BATMAN ARKHAM KNIGHT

King of Posters
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I posted about Batman ARKHAM KNIGHT in the games you wot played today thread because ive been playing it for the past few days but I actually have a few more thoughts about it beyond just a couple of jokey musings
I have been playing these games since the first one came out. I practically devoured it. Remember the little swirls of bats that surrounded you when you leveled up? Remember hunting someone through an open area until you finally corner them and they’re howling like a lunatic and letting bursts of machine gun fire off at the slightest provocation? Remember how the game awkwardly divvied up combat between the small diorama setpieces of stealth and the larger featureless open arenas of man punching?

Remember when Arkham City came out and hey, Rocksteady, why are your design sensibilities so weird? Why are we teased with this normal looking seedy metropolis skybox on the fringes of our game-world and instead given a heap of rusted metal and neon, impossible to navigate and seldom utilized in interesting ways? Yo like: Why is our one method of rapid transportation all about skipping over massive chunks of the world you have created? What does it say thematically that in your version of this mythos, Batman does not swing through the city, but must constantly put himself above it?

Arkham City made everything deeper and gave us more and that seems to be what you doubled down on with each iteration of this franchise. More villains, more Alfred/Bruce dynamic, more of Commissioner Gordon’s bizarre super fit grandpa design. More Joker. So much Joker! I guess it’s true what they say that Batman only has one interesting villain. You really don’t like Robin do you, considering you decided to go with the chris o’donnel version

Across Arkham Asylum and Arkham city I noticed within the first few hours of ARKHAM KNIGHT all of these games have that word in their subtitle jesus Christ anyway uh
we never as players really learn anything about the batman in your mythos? you just take our familiarity for the explanation in and of itself: batman is not a character but he is also never utilized as a force of nature interrupting the way the world works because we have to sift through upgrade menus before we can do anything.

Yo like: Remember how you got the best Batman voice actor of all time and then gave him no characterization? Rocksteady hey did you know the reason people like Kevin Conroy is that the animated series actually gets heavily into the way batman thinks and rationalizes the world around him and then you just made sure every line of dialogue the man says is him demanding something from someone else what’s going on with that. what’s uh what’s going on there.

Remember when you found new and intriguing ways to somehow sexualize Catwoman to uncomfortable degrees not even really found in Western Dudebro Comics and she has a move where she literally kisses a guy on the mouth and then kicks them in the dick because of course we have to show she’s a powerful female that way? Yo speaking of Women in Videogames what’s up with the way you focused on Batman and Joker’s relationship but conveniently glossed over how harmful and abusive Joker and Harley Quinn’s relationship is which is a big deal in the comics

The reveal near the end of Batman: Arkham Knight is that the titular Arkham Knight is Jason Todd, the second Robin who was killed by the joker. Jason Todd never shows up in an earlier Arkham Game. The one Robin who does was basically DLC first for combat missions only and then also you put him in the game in a sequence where Batman tells him off and to not get involved. Am I supposed to be emotionally shocked that Jason Todd is the villain? I never even fuckin’ saw him in your game before. What’s wrong with you? Why would you do that?

Arkham Knight if the stakes are so high in Batman needing to save Gotham City Tonight then yo why are all the people gone? Why are there no innocent lives to save or lose or struggle and fail with and around? Am I protecting Gotham City or am I protecting the bourgeoisie rule over the property in Gotham City?

Oh and Uh remember how you managed to still put the Joker in this one? fuck you

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These games are utterly miserable, and this is coming from a guy who is playing all the AssCreed games in order.

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my opinion is that Arkham Asylum is probably the series high point and they just got worse afterwards and never really refined any of the like broken mechanics or anything that left over from one installment to the next.

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I liked the character design they had for Mr. Freeze in the one game, he seemed like kind of a neat and different boss battle. But I’m a sucker for Mr. Freeze. I also liked the Killer Croc sewer fight.

That is my useful contribution to this thread.

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Asylum is the only one I played and it was just terrible. I mean the stealth sections are kind of cool I guess. That’s literally the only good thing I can say about it.

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I still hold the SB-controversial opinion that the Arkham games have just the right level of “complicated but dumb” combat that fits best in these open world type games. Anything like DMC-level involved would probably just drag things to a halt but the Assassin’s Creed “hold counter to win” style is too worthless to do much of anything for me. Here I rarely die but get to amuse myself with trying to tie as many different moves in and string the silly combos as long as they can go without having to work too too hard at it.

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Having played this game and enjoyed bits of it. I can say that the problem is there is too much of everything. Destroying towers, breaking barriers, disarming bombs and then doing this asinine Riddler races to boot. Catwoman is a hostage in the only way you can free her is if you get a really good lap time…so lame.

The best game in the series is the one Rocksteady didn’t make. I don’t like that every male character looks like they were designed by Cliffy B.

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yeah some of the challenge maps in this are ridic. theres one u can do with respawning waves where the enemies are electrified and if you hit them you take damage, but there are so many guys surrounding batman that its impossible to properly target them

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You’re not really supposed to target foes in the games with Arkham type combat you’re supposed to just tap the punch button until the glowing spikes show up over your head and then hit the counter button.

Its pretty boring unless you’re trying to string together different moves with all your gadgets and stuff like username mentioned. I like these games too but I know they’re terrible and I’m part of the problem etc. I played Arkham Knight to completion, stupid riddler trophies and all then played it again on the new game plus which was just the game again minus the riddler stuff. It was two straight weeks of me playing the game every night after it came out. I haven’t gone back and played it again since then and that’s probably the most damning thing I can say about the game.

I liked the city and flying around it. I wish it was more than just a really polished really shallow beat em up.

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the most fun ive had in the game so far are the setpieces that combine using the car and being on foot like pulling down a wall hiding Men and launching myself at a bunch of dudes that feels the most Batman but then it immediately gets ruined by the story like right after

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I liked how you could press counter at the right moment when a guy was trying to run you over in a taxi and you’d jump onto the roof of the car and pull him out of the driver seat.

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I wish they had better utilized some of the wackier combat options they included in this game
on a whole it seems like rocksteady is fervently against the idea of taking away abilities/gadgets between games once youd acquired all the upgrades. I feel like more experimentation could have helped this series

fuck I mean the coolest thing batman can do in this game is hit someone so hard they fly across the room into other guys

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its funny tho how much this reminds me of one of my favorite stories. I think it was from Batman: Black and White and its part of an omnibus that also had a story where bruce is an alcoholic in his early career and Alfred pays a bunch of kids to beat the shit out of him

it featured a batman heavily dependent on technology and gadgetry and his money who is cripplingly defeated by ra’s al ghul and has to build himself back up from nothing like he used to be and he eventually fights him in one of his old cloth costumes

Ive been thinking about how that would’ve been a more interesting end to a trilogy like this: starting the player off with everything they’ve had in the series so far but then taking it away and making them play as a simpler batman who doesn’t have bulletproof armor and a remote control tank and

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but it’s also pretty good.

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Yeah I’d be down with this, especially if they gave Bats a randomly assigned load out of gadgets at the start of each, then set you loose in the playground to accomplish your goals.

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arkham city lets you play as robin catwoman nightwing and azreal but like no batgirl in the vr trainings

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But she’s ballar in Injustice, so it balances out.

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this game has a dedicated camera feature that is actually pretty cool because the gotham they built is gorgeous