Batman: Arkham Knight has been out for just over a week now and it’s a phenomenal game that unfortunately has some glaring issues that really bothered me once I finished the game and let the experience soak in my head for a bit. Lately there’s mainly only been talk of the batmobile and while it is overused in a few parts and some of the tank fights are stupidly tedious, it’s not a bad inclusion like some people keep saying. I had more good experiences with it than bad and I feel like once the controls click for you the whole thing becomes so much better. Chasing down Firefly or smashing APCs off the road while I’m tearing through anything unfortunate enough to be in my way just feels awesome as it should but some people seem to think the batmobile is the core underlying issue with the game when it’s far from it. All of my issues are story based so be warned that there’s going to be some heavy spoiler talk going on here. We’re not just entering spoiler territory; we’re straight up buying a house and moving there.
First off let’s start with the whole Arkham Knight fiasco. It’s Jason Todd. Everyone knew it the moment they released a description of him and it’s all but confirmed when he first appears in the game and says “Time to die, old man”. The Arkham Knight being Jason Todd is no big deal and it would make sense to end the trilogy with Jason Todd involved in some way; it’s the way Rocksteady was acting in the months before release that ruined the moment. Since his reveal we’ve been told non-stop that the Knight was an original totally new character that Rocksteady created in conjunction with DC Comics and that we’re going to be blown away by the reveal in the game. We’re told time and time again that it wasn’t Todd and they even announced Red Hood day-one DLC as a fairly clever red herring. The only issue here is that when you announce a “totally original” character that has a deep hatred for Batman and is just as skilled as he is then the list of characters who could be under that mask narrows significantly. I was honestly really hoping that fake rumor about it being a descendant of Amadeus Arkham was true because that would’ve been a cool way to not only introduce a potentially interesting new character, but it’d also tie things back to the first game. Making the Knight an older Damian Wayne would work even better considering he’d have the resources to fund an army and would have the motivation/hatred to go after Batman due to the events of Arkham City.
Listen Rocksteady, when my little brother whose only Batman knowledge comes from the Nolan and recent animated films knew it was Jason Todd from the first trailer you kind of fucked up. The best thing to do would have been to embrace that it’s Todd from the get-go and done something interesting with it. Instead we get hours of this character whining to Scarecrow like a child asking when he’ll get to kill Batman and in the back of our minds we know who it is and are wondering when they’ll get around to revealing it. For a series that’s made by, and for, Batman fans it’s not really smart to treat your core audience like morons for months up to release only to reveal they were right the whole time.
The Arkham Knight’s identity isn’t even the worst part of this whole situation; it’s what happens after. So Jason Todd unmasks himself to Batman and now it’s time to fight him. Here’s a character that was trained by Batman himself and instead of a crazy boss fight where you’re hunting each other down, basically fighting an evenly matched version of yourself, you get another predator sequence that’s no different to all the other ones you’ve done throughout the game. This is a guy who knows everything there is to know about Batman and his end-game strategy is to sit on a perch with a sniper rifle while some goons patrol the area? That’s dumb and out of character. The stupidest part of this whole thing is that you can simply glide past the goons, get underneath Jason, and take him out each time with absolutely zero effort.
After that joke of a fight Jason runs off and we’re treated to Batman and Alfred having an even bigger joke of a conversation about the situation. It basically amounts to Batman saying “Hey, Jason’s still alive” and Alfred responding with the brilliant “Oh shit, didn’t see that coming”. When your game isn’t being subtle at all with the fact that this is Jason Todd it’s kind of ridiculous that this is the big payoff we get after what’s supposed to be a major moment not just in this game, but in the Arkham series universe itself. Poison Ivy’s death got more of an emotional response out of the two of them than this which is insane. Todd still being alive isn’t brought up ever again until he just randomly shows up for a split second to save Batman at the end and then vanishes again. Jason Todd’s death and eventual return is a major part of Batman’s history and in a game that basically serves as his origin story we’re treated to him whining like a child throughout it and nobody giving much of a fuck about him.
Now I kind of lied when I said all my complaints were story based, but this is something that didn’t click until I thought back on the game. You know what I realized a bit after finishing the game? There wasn’t a single boss fight in it. Don’t believe me? Think back on it and you’ll realize the only actual boss fight in this game is the fight with Riddler which, while cool, is kind of shitty considering you have to run around collecting trophies to get to it. That horrible tank fight with Jason and Slade don’t count either because those parts are complete garbage and more of an extended cobra tank fight. You can’t discuss the Arkham series without mentioning its boss fights whether it’s the infamous titan Joker battle or the fantastic Freeze fight; squaring off against the many super villains from the series is part of the fun and you don’t ever do any of that in this game.
The side-missions don’t offer much either. I expected a neat confrontation with Manbat but all you do is glide towards him, tackle him, watch Batman inject the cure into him and then repeat that process a few more times. Firefly is practically the same fight except this time you chase him in the batmobile. Two-Face is reduced to a predator mission where you can hilariously take him out almost immediately if you’re fast enough and Penguin doesn’t get anything either. And then there’s the added problem of half the side-missions being super generic “Go here and destroy x amount of things”. None of the side-missions hold the same level of intrigue like the previous game and it’s super annoying because after finishing the game you’re left with having to go around Gotham dealing with super lame checkpoint/watchtower fights and disarming mines. There’s nothing fun like the Deadshot mission from Arkham City and Pyg’s mission is just a repeat of the Hush one. Speaking of Hush, he and Azrael are also reduced to bit parts after major teases in Arkham City. I fully expected Azrael to have a prominent role in this game but he just ends up being a series of pathetically easy combat scenarios that ends on a hilariously anticlimactic note. I had a harder time looking for the starting points for Azrael’s mission than the missions themselves. Then there’s Hush who gets a single mission joke fight but considering how hilarious the scene was and the pretty good fake-out moment I sort of let that one slide a bit.
Now the absolute worst part of the game is the almost constant scene stealing everyone does to Scarecrow. This is easily one of the best Scarecrow moments in Batman history (with John Noble delivering a fantastic performance) and he actually practically wins by the end of the game by effectively “killing” the Batman persona, but the game almost constantly pushes him from the limelight.
For months I had been imaging what they could do with the nightmare parts with Scarecrow now that they’re working with new hardware but I guess I’ll never find out because you don’t square off with him at the end of the game, it’s Joker instead. Again. Now I quite liked the way they fit Joker into the game despite his death in the last game but throughout the game it seemed more and more like he was the main antagonist instead of Scarecrow. Now while the last part with Joker was super neat, Scarecrow was all but forgotten during it. It really didn’t help that the stakes had all but disappeared by the time you got to that point. The Barbara suicide scene was fantastic in that it was something I totally wasn’t expecting and significantly raised the stakes. It was a really well done scene that did a really good job of shocking you and letting you know that Scarecrow isn’t messing around. Having Barbara show up suddenly alive and breathing took any stakes this game had set up and tossed them out the window. Looking back it makes sense that it was a fear gas induced hallucination since Joker was interacting with the gun on the table, but the set-up to the scene makes no sense at all. Here you have Scarecrow telling Batman that he’s got his friend locked up in some building and his big plan is hoping that Batman hallucinates her committing suicide? What if Batman didn’t see anything or saw something completely different? It’s a gamble that doesn’t quite make sense for the character who has had everything planned out from the beginning of the game.
Now while keeping her alive in hopes of Gordon eventually helping him capture Batman later in the game does make sense, it was a smack in the face to have her face certain death yet again only to be saved at the last minute. They could have fixed everything that reveal ruined by having her die and it also would’ve been a nice callback to the animated series. Oh his identity was revealed to the world? Batman doesn’t care, he’s got a contingency plan for that. He’s got no plan for the loss of friends and some of his best moments are when he has to deal with something like that. Now it didn’t have to be Barbara who died, but someone from Batman’s team should have. Hell, tossing Gordon off the building would’ve been an even better moment since it would’ve been a nice reverse of that infamous moment from the cartoon.
This whole situation is something I like to call the Injustice Effect.
If you haven’t read the comic tie-in to the Injustice: Gods Among Us game go do it now. It’s a hilarious ride that’s the equivalent of a goofy B-movie. All logic is thrown out the window in favor of filling the series with as many “oh shit” moments as possible. Now the major problem with this comic is how Batman’s teammates are constantly dying while everyone on Superman’s team, who get a good thrashing every now and then, come out relatively unscathed. This is what happens in Arkham Knight. Batman is put through this hellish gauntlet but him and his friends come out of it with a few scratches and will probably forget the whole thing in a week.
Arkham Knight is a dark game and, supposedly, the finale to the Arkham series but having Batman lose absolutely nothing during this massive ordeal kind of makes the end result feel kind of empty and anticlimactic. Any stakes that were raised during the game were gone during the climax which is not something you want in your story. When the audience gets to a point where they know nothing bad will happen to any of the protagonists during the climax of a story then it all sense of suspense. It really doesn’t help how the game doesn’t even let you see the true ending until you complete all of the tedious side-missions and when you do see it all it does is offer even more questions to a game that’s apparently not getting a sequel.
It says a lot when the fake plot leaks have better ideas than your actual game. At the end of the day Arkham Knight is still a fantastic game itself, but in hindsight it drops the ball incredibly hard to what’s supposed to be the grand finale of this series that started back in 2009 with Arkham Asylum.
