Batman: Arkham Knight

In particular when a series crosses console generations.

Even having known and adored these characters for years, or actually because of it, I still appreciate biography sections. It ties things together in a fun, nerdy kind of way. There's something awesome about facing off against Scarecrow, and then looking at his bio just to check that - yep - Bats has been taking on this guy for 75 years.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 1st 2018 at 9:08:20 AM

I don't really agree with that philosophy.

• You never pick up the fourth Harry Potter book, or watch the fifth film expecting to jump into the story - if you read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and you don't know who Sirius Black is, the book shouldn't have to take a minute to catch you up to speed.
• This isn't like Final Fantasy where each iteration is standalone, or like the Disgaea series of J-RPG's where the games aren't fully part of the mainstream and you could be forgiven for not knowing who some of the cameo characters are.
• The Arkham games are adaptions of material that's existed for decades that's been extremely popular for decades, and they're all connected. This isn't like if there were a Spawn video game, yeah, those characters deserve a bio or two because only the hardcore fans who've read Spawn #1 are going to remember who the bulk of those characters. It's not an underrated series of games either that's taken a decade to come out - Rocksteady has won awards for this franchise.

I mean I hate to be callous but, a a certain point, if someone's jumped onto a series, but decided to be on the fourth part and is unhappy that they don't know what's going on, that's on them. It's redundant game and story design to be that inclusive. When a book series is labeled Parts 1-4, you don't start at Part 2 and expect a glossary/summary of events - that'd be a waste of characters.

Fantasy novels often include maps and summaries (which I also find somewhat unnecessary) but I can sympathize with that because fantasy novels are freaking long and packed with lore. The Arkham games really weren't in my experience - I beat the first game in a day and the second in a week. Arkham Knight's only taken me so long mainly due to negligence. Most of the information included in the bios is irrelevant to what the player will be doing, or how Batman will interact with the people in those bios.

I haven't even touched most of the biography section because most of it's information I've already known.

What personally bugs me is that it's treated like a special thing to unlock -games that do stuff like that bug me. It's not a reward to see some still images and information safely in the category of "Sh't I Already Know." These bios are just here to reinforce information that really isn't that relevant or interesting. Do I really care who Jack Ryder is by the time of Arkham Knight? Do I need to suddenly have a dossier on Selina Kyle the moment she appears in the game?

If anything it'd be a stronger Show, Don't Tell for Batman's dossier gallery to not suddenly update Selina's information the moment he encounters them - it'd make more sense for Bruce to already have these bios already filled out and to gradually update them with information relevant to what's happening in-game. I haven't checked yet but I imagine Arkham Knight's profile doesn't update at all throughout the game - we'll probably just get a new bio slot for when Batman learns his identity. And I know who it is because it was bloody obvious even before a friend spoiled it for me, the only doubt I had was over whether it was too obvious. I'm almost certain we'll just have a new slot for Jason Todd.

I could understand it if they maybe gave an in-game rundown of who the new characters are - like maybe Batman talks with Gordon and they talk about Scarecrow's MO, but to provide an in-game profile for every single person in Gotham is wasteful to me.

If they gave profiles exclusively for new, or obscure characters like Firefly or Man-Bat I could tolerate it, but I can't believe that somebody picking this game up doesn't know who Bruce Wayne, Alfred, Selina Kyle, or the Joker are by now. I didn't know who Copperhead was in Origins,`and while I knew about Solomon Grundy from the Justice League cartoon I didn't know he had roots in the Batman mythos - those were characters whose bios I actually read.

The only bios in Arkham Knight I've cared to read were Joker's, since he had an audio tape recorded by Bruce, and then Barb and Dick's, because I wanted to see if Bruce had anything special to say about them.

All of that to say I don't really enjoy the same bio sections the fourth time around.

Edited by Soble on Jul 2nd 2018 at 6:52:58 AM

The most immediately obvious reason why that example don't really work is because the Harry Potter series is prose, where any and all exposition has to take space from plot progression, whereas in the Arkham series the bios are entirely side content that no player has to pay attention to at all. At most, you just have to cycle through them to get to the voice clips / "interviews."

I've only played FFXV of the recent Squeenix games, and I don't really remember there being a bio mode, so I omitted that.

I'll admit I just don't get the idea that because a series is long lived and popular, that means the characters wherein don't deserve to have their history recognized. Especially given that the Arkham series tauts itself to an extent as a celebration of that history, combining concepts and characters from Batman’s 80 years. Not to mention that, again, they still do so primarily through side content that's literally only there for the player to enjoy if they so choose. It costs nothing to have these things in the game, so the position of being against their inclusion simply because "it's on them" if fans want to experience that history doesn't make an awful lot of sense. What's it hurting you to have them there, even given that you personally have no use for them?

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 2nd 2018 at 7:24:08 AM

Prior to playing City and Knight my knowledge of Batman stuff consisted of the Dark Knight Trilogy, and vague memories of TAS, Batman Beyond, Justice League, and The Batman.

So I for one say thank fuck for those bios and completely optional side stuff for being there instead gatekeeping me with “go read a century’s worth of shitty comics if you want to be allowed to enjoy this game”

Agreed. Even when Arkham Asylum came out, I'd only seen the Dark Knight Trilogy and maybe an episode or two of the animated series. I was also, like, 14 when that game came out.

I just didn't have the frame of refernce for everything. And the games were my jumping off point for his entire rogues gallery. I apprecieated the bios just to get a vague idea. Hell, I read the walkthrough guide with all of them printed out religiously when I was on my Batman kick.

So, not that my take's changed at all, but I needed to point out that this made me laugh harder than it should have.

The whole game is brilliant. But that scene just felt so left field it was wonderful. Mark Hamill just having the BEST OF TIMES.

The Joker shouldn't have been in the game at all. Like, enough is enough. It's just sad that the series never seemed to be able to conceive of a Batman story that didn't use Mark Hamill's Joker performance as a crutch.

The entire Arkham series was about the dynamic between those two, so I don't think it would've worked with Joker taking a backseat in the final game. Not to say that Scarecrow was a poor choice of a villain (though I can't say the same about the Arkham Knight), but Joker is such a fundamental symbol of what Batman fears and hates that the fear gas would've made him appear at some point through the story, even if the whole "joker blood infection" plot was removed.

Edited by SgtRicko on Oct 20th 2018 at 12:11:33 AM

It's funny because I agree with one of the comments that said this game would have been really boring without Joker in it.

I kind of agree that the "Hijacked By Joker" starts to get old, and Joker ultimately taking over the plot became a meme unto itself.

Edited by Soble on Oct 19th 2018 at 7:26:06 AM

I disagree. Batman has one of the best Rogues Gallery of any fictional character ever. Insisting on putting Joker at the forefront all the time is reductive to the Batman franchise. Maybe giving Joker one or two scenes as a hallucination would have been cool. But having him hogging the screen for almost the entire game, even more than in the previous entries three where he was already the main villain... it just reeks of desperation. It's like the writers just have no confidence in their ability to keep the player's interest if Mark Hamill isn't Jokering it up every single moment of the entire ride.

Honestly, I had had my fill of Mark Hamill's Joker as early as the end of the first Arkham game. I liked him, but after a whole game of listening to him make jokes over the asylum loudspeaker I was totally ready for something different. I was very pleased when the trailers for Arkham City indicated that Hugo Strange, a character I find pretty underrated, was going to be the main villain. But then they mucked it all up in the final product by shoving Strange to the sidelines and devoting most of the game to yet another Joker story.

I feel the Joker works best when he's just a villain among many, but not the be-all end-all villain of Batman. He can be the most prominent or most personal adversary Batman has, but preferably in a primus inter pares kind of way. He shouldn't be in a category of his own. I really hate the kinds of stories where Joker is shown completely dominant over the rest of Batman's enemies, as if they're all chumps compared to him. For that reason, I'm not at all fond of the hallucination scene at the end of Knight where Joker is shown effortlessly defeating the rest of the baddies.

Edited by DrDougsh on Oct 19th 2018 at 10:58:04 AM

That's because the Joker in that scene is not Joker, but Batman, and is a hallucination of the Batman while under the Scarecrow's fear toxin. The Joker would have never stood a chance against all of those villains without a group of lackeys and trickery even at his height.

And the thing is, the Arkham series has always been about the fight between Batman and the Joker and all of the other villains were just important sidequests. Every single Arkham game's plot is something the Joker did, even Knight, despite Scarecrow's terrorist attack being the main focus, the Arkham Knight and the Joke disease take up much of the plot.

If you took out the Joker hallucinations, you would have to still find a way to make the Joker still feel like the overarching villain despite him being gone.

It would be nice if the next Batman games relegated Joker to sidequest material or kept him out of it altogether.

Or they simply conceived the overall plot of the series as being a Batman / Joker story, and they don't share the perception that it's some sort of mercenary battle of who gets to be top villain.

I'm not going to lie and say the didn't obviously love the Joker a bit much, but I always thought cherry picking the Arkham series as awful for daring to have a Joker based arc, just because everyone else was also doing so at the time, didn't make a lot of sense. The Joker overexposure of the period isn't really the Arkham series' writers' responsibility, nor should they be considered to have not done their jobs adequately just because they didn't make decisions you wanted them to make instead.

Or to put it another way, I agree the Joker works best as part of an ensemble. But maybe it's because Batman doesn't get hit near as badly with villain complacency as - say - Superman or the Justice League (both of whom for it's not uncommon to find people who legit believe they don't have more than three or four villains), or maybe because the Arkham series has still always made sure to give the wide ensemble of Batman's Rogues Gallery their times to shine even with all the Joker use, but I can't agree that the Arkham writers should be considered as having screwed up for not seeing it the same way.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Oct 19th 2018 at 12:05:04 PM

To put it another way, I began to dislike the Arkham sequel plots when I realized they were about the Batman/Joker dynamic instead of who I assumed would be the advertised Big Bad of each game. I acknowledge that the dynamic focus was intentional, but I don't care to see it take center stage in all four games.

If the Joker and his relationship with Batman is meant to be the series' most defining overarching theme, then why did the marketing of every single game except the first one try to create a different impression? The trailers of City, Origins and Knight all downplayed (or in Knight's case, straight-up concealed) the Joker's involvement and tried very hard to give the impression that some other character was the main villain — Strange in City, Black Mask in Origins and Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight in Knight. In all these cases the advertised villain got shafted to varying degrees in favour of focusing on the Joker. It strikes me as disingenuous to respond to criticism of the Joker being overused with "Well, what did you expect?" when the series itself kept trying to trick players into thinking that this time it wouldn't be all about the Joker.

I can accept that using the Joker in every game was a deliberate choice, but that doesn't mean I have to think it was a good choice. Particularly since, for my money, the series never really does anything all that interesting with Joker or his relationship with Batman. Really, the plots of all three main Rocksteady games are kind of variations of the same thing — that of Joker having brewed or infected people with some kind of sinister concoction, and Batman needing to find an antidote or resist the infection. By the time of Knight, it's just gotten monotonous.

If video game development is anything like film development, the people who actually make the games are not the ones responsible for the marketing.

Also, of all the games City is the most complete ensemble of the work, and Strange is absolutely still the Big Bad of that game regardless of Joker's presence. I think you're focusing so much on Joker that you're ignoring the presence the other villains actually have in the series.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Oct 20th 2018 at 9:43:26 AM

I would disagree with Strange being the Big Bad of City... ultimately, his whole plan feels more like a mere framing device that's meant to justify the enclosed space in which the story takes place. After the first trip to the Steel Mill, literally every mission Batman goes on has to do with Joker's plot, not Strange's. The only time the story ever goes back to Strange's plot until the end is when Quincy Sharp is incarcerated. Strange's plan very much ends up feeling like a B-plot despite being hyped up as the A-plot in both the trailers and the teaser comics. In any case, Strange is ultimately not even the Big Bad of his own B-plot, what with Ra's being revealed as his boss, which I think was another bad writing choice. Revealing the mastermind to be a guy you already defeated in combat earlier in the game feels very anticlimactic, and it ultimately just does disservice to the characters of both Strange and Ra's. Ra's would have been better off as the sole Big Bad of a later installment.

Aside from not being focused on as much as the Joker's plot, Strange's plot is also just really undercooked on its own merits. His plan doesn't make a whole lot of sense and a lot of the things he says and does don't really pay off like they feel they should. Like, Strange keeps talking about how he wants to "break" Batman and we keep hearing about how he has "something special in store" for Batman... but nothing ever comes of that, and Strange is ultimately totally content to let Batman run around do his thing until the end of the game. The plot of Arkham City really feels like they originally planned something more for Strange before ultimately chickening out and deciding to highlight the more well-known Joker and Ra's, leaving Strange's plot rather bare-bones.

I always think of "Protocol 10 begins in (whatever number is most appropriate) hours" as Hugo Strange's way of saying "Hey, Batman? I'm still here. You wanna try to stop me? ...No? Okay. (cries in his Batman collection)"

I disagree with the whole 'Arkham Knight was marketed wrong'. They went out of their way in interviews to describe the Joker as having no involvement and as the Arkham Knight/Scarecrow as the Big Bads. They also repeated over and over AND OVER again that the Arkham Knight was an orginal character, to the point they VERY early on they were asked directly if it was Jason Todd and they said no.

Plot twist: It was Jason Todd.

They very clearly wanted to paint a false idea of what the game was.

My problem is that the second game ends on this massive cliffhanger of the Joker actually being dead and the entire DLC is Harley mourning the loss of Joker and it was this big 'Holy Shit' moment because they actually killed Joker off. I wanted to know what the next game would become if Joker truly stayed dead. I wanted to know the consequences of a Joker-free Batman game. Not to mention Arkham City was a great swan-song for Mark.

The marketing had me hyped up. I wanted to see what Two-Face, Harley, and Penguin would be like when they took center stage and could work freely without the Joker. That was EXCITING to me.

But, nah, most of the plot is the Joker Toxin, Scarecrow takes a backseat even in the game's climax (the Joker fight gets the dramatic beats, NOT Scarecrow), and everyone else is relegated to side-stories. The Arkham Knight is even a goddamn joke and a wasted character. I wanted to see him far more as an anti-hero darkside of Batman who sees putting these villains down as the right thing considering how much death they cause. Instead he's... Jason Todd with daddy abandonment problems.

I'm tired of the Joker. I'm tired of it. Everyone is trying to out-do each other's Jokers and who has the best or most insane or always having him be Batman's ULTIMATE ENEMY and I'm just tired of it.

Arkham City is still one of my favorite game plots and one that I felt balanced the characters and villain's agendas nicely, while I think of Arkham Knight as a massive disappointment.

And don't even get me started on the problems I have with the Bat-Tank.

Concept art has surfaced for a proposed but ultimately cancelled Arkham Knight sequel that was set to star Damien Wayne as Batman and a much older Bruce as his mentor ala Batman Beyond.

At least we now know who the new Batman in The Stinger is.

Ok but why was there smoke coming off of him and why did he turn into a giant flaming bat? That's not how Damian operates.

Honestly I'm not even sure if I'd have wanted another sequel.

• Rocksteady was good to me but the design of Arkham City and Knight's maps left me disappointed
• The whole "Batman is prepared for everything" concept just doesn't tickle me the way it did back in the first game.
• Where would an Arkham Knight sequel really go story-wise? Bruce is outted. Damian takes over. Fights the League which turns out to be led by someone possessed by the Joker?
• What would we even call it? Arkham Future? Arkham Beyond?
• Do we really need another masturbatory 5 to 6 hour game about how hardcore Batman is and how poorly he's equipped to handle city-wide crises alone?
• Can the gameplay really be expanded any further than it already has? We've got punching dummies, kicking dummies, shield dummies, ninjas who can actually fight, snipers, electric baton-wielding dummies, Batmobile crash dummies, and automated drones.
• Without the greater comic book universe around them the idea that anybody would let most of Batman's rogues gallery live is much harder to digest, and the games have already used most of the recognizable ones if not necessarily killed them.
  • I could maybe see Damian fighting Azrael... but does Damian really have any notable rivalries with anyone besides Deathstroke or Talia?

Edited by Soble on Aug 14th 2019 at 5:07:25 AM

The concept art already has a name on it, or at least an internal name, of "Batman Sabbath."

And considering it's set years after Knight and speculating Damian had to have been born sometime before Talia came to Arkham City, it's likely people may have ended up forgetting the identity of the Batman, especially if Damian wasn't using his father's surname.

As for the Batman's rouges gallery, the only member of Bruce's to be shown in the concept art who survived Knight is Two-Face. Poison Ivy was dead because of her sacrifice and is likely either resurrected, a plant zombie, or a new person, Black Mask is an actual new person (a blond woman), and the only other concept art was Gorilla Grodd, who isn't a normal member of Batman's rouge gallery.

Edited by tclittle on Aug 14th 2019 at 3:00:12 AM

Well, Sabath would be an internal name to only used by the crew before an actual title would be chosen. "Batman: Sabath" on it's own really doesn't tie to the Arkham Asylum brand recognition or really the preceding series, but the title theming really has nowhere to go after Knight. They even made this joke back in Arkham City itself.

I don't really see where else a sequel would have to go either. They already fucked that up enough with Arkham Knight and I see no way to re-rail it or say/do anything particularly interesting that the previous games didn't already do. Arkham Knight should have been a culmination of so many things but it left a lot of those to rot, wasted opportunities, or squandered potential and we can't exactly 're-do' Arkham Knight either.