum.
  • In the Golden Ending: "Hey freak! Maybe you missed the news: Batman's dead." "That look don't scare us no more!"
  • One of the random conversations between street thugs you can overhear while out and about will feature a mook remarking that he participated in every previous game, yet has never run into Batman, not even once. Whether his streak is broken (along with a rib or two) is up to the player.
• Terms of Endangerment: As ever, the hallucination Joker has a few.
• That Man Is Dead: While Batman fights the Arkham Knight, he calls him Robin, trying to get through to Jason. Jason just shouts at him not to call him that.
  Batman: Stand down, Robin!
  Jason: Don't call me that! That's not who I am!
• There Can Be Only One: Henry Adams believes this should apply to the infected, killing them to prove himself the strongest and most worthy of being the new Joker. When he realizes that Batman is also one of the infected, he concedes that he isn't the strongest of the group and commits suicide.
• Through the Eyes of Madness:
  • The games opens with a police officer, who's also the player character, patrolling a nice diner just before it becomes overrun by a horde of vicious demons, who rush the player character after a few moments. It's only after the player character is tackled that the player learns they weren't shooting at demons, they were shooting the same patrons they heard talking about their dayjobs from before, all because the supervillain known as Scarecrow flooded the diner with his "fear toxin."
  • Early on in the game, Batman has to stay in an self-destructing chemical factory so that the toxins it releases won't spread throughout the city, or worse, the entire Eastern sea board. He manages to limit the toxin's release so it only affects those in the building, but as he works to stop the release altogether, the computer goes from saying the blast radius "decreased by fifty percent" to saying it "increased by ONE THOUSAND PERCENT" just before Batman turns to face a nightmare that shoots him in the face. The player may not immediately put together that nightmare is a hallucination and have a bit of a heart attack.
  • After Batman is exposed to Scarecrow's new fear toxin at the chemicals facility, billboards throughout the city will momentarily change to have more sinister messages, only to revert to their original form as soon as they're out of the camera's sight. For example, a sign for the Bank of Gotham shows a woman giving files to three bank clerks with the slogan "The Easy Way." The camera will occasionally show a hallucination of the sign that keeps the slogan "The Easy Way," but the woman is replaced by an armed Batman, who's surrounded by the slumped corpses of three supervillains, demonstrating Batman's fear of becoming a murderer.
  • These hallucinations pop in and out of the game, most notably when Batman finally gets a look at the Arkham Knight's face, only for a hallucinated face to cover it up and mock Batman. By the time the hallucination wears off, the Arkham Knight has escaped.
• Time Skip: The game takes place one year after the events of Arkham City, nine months after Arkham City: Endgame and an undetermined amount of time after Harley Quinn's Revenge. The prequel comics fill in the gap.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The thugs are well aware that a semi-sane vigilante is running around Gotham leaving a trail of unconscious bodies with concussions and broken bones. What do they do? Trash the emergency room!
  • Gotham is evacuated because of the threat of a massive chemical attack from a known terrorist. What do Gotham's overinflated criminal population do? Screw the evacuation buses! It's rioting time! It is heavily implied that many of them die horribly throughout the game and, indeed, the streets become a lot more sparse as you progress through the story.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • After being an annual Butt-Monkey, even as the Big Bad of City's Post-Climax Confrontation, Harley Quinn is Promoted to Playable and capable of taking on cops in close combat. Though this is mainly in the DLC, where she manages to beat Nightwing in a Boss Fight. In the game, she's a cutscene boss to Robin and Batman. Quinn also manages to track down Batman's secret base in Panessa Studios seemingly on her own, which even surprises the hallucinated Joker, who notes that she never used to be that competent. However, her interview tapes reveal that Henry Adams tipped her off.
  • Scarecrow in most adaptations has always been a minor villain but in Arkham Knight he unleashes a level of destruction that even Joker never caused, successfully unleashing a chemical weapon in Gotham. More importantly, he succeeded in outing Batman's identity to the world, which no villain in any adaptation ever managed to do.
  • The Disruptor has been somewhat useful in City and Origins, but it pales in comparison to the Knight version; not only do all guns disrupted stay disrupted permanently, but a second shot will cause them to explode when fired, knocking out the wielder, but it can also electrify weapons crates, taking out anyone who tries to resupply. Furthermore, through upgrades, the Disruptor can nullify stun sticks, medics, drones, detective vision jammers, detective vision trackers, detective vision proof shoots and the Tanks. The only thing keeping the Disruptor from being a total Game-Breaker is the 3(4 if upgraded) shot limit and the painfully slow recharge.
• Tragic Mistake: Batman locking up Robin in the containment cell at Panessa Studios. He does this because he believes he's protecting Robin, but in the end, Robin is defenseless when Scarecrow arrives and kidnaps him, forcing Batman to surrender to Crane's clutches and have his identity revealed to the world. This can be even worse if the player remembers to go back to Robin after rescuing Barbara - the threat is nearly over, but Batman still won't let Tim out.
• Trailers Always Lie: One of the trailers shows Oracle, Batman, Nightwing and Robin all in the Clock Tower. This never happens in-game, nor is there any part where they're all physically together at the same time.
• Trailers Always Spoil: Averted. The E3 trailer has Oracle giving Batman Penguin's location and him proceeding to interrogate Penguin. He says "The Arkham Knight" before the first Scarecrow glitch in the trailer leads to "where they are" and Penguin says "So that is who he had" before Scarecrow is revealed. This hides the fact that by this point in the game Oracle has been kidnapped by the Arkham Knight.
• Trick-and-Follow Ploy: Batman finds Penguin's numerous hideouts by attacking his goons, then following them when they fall back to said hideouts.
• Troll: The Joker of course, but this game takes it up to eleven whether it be gloating about harm coming to Barbara or laughing at Bruce's dead parents. Indeed the ending is basically the ultimate defeat of the ultimate troll: Joker is mocked, his weaknesses exploited then forgotten.
• Tron Lines: The Stealth Suit militia members present during Predator encounters wear outfits lined with glowing blue circuitry; the suits make them invisible to Batman's Detective vision, at the cost of making them stick out like a sore thumb to regular eyesight.
• Uncanny Valley: Professor Pyg's face is a very intentional example, looking completely inhuman after years of self-administered plastic surgery.
• Underestimating Badassery:
  • Lampshaded during a conversation between two militia members in the underground tunnels — while both doubt Batman has much of a chance of ever defeating the combined forces of their ranks, hardware, and vehicles, one of them can tell just how fearsome he is from the Arkham Knight's briefing; he even feels more comfortable with an invasion of this scale, reasoning, "I'd rather have too many guns than not enough."
  • The Arkham Knight himself repeatedly claims to know every trick Batman has and how he thinks. He spends the entire game underestimating and losing to Batman; and each time he personally confronts Batman ends in failure, despite advantage in weapons, armor, and numbers. Given that he's Jason Todd, he has the least excuse of anyone to do this. It even gets lampshaded by Hallucination!Joker
    "What kind of supervillain thinks a bullet to the stomach and a handful of tanks will stop the Batman!?!"
• Undisclosed Funds: The bounty of Batman's head has gone up from 50 million in Origins to (in Deathstroke's words) "Whoa, I could finally retire."
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The final hallucination in Batman's mind where you play as Joker becomes a First Person Shooter where you wander around shooting people with a shotgun. It eventually turns into a Survival Horror, where Joker is faced with his fear of ignominy as well as his fear of Batman.
• Unique Enemy: At Arkham Knight HQ, Batman encounters a militiaman giving a speech that includes him mentioning that he's testing out a new device: a bomb strapped to his body that checks his vitals and explodes if he's knocked unconscious (to exploit Batman's Thou Shalt Not Kill rule.) The other militiamen scoff at the idea of walking around with bombs strapped to them, and after Batman takes him out (by getting him in a headlock and disarming the bomb before knocking him out) the device is never used again.
• Universal Poison: A variant. Scarecrow's new fear toxin is extremely potent to the point that it can penetrate any clothing or orifice. Gas masks and respirators included, the only way to escape it is by getting underground or higher ground.
• The Unmasking: Scarecrow finally succeeds at achieving the goal of so many Gotham villains: unmasking Batman and revealing his secret identity. Even after his Secret Identity is revealed, the thugs aren't all emboldened just because they know it's Bruce Wayne under the mask. Some Mook Chatter has thugs express disappointment that Batman is just a rich guy. Likewise, a wandering group of thugs joke about Wayne themed gear but shut up when they realize it's still the same guy who's repeatedly kicked their asses. One thug complains that now they "have a bat with nothing to lose" while another is excited to know he met Bruce Wayne, despite said encounter ending in a beating. A few even mention that after how many times Batman's beaten them up through vigilante justice, they're planning on suing him for everything they can get.
• The Unreveal: There's a point where it seems like the player will finally find out who the Arkham Knight really is only for Batman to knock off his helmet off and reveal another hallucination. No matter how many times the player looks away and back, the hallucination will continue to take the place of the Knight's face until the player leaves and the Knight disappears.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Batman absolutely refuses to acknowledge several fear-gas-induced hallucinations no matter how they persist. He's particularly adamant regarding the Joker he keeps seeing everywhere. He never says ANYTHING to Joker, while the Joker keeps taunting him from inside. Subverted upon Joker's defeat. Of course, this helps maintain his absolutely stoic attitude and keep his mind on what is real. It makes the moments where he DOES mistake a hallucination for the reality that much scarier.
• Victory Is Boring: Joker's death at the end of Batman: Arkham City led to Gotham's crime rate falling to an all-time low. Batman had little to do but make up gadgets and upgrades that he barely uses. Arkham Knight on seeing the capabilities of the new Batmobile jokes to his men how bored Batman must have been.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • When playing as Officer Owens at the very beginning of the game, not shooting anyone during the fear gas sequence will result in Owens being a lot less psychologically traumatized as the events of the game continue.
  • An interesting Cruel to Be Kind example. During the airship part of the story, Batman has the opportunity to talk to Stagg or progress to the final room without talking to him. Initially, it would seem that abandoning Stagg would be the cruel option, however, during his and Batman's conversation, Stagg is gassed with Fear Toxin, thus making it the kinder option to just ignore him as it, presumably, spares him this fate.
  • Well, very slightly - while gunning down villains as the Joker in his final hallucination, you can choose not to shoot the Penguin and either the Riddler or his hostage. You still need to shoot one of the latter two to progress, though, and there's no option to spare Two-Face.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • You can run over anyone you want to while driving the Batmobile since they won't die from it.
  • You can also shoot them with anti-personnel rounds.
  • You can blow up any car in the game, even parked police cars.
  • You're not allowed to shoot occupied police cars, but you can damn sure run them, and any other car you like off the road. You can also run over cars like pancakes with the tank-like Batmobile.
  • If you're down to a couple of easily manageable thugs, you can string them along with certain gadgets for a long time without KOing them. Keep hitting them with batarangs, the REC, explosive gel (without any upgrades) as long as you like.
  • If any criminals run from you, you can always chase them down and attack them anyway.
  • There are several instances throughout the game where you can choose to let Batman's allies die or at least prolong their suffering by not pressing the right buttons as instructed: Harley can kill Robin during the Panessa Studios level, Penguin can kill Nightwing in Gun Runner, Hush can kill Lucius in Friend in Need and Blackfire can kill Ryder during Lamb to the Slaughter. Also, you can just stand next to a captured, bound and blindfolded Jason and Catwoman as long as you want. What makes this even crueller is that all of them become increasingly nervous/desperate as Batman stands by idly. Of course, this only leads to a mission failure.
  • Likewise, it is possible to beat up all the thugs attacking a fireman, then grapple away and leave the poor hostage still bound and trapped, begging Batman not to abandon them.
  • There's a point in the game where you can beat up an enemy forever, beating them down, blasting them with gadgets, and caving their face to your heart's content. Given it's the Joker and he's been taunting you throughout the whole game, you should have plenty of anger to vent.
• Villain Decay:
  • Remember when Black Mask was a powerful mob boss who didn't fear the Joker or Batman at all? In the Red Hood DLC, he gets beaten easily by Jason, breaks down begging for his life, and is killed like an insignificant insect.
  • Penguin: In City he had a museum for a fortress, a small army made of thugs, mercenaries, and Sickle, all armed with state-of-the-art military-grade weapons and equipment, Mr Freeze's gear, a Great White Shark, and Solomon Grundy. If it weren't for Batman, he could've seized the whole prison. Here his gang is made of thugs, Sickle vanished along with his brother, the Freeze gun's in GCPD, and Grundy is gone too. He has to sell guns to the militia for immediate income. As of the Nightwing DLC what's left of his gang and resources are gone, he doesn't even escape GCPD, and Nightwing gets some payback for the main story. Oh, and he's scared of the dark.
  • Two-Face: After building himself up throughout City, his gang is also reduced to thugs and he's forced to rob banks just to keep his finances up. Also, before it took multiple takedowns to defeat him, and he had unlimited reinforcements and a grenade launcher. Now he's fought in a normal Predator encounter and is armed and goes down like any thug; if you use Detective Mode during the final encounter, you might take him out without realizing it. He does better in the Robin DLC since he at least escapes GCPD, but it's clear that he's finished as a criminal. Especially since he was defeated by Robin the Boy Wonder, who every crook treated like a joke, meaning his reputation has taken a hit.
  • The Riddler as of Catwoman's Revenge. The Riddler was one of the series' most intelligent villains, especially in Arkham City where his crimes had serious threats against the Dark Knight himself. However, in this DLC Riddler has officially sunken at his lowest point. Imprisoned after the events of the main story, Riddler is using his one phone call in jail to call his computer AI to wire bail money, while his former hostage Catwoman infiltrates his base simultaneously in order to rob him blind out vengeance. Selina easily succeeds at stealing Riddler's entire life savings as he breaks down crying and begging for her not to. After losing everything, Riddler is left with no money, no chance of escape from prison, and ends up losing his career as a supervillain forever. All capped off with him getting tased by Aaron Cash like a cartoon character in the end.
• Villain Protagonist: The Joker is the Player Character for a bit of the game.
• Villain Song: After two separate, equally fitting Obsession Songs, Joker finally gets his own original number, the swinging lounge show-stopper "Look Who's Laughing Now" (Also known as "The Asylum Blues" according to the novelization), where he taunts Batman for all his myriad failures and crows about how he's slowly but surely taking over Bruce's mind. A curious case, since this song is being hallucinated by Batman and the "real" song being song by Johnny C isn't heard by the players.
• Villain Team-Up: Following City, the remaining villains have joined forces to kill Batman, believing that criminal enterprise can never thrive as long as he still lives. Though in practice this meant that they all chipped in to fund the Arkham Knight's army and agreed to not interfere with each other's operations and they run their own private criminal schemes while Scarecrow's master plan unfurls.
• Villainous Breakdown
  • The Arkham Knight becomes steadily more unhinged as the game progresses and his attempts to kill Batman keep failing. He goes from calm, intelligent attacks to throwing tanks and weapons at Batman in desperate attempts to get him. By the time Batman confronts him for the last time, he's completely lost it and tries to hunt Batman down with a sniper rifle while childishly screaming things like "STOP TALKING TO ME!". And once Batman forgives him for all he's done and offers to help repair the damage Joker did to him, he just breaks completely and runs away once Batman's back is turned.
  • Joker in Batman's mind gets progressively more panicky as Batman's shoving the villain's worst fear (being forgotten) in his face again and again in a bid to shake him off for good. It gets so bad he outright begs Batman to not forget him.
  • Scarecrow goes through a spectacular one when Batman injects him with fear toxin, showing him his worst fear; bats. He screams in terror upon the demonic Batman in front of him, leaving him with a terrified and broken mind.
• The Voice: The second-in-command of the militia. Often heard as Batman blows up drones and shuts down outposts, never met or punched in the face.
• Voice Changeling: Using the Voice Synthesizer, Batman and Nightwing can imitate the voice of anyone they have recordings of. In combat, they can use this to imitate the voices of villains and tell their minions to position themselves wherever the player so desires.
• Voice of the Legion: Whenever hallucination Joker speaks, a chorus of sinister laughter can be heard under his voice.
• Walking Spoiler: After getting a dose of fear toxin early in the game, The Joker follows Batman around as a hallucination, mocking him at every plot element and every enemy defeated and riding off the fear that they are the same and Joker will eventually take control of his mind. It's also an immediate spoiler that he's voiced by Mark Hamill again.
• Weird Trade Union: One rioter can talk about how a friend of his just got laid off by Riddler and replaced with a robot, prompting the other to suggest that the low-end criminals of Gotham need to get organized to keep the supervillains from treating them like this.
• Wham Line: Four of them.
  Commissioner Gordon: This is how it happened. This is how the Batman died.
  Joker: Miss me?
  Arkham Knight: Don't worry, Bruce, I kept some secrets to myself.
  Batman: Jason? But... you're dead.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • In-Universe, one of the conversations between two goons wondering what happened to Tiny, Penguin's shark from Arkham City. Sure enough, in the "Arkham Lockdown" DLC set after the main game, Nightwing sees him secured in a tank at Penguin's depot at the Blüdhaven Docks, bearing a few more scars but still as vicious as ever.^note (The model and textures were also recycled for a similarly huge shark hanging from the pier at Panessa Studios, confusing quite a few players.)
  • Hammer and Sickle, who are in the comic and even reconjoined, don't appear in-game.
  • For a supremely Smug Snake who lays down a lot if not most of the militia's smack talk for huge portions of the game, the arrogant sub-commander under Arkham Knight and later Deathstroke seems to slink away after all is said and done. Granted, without his toys and boys he is nothing, but a bonus Most Wanted for him might have been nice.
  • Victor Zsasz appears in CCTV footage when tracking Oracle, and there are bodies matching his MO, but Zsasz himself doesn't appear in the game. His voice clips still exist within the game's data, however, indicating that he was originally supposed to have a bigger role.
  • After locking up Harley in an isolation cell after her takeover of the movie studios, she is simply left in there by Batman and wasn't released when Scarecrow came to kidnapped Robin but her crew has simply disappeared and went unmentioned for the rest of the game.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Batman gets criticized several times throughout the game for his lack of trust in his allies:
  • Gordon's response to learning Barbara Gordon is still in Gotham City and Batman knew about it is to shout at him and punch him in the face. He follows this up by declaring he should never have trusted Batman, and throwing the Batphone at his feet.
  • Tim Drake gets so upset about Batman forcing him to sit out of the action that he outright calls Bruce a "son-of-a-bitch. This happens after latter reveals that he lied to him about Oracle being fine.
  • Barbara Gordon gives Batman crap for isolating Tim in the movie studios, taking away communications, and generally leaving him to fend for himself while Scarecrow's forces ran rampant.
  • Jason Todd is bitter that Batman was unable to save him from the Joker and seemingly took another Robin as a Replacement Goldfish the entire time he was in Arkham (a year). Bruce insists that he did search for Jason but he doesn't offer much defense about bringing Tim into the Bat-family before Jason died.
  • Whichever way the player chooses to progress after locking up Tim, the Joker will lay one on Bruce — if Batman tells him he saw Barbara die, Joker notes that if he hadn't tasked Robin with trying to cure the Joker clones (an attempt that was ultimately pointless), he could've been out in the field and prevented her capture. If Batman neglects to tell him and leaves, Joker mentions how delaying the inevitable will seem all the more like a cruel betrayal when he finds out the truth. In either case, he thinks Batman's actions are selfish and despicable, and he couldn't be more proud of the little guy.
  • Two of Batman's allies are held up at gunpoint by villains, with Batman standing nearby to save them. Each segment gives you about three minutes to act and save them, with the characters in question pointing out how Batman doesn't seem to be doing anything, especially in the latter case. Much like Dr. Young in the first game, taking too long will result in their deaths and a game over. One of the villains even calls you out on being cold in his game over.
• What the Hell, Player?: If Penguin kills Nightwing during his side mission (which will probably only happen if the player intentionally holds off on saving him for several minutes), his Game-Over Man taunt feels like it's just as much directed at the player as it is Batman.
  Penguin: You and Batman were friends, right? Now, I hated your guts, but THAT'S harsh.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The Golden Ending: Gordon has run for mayor and won, Barbara and Tim Drake seem to be getting married and though Gordon worries that criminals will grow bold and no longer fear Batman once his influence finally disappears, a mysterious Bat-like figure still prowls Gotham.
• Where It All Began: The final confrontation takes place at Arkham Asylum.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Arkham Knight planned to do this at the very beginning and several times throughout the game but was always stopped by Scarecrow. Then Scarecrow degrades to doing this after Batman, who had been injected with three separate doses by this point, tells him he is not afraid, ironically having Arkham Knight stop him.
• Why Won't You Die?: The Riddler gets increasingly unhinged as Batman gets close to completing his final course. The last thing he shouts just before Batman crosses the finish line is "STOP! NOT! DYING!"
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Gotham is your playground, 5 times bigger than that of Arkham City. On a technical note, a significant achievement of the game is the complete lack of loading screens. The entire city is one, single, fluid map. This includes every labyrinth sewer, every ducting system while crawling around inside the buildings and criminals can hide in buildings from you.
• Wrong-Name Outburst:
  • After seeing a few flashback hallucinations of Joker's torture of Jason Todd, Batman accidentally says "Jas—" before correcting himself for "Tim" immediately after he catches it while talking to Robin. The Boy Wonder notes he hadn't done that for a while.
  • The Riddler also does this during his boss battle.
  "Die, Father! I mean, Batman."
• You Have No Chance to Survive: Scarecrow kicks the plot off by hijacking Gotham's PA system and threatening to unleash his fear toxin, then spends the entire game regularly announcing how horribly he's going to make Batman and everyone he cares about suffer.
• Your Head A-Splode: Happens to Catwoman if she picks the wrong key to disarm her Explosive Leash. The screen cuts to black - and Riddler - before she goes boom, though.
• Zerg Rush: The tank battles see enemy drones overwhelm you with ever-increasing missile salvos and reinforcements. Especially at the GCPD, which involves an army of tank drones rushing in at once to destroy the building and overpower the Batmobile.

---

DLC Episodes

Harley Quinn

• Badass in Distress: Poison Ivy, despite being explicitly superpowered, is stuck in a Bludhaven prison. This leaves Harley Quinn to break in and rescue her, kicking off the brief plot of the DLC.
• Brief Accent Imitation: Harley mocks Penguin by mimicking his accent. He takes offense to her use of British slang that he himself doesn't use.
• Call-Forward: Ivy has one of her vines snatch up Nightwing in a similar manner to Batman in an early cut-scene in the main game.
• Hero Antagonist: The Blüdhaven police and of course Nightwing.
• Hypocritical Humor: Harley Quinn angrily snaps at Nightwing during their fight that crime-fighting is against the law.
• Final Boss: After fighting through waves of police personnel, Nightwing shows up to fight Harley and to mark the end of the DLC.
• Malicious Misnaming:
  • Harley comes up with about a dozen different names for Nightwing during her fight with him.
  • Harley's insistence on calling Penguin "Blubberpot" may also count.
• Mission Control: Penguin is Harley's mission control in the DLC. He's also the one who taunts her if she dies.
• Mythology Gag:
  • "Thaddeus Ryerstad", the unhinged copycat vigilante known as Nite-Wing (not Nightwing), can be seen on a Wanted poster.
  • Occasionally, the sane voice of Harleen Quinzel will speak to Harley like a conscience, trying to steer her towards rational and moral decisions - an idea from way back in her first solo series, where Harleen was represented as a literal shoulder angel.◊ Much like there, Harley never listens.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Harley and The Penguin rescue Poison Ivy from the Blüdhaven police so she can join Scarecrow's team...except Ivy's not interested, pulling a Heel–Face Turn, forming an uneasy truce with Batman and proving instrumental in stopping the spread of the Cloudburst.
• Obligatory Earpiece Touch: Harley makes this pose when talking to Penguin, which seems odd as she doesn't appear to wear an earpiece.
• Promoted to Playable: Harley herself, which is quite a step up from her Butt-Monkey status.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Penguin makes his displeasure of working with Harley known. While Harley herself, Genius Ditz she is, will throw insults back at him when she's actually paying attention to what he's saying.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: When in Harley's Detective Vision you see the walls covered in crazy writing.
• Took a Level in Badass: She manages to defeat Nightwing in straight up hand to hand combat while also being outnumbered by cops who are attacking her at the same time, though it's Poison Ivy that takes him out in the following cutscene.
• Villain Protagonist: Harley Quinn naturally.

Red Hood

• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Black Mask begs Red Hood to spare him at the end of the episode, offering him drugs, money, or anything he wants just as long as he spares him, to no avail.
• Asshole Victim: Everyone who Red Hood kills is a gangster.
• Big Bad: Black Mask is the boss of all the gangsters Red Hood is up against in this episode.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Red Hood against Black Mask — a vigilante who won't hesitate to kill pitted against a gangster fighting for total control of the drug trafficking scene in Gotham.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: In only three missions, the Red Hood cripples Black Mask's forces. Eventually leading up to the boss' death.
• Disney Villain Death: Sionis is unceremoniously kicked out a penthouse window into the busy street below, presumably either being killed by the fall or traffic.
• I Lied: Red Hood interrogates a False Facer thug on the whereabouts of Black Mask, promising to let him go alive if he provides him information. Guess how well that ended?
• Killed Offscreen: The mooks at one point state that Red Hood killed Killer Moth a month ago.
• Neck Snap: Red Hood's silent takedowns have him brutally snap the enemy's necks in various ways.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Red Hood always appears in his regular outfit in the cutscenes even if his alternate outfit is selected.
• Retcon: Black Mask's design has him — contrary to his cameo appearance in City — back in his pinstripe white suit from Origins, with the formerly detachable mask now irremovably burnt into his flesh, as detailed in Origins Blackgate; Brian Bloom voices him here as well, as opposed to Nolan North.
• Sociopathic Hero: Red Hood pumps unarmed, pleading thugs with lead after pumping them for information.

Batgirl: A Matter of Family

• Adaptational Backstory Change: Downplayed. Most versions of Harley don her criminal persona not long after meeting Joker. Predating Arkham Asylum by three years, the Matter of Family DLC shows that Harley was an Arkham psychiatrist for five years, able to connect Edward Burke with Dr. Young. ^note Origins was in Batman's second year, and Asylum was eight years later.
• Adaptation Distillation: Has thematic elements from The Killing Joke and like in Death of the Family, Joker's motivation and goals is to kill Robin and Batgirl, as he feels they're affecting Batman and slowing him down.
• Amusement Park of Doom: In fitting with the adaptation of thematic elements from The Killing Joke, Joker's taken over Seagate Amusement Park, situated on a former offshore oil platform, and turned it into his very own house of horrors. The audio tapes left by Edward Burke reveal the entire park was even built to Joker's specifications, and the property later handed over to him by the unsuspecting tycoon.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Some goons mention a former member of the crew named Paulie who apparently (though this is one of many conflicting theories presented by the mooks) "made a pass" at Harley, and express surprise at how angry Joker got, reasoning that he shouldn't have cared that much about that "annoying witch". Nonetheless, Paulie was fired, with a severance package in the form of an RPG to the torso.
• Bittersweet Ending: Batgirl and Robin managed to save Commissioner Gordon and other cops, but Joker has escaped.
• Death by Adaptation: Edward Burke — having previously appeared in DC properties as either the second Planet Master or a duplicitous U.S. Senator — is here a wealthy industrialist with a terminally ill daughter, who built Seagate Park for her at the suggestions of his psychologist, Dr. Quinzel, and her friend, "Jack White". Like the park owner in The Killing Joke, he too is unknowingly poisoned with Joker toxin; after his daughter passes away, "Jack" gives him some pills to help commit suicide, and he dies screaming with laughter.
• Easter Egg: Starro appears in the Batgirl DLC, though only as a set piece; he has no actual role in the events.
• Foe Romance Subtext Harley gives Batgirl a few compliments and cheers her on when she's fighting her mooks.
• Jump Scare: While grappling up to a ledge at one point, a giant mechanical joker fish comes in screaming at Batgirl, complete with Scare Chord, before backing off. Batgirl proceeds to call it a bad joke.
• Karma Houdini: Joker gets away in the end.
• Mythology Gag:
  • A human being with a Starro parasite attached to his face is advertised as "The Starfish Freak" on a poster for a planned sideshow exhibit; the design for the creature is even exactly the same as its appearance in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, right down to its coloration. The parasite itself, now five times as large and detached from its host, can be found suckered to a containment tank underneath a stairwell in the south end of the park.
  • A long-nosed clown balloon from the main game, with modified textures, can be seen floating over the shark attractions.
  • One of the Joker's nicknames for Batgirl is 'Bat-fake,' which is what he called Terry McGinnis in Return of the Joker.
• Noodle Incident: A running gag in the Enemy Chatter involves the Joker killing a gang member named Paulie over some perceived slight and everyone arguing about what Paulie did to upset the Joker and how the Joker killed him.
• Promoted to Playable: Barbara is finally playable in this DLC.
• Proper Lady: Harley Quinn notes that Batgirl carries herself with such elegance and style that she should be "Bat-lady" instead of "Batgirl". Batgirl snarks that its not the 19th Century though Tim Drake does call her "M'lady" to tease her.
• Riddle for the Ages: What did Paulie do that made Joker kill him, and how did Joker do it?
• Rule of Symbolism: Childhood and family, naturally, play a huge thematic role:
  • Barbara is terrified of both losing her father and, in saving his life, having him possibly find out her secret identity.
  • Joker compares Batman, who has noticeably softened since taking on two sidekicks at once, to a distracted, overtaxed new dad, and describes the effect it's had on Batman's interactions with him like a declining, loveless relationship between husband and wife. Joker being who he is, he naturally concludes that killing Batman's sidekicks is the best way to rekindle his archenemy's hatred.
  • Edward Burke built the entirety of Seagate Amusement Park out of loving devotion to his daughter, hoping it could rally her spirits and stave off her cancer for a little while, a hope Joker cruelly exploited for his own ends.
• Ship Tease: Pretty much a Foreshadowing at this point to her and Tim dating.
• Shout-Out: One of the predator scenes open with some of Joker's thugs discussing the premise behind Jurassic Park... and getting the science behind said premise hilariously wrong. The hostage openly begs them to stop talking because they're making him stupider just by forcing him to listen.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: At the end Barb and Tim pull this to Gordon and the cops.
  Gordon: I guess some things run in the family.
• Valentine's Day Episode: Joker even hopes to give Bats the best Valentine's gift he can, in order to spice up their waning rivalry — Batman's own sidekicks, dead, and their hearts served up on a platter.
• Worthy Opponent: Harley Quinn is quite a fan of Batgirl and openly roots for her in fights with thugs.

Nightwing: GCPD Lockdown

• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Penguin's thugs attempt to infiltrate the GCPD Headquarters, the Hub Level of the main game, to release Penguin.
• The Bus Came Back: Tiny, who had not been alluded to since Arkham City.
• He's Just Hiding: In-Universe. Penguin's mooks wonder if Batman is really dead since their kind have a tendency to come back from the dead.
• Jump Scare: When Nightwing invades the Penguin's hideout, notice there's a rather large, leaking aquarium on one side of the room. If you go in closer, Tiny (from Arkham City) will rush the glass and manage to crack it.
• Mission Control: Lucius Fox takes over from Alfred and Barbara, guiding Nightwing through the GCPD and hacking into whatever he needs.
• Mythology Gag: Nightwing briefly shows the same love of playing with word prefixes ^note dubbed "unwords" by Greg Weisman (in this case, "intractability" to "tractable") as his Young Justice (2010) counterpart.
• Time Skip: As per the dialogue this mission is set after the game and the Golden Ending, Barbara and Tim are married and on honeymoon, Batman is still gone and Nightwing went back to Bludhaven some time between Arkham Knight and the start of this DLC.
• Villainous Breakdown: The Penguin, trapped in an elevator with no lights, goes completely to pieces as Nightwing takes out his mooks.

Robin: A Flip of a Coin

• Arc Words: "You're not him".
• Bittersweet Ending: Robin stops Two-Face but he realizes that as Batman's successor, his chances for a peaceful life are slim. This is symbolized, when he catches Two-Face's coin and finds out that the "Bad Face" lands.
• Foreshadowing: Nora Fries's cryotube can be spotted, hinting at her sidequest in the then-upcoming "Season of Infamy" DLC.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Averted. Robin holds up his Bullet Shield in the finale but he doesn't have time to properly brace. Two-Face first hits the shield, knocks it away, and stuns Robin, then shoots him in the foot, which leaves Robin on the floor with Two-Face standing over him. If it wasn't for Barbara creating a last-minute distraction, Robin would have died.
• Mission Control: Oracle is back, co-ordinating events for Robin.
• Time Skip: Takes place after the Golden Ending of Arkham Knight and sometime after the events of GCPD Lockdown.

Catwoman's Revenge

• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Riddler as Catwoman takes all of his money and destroys his robot factory.
  Riddler: (On the verge of tears) Please, do you want me to beg? I can beg! MERCY, PLEASE!
• Black-and-Gray Morality: It's a Classy Cat-Burglar against a cyber terrorist/egomaniac hostage taker. However, Catwoman is the more sympathetic of the two fighting.
• Book Ends: Riddler's first appearance in the Arkham games was as an off-screen voice who insulted and manipulated the hero by radio until you defeated his plans, by which time the police captured him and interrupted him in the middle of a villainous speech. Riddler's final appearance in the Arkham games has Catwoman robbing him blind, destroying his robots, while Riddler helplessly tries to order his robots via his "one phone call" in Prison. By the time Selina wipes him out financially, you can hear Riddler being tased by Aaron Cash in the middle of a monologue.
• Break the Haughty: The Riddler loses everything by the end of the story, putting an end to his career as a supervillain forever.
• The Dog Bites Back: After spending the entirety of the main game as Riddler's prisoner, Catwoman gets her chance at payback.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Well steal your happy ending rather. After finding herself forced to abandon her hard-burgled loot in Arkham City to save Batman, and spending most of Arkham Knight as Riddler's hostage, Selina ends the Arkhamverse a millionaire ($2.7 million) and gets revenge on Riddler.
• Energy Weapon: Catwoman fights an army of Mecha-Mooks in a factory where lasers are passing by the arena while constructing more robots. They also cause serious harm to Catwoman if she's hit.
• Humiliation Conga: Riddler is still in prison. His own mooks have decided to rebel against him and then his incompetent programming results in his security system failing. Then Riddler is robbed blind by Selina, who steals all his savings from his loot and destroys his robot factory. In other words, Riddler is finished as a supervillain, with no more money and resources to come back.
• Karma Houdini: Selina easily gets away with a cool 2.7 million dollars in her bank account, though by that point she's not really much of a "villain" anymore.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Toy Factory setting is named after Winslow Schott, the Toyman, a prominent Superman villain.
  • This wasn't the first time Selina robbed and demolished a toy store.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Riddler accidentally unlocks his own voice operated computer account for Selina to use while doing some Evil Gloating.
• Nintendo Hard: The final battle takes place with Catwoman against around 30 robots all while the floor is becoming more and more electrified. The best option is to just keep attacking and blocking as fast as you can while avoiding the floor that is electrified. DO NOT use takedowns as the floor will electrify faster and 9 times out of 10 Catwoman will perform said takedown on the electrified floor which will pretty much kill her.
• Non-Action Big Bad: The Riddler, who is notably still in prison at the time of the DLC.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: The Riddler is pretending to call his lawyer on his prison phone call, when in reality he's calling his computer AI to wire bail money and kill Catwoman. Nigma has to keep acting like he's arguing badly with his lawyer whenever a cop gets near.
• One-Woman Army: Catwoman of all characters proves fully capable of demolishing an army of robots in the Riddler's lair. She did have practice fighting them on the previous night, after all.
• Poke the Poodle: Aaron Cash threatens to take away the Riddler's chess set when he overhears him screaming on the phone.
• Police Are Useless: Hilariously subverted. At first it seems like the police are doing a bad job watching Riddler while he's phone calling his base to wire bail money, but Officer Cash makes a point of repeatedly checking on Nigma during his patrol route, and they taser him after he gets hostile.
• Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: Several of the Riddler's human mooks talk about how they used to bully nerds like him when they were younger.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Riddler's wordiness works against him as most of his more complex words ends up confusing his own AI. Of course, the AI also shows that it doesn't know the word "Run".
• Shout-Out: The logo for Winslow's Toy Store is the same logo for the Planet Express company.
• Smart Ball: The Dumb Muscle working for Riddler pull it for once. It turns out that they got Riddler to pay them online automatically instead of in person. Considering the employers of Gotham, this was a smart move.
• Spell My Name with a "The": Riddler's computer always refers to him as the Riddler.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Riddler realizes he's doomed after hearing his computer unlocks itself, after he was boasting that Selina would never get into it since it was voice-locked.
• Time Skip: Downplayed Trope compared to the other Arkham Episodes. The game takes place the night after the main ending of Arkham Knight.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: Riddler's intelligence has taken a serious fall in this story. For example, he accidentally allows Selina access to his account. Though it was quite clear he was at the end of his Villainous Breakdown.
• Villain Protagonist: Like her first DLC, we follow Catwoman's tale again.

The Season of Infamy

• Adaptational Heroism:Nyssa Raatko, Talia's younger sister, is far nicer than her comics counterpart. Batman even calls Nyssa the Only Sane Man of the League of Shadows and the Cure choice shows her to be a defiant woman who refuses to become a reanimated zombie like her father.
• Alas, Poor Villain: If Ra's al Ghul is allowed to die, his death scene is very somber, with Batman admitting that he had convictions and taking him to GCPD to die. Before he leaves, Ra's tells Batman that he's proud of him for breaking his one rule, and Batman quietly shuts the cell door for him to die.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Beating everything, including the "Season of Infamy" DLC, rewards the player with a version of the Knight Batsuit with a golden Batsymbol and the torso armor plating black.
• Animation Bump: Alfred's holographic projections in "Beneath the Surface" and "Shadow War" have better coloring and more realistic movements and expressions than they do in the rest of the game.
• Batman Grabs a Gun: "Shadow War" provides the player the option of having Batman destroy Ra's life support and let him die naturally rather than use the last remaining Lazarus chemicals to heal him.
• Book Ends:
  • A character example from "Shadow War." Provided you destroy the Lazarus Machine, the first time we saw Ra's, he was a corpse in a morgue at Arkham Asylum; the last time we see Ra's, he's on his deathbed in police custody. The ending hearkens back to City as well, with Batman carrying Ra's' dying body away the same way he carried Joker out of the Monarch Theater.
  • Croc was introduced in Asylum being led out of an elevator with a shock collar; here, he's led into one by multiple men wielding shock prods at the end of his quest line
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • "In From The Cold". Nora isn't cured, but she convinces Victor that it's better to live her final days with him than watch her husband go insane. Victor agrees, in the process opening his helmet, implying that he'll make sure he dies alongside Nora, and the two leave Gotham to live their last days in peace.
  • "Shadow War"'s Destroy the Pit ending: under Nyssa's leadership, the League of Assassins will finally leave Gotham behind, preventing any more destruction and death under their watch. Unfortunately, doing so requires Batman to prevent Ra's from being cured, which Ra's and Batman both clearly consider to be a violation of Batman's one rule. Ra's expresses his pride in Batman for the decision he made as Batman quietly closes the door to his cell, where he'll eventually die.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Given that the missions were likely developed after the main game received its "M" rating, most of the DLC is surprisingly violent in comparison — the icicle-covered militia corpses on the tanker in "In from the Cold" show what happens when Harmless Freezing isn't in effect, "Beneath the Surface" has Croc's hand being cut off with a buzzsaw in captured video footage, and "Shadow War" has countless League Assassins dead in pools and smears of blood after fatal sword combat.
• Canon Foreigner: Ranken, Iron Height's warden.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Like her elder sister, Nyssa dies in Batman's arms after being killed by Ra's in the Cure Option.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: A theme of the Mr. Freeze side mission. Nora Fries convinces Victor that she isn't as afraid of death as she is seeing her husband destroy himself to restore her. Victor comes to accept this, and seemingly shuts down his suit as well. In the Cure option, Nyssa Raatko says she is different from her father in that she isn't afraid of death either.
• Downer Ending: "Shadow War"'s Cure ending: Ra's al Ghul is rejuvenated by the Lazarus Pit and will continue his crusade against the world after killing his own daughter Nyssa, who chooses to die rather than use the Pit herself - and all of it is Batman's fault.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Played Straight in "In from the Cold." Though Nora's container and Victor's equipment are irreparably broken, they reconcile, and Nora convinced her husband to spend the remaining time together. Aaron Cash in the Trophy Room says it's as close as they'll get to an ending.
• Enemy Civil War: The League of Assassins is warring against itself, with one faction trying to restore Ra's, who while having been revived since his death in City but is falling apart due to excessive Lazarus Pit usage, and one faction following Nyssa, which is trying to deny Ra's any further Lazarus Pit revivals, believing that the pit has driven him mad.
• Face Death with Dignity: Regardless of the player's actions, someone will die in "Shadow War," though every possible casualty dies without panic. When struck down by her father in the Cure option, Nyssa keeps her composure as she gets to call out Batman in her final moments. Ra's shows a similar serenity if you destroy his one chance to live on.
• Fingore: The secret tape that's unlocked after completing "Beneath the Surface" has Warden Ranken cutting off an inmate's finger to test the regenerative formula developed from Killer Croc's DNA.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Mad Hatter's goal is to turn Batman into his new "Alice". Some of his lines, especially after you lock him up, only add to this.
• Foreshadowing: There are several hints before the climax to the nature of Iron Heights.
  • When Batman is making his way into the prison an inmate freaks out, begging Batman not to have to go through anymore tests.
  • After saving the guard who parachuted out of the airship, he tells Batman that, when he gets into the airship that they were doing their jobs.
• Hellhole Prison: Iron Heights is run by Warden Ranken, a Mad Scientist who performs brutal experiments on the captive Killer Croc and the other inmates in an effort to creature a Super-Soldier serum. Even before they discover this, Nightwing tells Batman that while Iron Heights isn't the worst prison in the world, it's pretty damn close.
• Honor Before Reason: The League of Assassins offers Batman the choice to either end Ra's cycle of resurrections and effectively kill him or allow him to rise once more. The latter has Ra's kill his daughter Nyssa and the assassin civil war only dies down because Nyssa's faction flees and the loyalists need some time to recover before resuming business as usual. The alternative sees the League of Assassins pledge to refrain from killing innocents and stay away from Gotham altogether - at the cost of Batman causing the death of Ra's. Several characters question whether ending the resurrection of someone who's barely a shadow of who he once was is actually taking a life and Batman prohibits Nyssa from actually killing him rather than just letting him die over the next few hours or days, but Ra's dying words make it clear what his opinion is. So the only upside to not ending Ra's' resurrection is really abiding by Batman's One Rule.
• Mythology Gag:
  • League of Assassins members have a special "Fury" attack that, much like the boss battle with Ra's al-Ghul in City, requires Batman to counter multiple quick-paced strikes before he can try to dodge or retaliate. The score from that fight, too, makes a reappearance.
  • Iron Heights Penitentiary makes an appearance, though in a much different form and seemingly unaffiliated with Keystone City or the Flash; nonetheless, if Batman inspects the cells near where the warden is abducted by Croc, "GORILLA GRODD" can be seen etched into the door.
  • Warden Ranken's experiments on his inmates were founded by, of all organizations, the Quorum from Bloodlines; fitting, since Ranken's attempts to recombine atavistic DNA with human is decidedly similar to the end goal of creating the Blood Pack.
  • This isn't the first time Batman refuses to kill Ra's al Ghul, but won't save him either.
  • A Wanted poster for "Dr. Linda Friitawa", also known as Fright, can be found in Elliot Memorial Hospital near Ra's' audio tape.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: If the player chooses to revive Ra's al Ghul, he'll kill Nyssa and escape.
• Nostalgia Level: Mad Hatter's pop-up storybook, where Batman hallucinates fighting Blackgate gang members at Arkham Asylum, and Joker goons and TYGER guards at the Sionis Steel Mill. There are even different chapter headings for the games written on each page.
• Offing the Offspring: The Cure Choice for "Shadow War" ends with a resurrected Ra's murdering Nyssa, his younger daughter and then disappearing.
• Pietà Plagiarism: Batman holds yet another person in the Pieta pose in "Shadow War." carries a dying Ra's in this fashion after taking the option to destroy the Lazarus Machine. It recalls him carrying Joker's body in a similar fashion at the end of Arkham City, suggesting that this is the end of his other Arch-Enemy.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Batman gives as close as he ever will to this kind of one-liner to Ra's, when he decides to destroy the Lazarus machine:
  Batman: You were not a good man, Ra's, but you had conviction.
• Prison Ship: Iron Heights is reimagined here as a prison airship.
• Refusing Paradise: If you take the Cure choice, Ra's kills his daughter Nyssa, and then disappears. Batman suggests curing Nyssa with the Lazarus as she dies, but Nyssa refuses saying that she's not afraid of death like her father.
• Retcon: After completing "Shadow War," a tape is made available that provides new motivation for Ra's' motivation in the previous game. Ra's wanted to have Batman die in Protocol 10 as well, but held back because Talia vouched for the Dark Knight. Further, if Batman wouldn't join, Ra's would have turned the League over to Talia.
• Rhymes on a Dime: Mad Hatter does this constantly. Cash doesn't like it. Hatter pushes his buttons by rhyming with what Cash says, and then tricking Cash into rhyming with him.
  Cash: Tea party's over, freak. Start talking.
  Mad Hatter: As you can see, I'm balking. Bring me Batman, or the Hatter is walking.
  Cash: I give the orders here, not you.
  Mad Hatter: And you'll have three dead cops by the time I'm through.
  Cash: We'll see about that, now quit with the rhymes!
  Mad Hatter: Then let me talk to the Bat, and I'll confess my crimes. [chuckles] Sorry.
  Cash: Talk, god damn it!
  Mad Hatter: Now, now, officer, you mistake me for a snitch.
  Cash: Where are they, you little son of a bitch?!
  Mad Hatter: [laughs] That certainly scratched my itch.
• Sadistic Choice: The Shadow War mission presents the player with one: Sparing or letting Ra's die. Cure Ra's, allowing him to rebuild his empire, more insane than ever? Or do you break Batman's one rule, to save countless lives?
• Shoot the Dog: If you let Ra's die.
• Sickly Green Glow: Ra's Al Ghul is strapped to a Lazarus Pit contraption that glows green with the Lazarus waters flowing to him. The color, combined with his sickly appearance hits home on how weak he is.
• Theme Naming: Hatter's kidnapping victims in "Wonderland" all fit his own chosen theme, of course — Katz for the Cheshire Cat, McQueen for the Queen of Hearts. Lory as the White Rabbit initially seems like the odd man out, but the car is found empty and Lory returns to the precinct unharmed of his own volition; sure enough, it's revealed to be Hutch in the interrogation room that's secretly Tetch's hypnotized puppet.
• Wardens Are Evil: Warden Ranken of Iron Heights performed brutal experiments on Croc and his other inmates in hopes of weaponizing Croc's mutation.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Alfred makes a case of this regarding Ra's Al Ghul, noting that he's not someone who can be considered human anymore, given that he keeps dying and being resurrected by supernatural means every time. He implicitly suggests that this would qualify him as an exception to Batman's one rule, since he's not any different from a zombie.
  Alfred: Is preventing some ungodly resurrection truly the same as taking a life?
• What the Hell, Hero?: If Batman makes the choice that leads to Nyssa's death, their last words are spent calling Batman out for sticking to his morals over the lives of countless innocents and refusing to let Batman save their life.
• Withholding the Cure: The Second Choice for the "Shadow War" mission. Batman destroys Ra's life support system, which leaves him alive but on his deathbed with weeks left to live. Nyssa Raatko wants to administer the Coup de Grâce, but Batman stops her and takes Ra's decrepit body to GCPD Lockdown with either hours or days left.
• You Monster!: Batman to Warden Ranken, indirectly.
  Warden: That monster deserves to be put down.
  Batman: (grabs him by the collar) There's only one monster here.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: In "Shadow War." Ra's tells Bruce that he's proud of him in the aim of invoking this after Batman destroys the Lazarus machine, suggesting that Batman finally broke his one rule.

Tie-In Comics

• Adaptation Personality Change: The Bruce of the Arkham Comics is a lot more upbeat, mellow and friendlier than the one in the main games. He even jokes with Robin and pals around with Lucius and others.
• Ascended Meme: Batman finally gives his signature line... albeit in German.
  Kidnapper: Was zum Teufel bist du!? (What the devil are you?!)
  Batman: Ich bin Fledermausmann! (I'm Batman!)
• Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Harley cuts off one of Lucius Fox's fingers to gain access to his tablet. However being a member of the Crazy-Prepared he makes sure that its still useless to her.
• Call-Forward: This being a prequel comic to Arkham Knight, expect a lot of these.
  • After fighting Killer Croc, Batman mentions he used up his last Freeze Blast against him; rather than this meaning the item is no longer accessible in-game, Batman instead began construction on a stronger version of the gadget, which can be found in the testing chamber at Panessa Studios.
  • Batman, in saving his new Batmobile from thieves, gets it stuck on the top of a skyscraper, and makes a note to upgrade the Batwing to be able to carry it. Sure enough, the in-game Batmobile can not only be airlifted, but contains a power winch capable of pulling itself up walls.
• Car Fu: Once again, Batman slams the Batmobile into Bane. Bane, having all his Venom tubing connected this time, is able to shrug off the blow more easily.
• Conjoined Twins: Thanks to the Scarecrow, Hammer and Sickle are this again. It's also a Call-Back to their conversation in the Steel Mill back in Arkham City, where they mention rejoining anyway.
• Description Cut: As Gordon, Barbara and Bruce are exercising in the park in Issue #13, Bruce flashes back to a fight of his that took place in that very same park. When Barbara notes the fountain isn't working, it cuts Batman shoving a thug's face into it.
• Handicapped Badass: Barbara shows us the reason she deserves her picture on the trope page where she takes down a knife wielding thug in her wheelchair.
• Killed Off for Real: Due to Arkham Knight trying to frame Batman, he has killed several minor members of the Rogue Gallery.
• Legacy Character: A new Electrocutioner has taken the place of the first after Lester's death.
• Like Father, Like Son: Kid Shark is pretty much a younger King Shark.
• Loose Canon: Much like the earlier Arkham Unhinged chapters, parts of this comic directly contradict the events of the game and the exact relation it has to the events of the game is not made clear.
• Man of the City: The comics have Bruce going full distance, launching many projects to redevelop Gotham after Arkham City. Though he and Lucius run into many problems attracting new investors because everyone is wary about Gotham's reputation as a Wretched Hive.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It turns out that because Bruce pulled Wayne funding from Stagg is the reason he was willing to deal with Crane.
• Not So Above It All: In Issue 14 Alfred, of all people, wants a few minutes alone to deal with The Penguin since he was the one behind Harley's attack on Lucius.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Simon Stagg's appearance in the prequel comic, trying once again to marry off his daughter to a more "suitable" rich playboy (in this case, Bruce himself). Sapphire is not amused. Metamorpho himself appears later on, as a bio-organic lifeform synthesized from Clayface mud samples and a radioactive isotope found in Egypt, and structurally stabilized with "organic matter" (namely, the body of Rex Mason).
  • In issue #1 of the tie-in comic, Batman leaves the new Electrocutioner on top of the Sefton-Hill Building, a reference to Sefton Hill, Rocksteady lead designer and effectively the "face" of the Arkham games' staff.
• Off Hand Backhand: In Issue #3, Bruce casually fends off muggers while he's on a payphone without turning to look at them.
• Retcon:
  • In the game it is revealed that Bane went back to Santa Prisca after his last fight with Batman. Here Arkham Knight kills him as proof to the other Rogues that he has what it takes to kill Batman.
  • Jason was supposed to fight Batman during the Joker's riot at Arkham Asylum; according to Harley, Jason escaped when things started going south. We later see that Jason escaped with Deathstroke's help, the assassin was in the asylum as well, and stole from Batman to get his army started while Batman was dealing with Joker.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Electrocutioner II is killed off several pages after he first shows up.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: When the cops think that Batman is finally killing criminals^note Actually Arkham Knight, they applaud Batman for finally crossing that line and executing "lowlifes" without trial. Batman, disgusted, wordlessly drives off.

---

"Gotham needs something more, something worse, to defend her. She needs a new myth, a legend more powerful than I can be right now. A legend that can only rise from the ashes of the Batman."

---