RumbleHumble
Banned
BATMAN! BATMAN! BATMAN!
Most nerds can't get enough of the man-child running around in long-underwear speaking in a deep, gravely voice to other disaffected weirdos about justice. Including myself. I've loved Batman and all his various iterations since early childhood, having the fortune of being raised on Batman: The Animated Series and the Adam West Batman all around the same time.
Naturally there's been a whole lot of games about playing the Batman, because, why wouldn't there be? But a grand amount of them (but not all) sucked for various reasons. With the release of Arkham Asylum though, that all changed. By transforming the world of Batman into a character-action "Metroid Prime-Light" style game, devs appeared to finally crack the Batman formula. Helping make the whole game go down smooth, Paul Dini, Kevin Conroy, and Mark Hamill all lent a helping hand. It spawned three sequels, each of which has their own devoted fans. I hadn't played either of the original two entries for a few years, and after feeling a heavy Batman kick due to a favorite podcast of mine running through an analysis of Nolan's Batman trilogy (Blank Check with Griffin and David), I decided to pick up Return to Arkham on a sale. I also decided to pick up TellTale's Batman Series on the cheap because, hey, Batman.
For some background, my Arkham rankings prior to this playthrough are as follows:
1. Asylum
2. Origins
3. Knight
4. City
While I enjoyed the story in each of these games, I'd always felt that, for Asylum and City, the narrative was more about sending Batman around from villain to villain. Playing again, while I appreciate all the unique narrative choices Asylum made, the story feels at odds with the game design. There's some big elaborate party the Joker has planned with Batman being the guest of honor, only to repeatedly try to kill Batman over and over and over again. With the constant threat of death in game mechanics, it feels weird to know that supposedly Joker has this grand old plan that is VERY contingent on Batman staying alive. And the weird fetch quests that Batman is sent on that lead to his encounters with villains like Croc and Ivy feel perfunctory narratively, less to do with what they can get out of Batman in a character, and more to do with: Hey here's a villain with a unique boss battle. And some of the time (see the Killer Croc battle) the boss mechanics are just plain rotten.
That all changes is every fight with Scarecrow. While the Scarecrow sequences are relatively simplistic in terms of actual mechanics, the preludes and postludes are some of the best things about this game. I won't spoil anything, but each of these fights does a great job of shifting character perspective, game perspective, camera perspective, and even mechanical expectations. Rocksteady appears to have a great deal of fun with these moments trying to scare and disorient the player, and even with knowing all the tricks, these moments are still a whole lot of fun (and help demonstrate why Knight, despite its flaws, is still so so so good). These moments also reveal more about Batman and the player's relationship with Batman that are literally non-existent in the rest of the game.
What the game is lacking in narrative, it makes up for in atmosphere with ease. Every moment in the Asylum has Hamill's Joker taunting you over the loud speaker. Every death is punctuated by one of the villians taunting you over your failure in a manner that's admittedly unsettling. The goons have some really great lines that sell their fear of the Bat and the other supers they're surrounded by. The art style hearkens back to the best of Burton, the Animated Series, Schmaucher, and Nolan. And there's so lore for days with audio logs, Arkham entries, and other unlockables, most of which are thankfully still accessible while still solving a puzzle or fighting a buttload of goons. On top of all that, Rocksteady decided to link environmental puzzles to the Riddler, who goes from glib to enraged with every puzzle you solve.
All this contributes to Rocksteady's greatest feat. In Asylum, you truly feel like you're Batman, you truly feel like the Joker is out to get you, you truly feel like everyone is terrified of you, you truly feel like you're in the world of Gotham, with all its people, all its kinks, all its quirks. The combat (which has been written about over and over again) lifts from Ultimate Spider-Man (UNDERAPPRECIATED), in keeping the focus of the fight on one button, pressed in sync with the reading enemy prompts, resulting in beautiful, brutal clashes. The stealth encourages using various devices to sabotage and scare armed enemies in mini-sand boxes. And the toys the given you feel right at home with what Batman is.
That's not to say there isn't room for improvement. Because many of the crucial buttons, like running and jumping, are context specific, there's a whole lotta jank as to when those buttons will do what you want them to do. Expecting to jump over a railing to avoid an armed enemy spotting you, Batman will just run into the railing over and over, ramming it with his bat crotch. Think you just engaged the jump over enemy button? Ha! Batman's just gonna keep on running into that dude with the smeared make-up who just really wants to punch you. There's camera problems in fights as well. The camera usually pans out in combat sequences, allowing you to see all the enemies you're fighting at once. At that works...most of the time. The times that it doesn't feel really cheap and frustrating, particularly when you've got a good combo streak going. It's real hard in this game to cancel out of an action after it's been initiated, which would normally be fine, if it weren't for the counter prompts coming at moments where you literally can't counter.
Lastly, for a game that's aping Metroid Prime, the solutions to how to get to where you need to go next are pretty much arbitrary. The problem isn't Batman's devices, which are great, the problem is the environmental prompts, which are insanely bad. You often won't know that a piece of wall is breakable with explosives without keeping detective mode on at all times. You won't know that there's a wall you can link to with the double sided rope grapple without having the rope grapple aimed at every wall you can find. Metroid Prime partly works as well as it does because its environmental puzzles are teaching the player a language about the world around it, with rewards hiding behind understanding the language. In Arkham Asylum, level design is much more haphazard regarding puzzles. It's not that these enviornmental puzzles are hard (or that there isn't a language, the player learns the meaning of an air vent or sewer grate very quickly), it's just that, many of the devices don't feel like they contribute to some new meaningful understanding of the environment based on a language learned by the player. For me, that's rough.
City took things in a whole different direction, to my chagrin at the time. Where Asylum was tight in its construction, City was an open world, arguably full of the same haphazard decision that frustrated my experiences with Arkham. Making things worse, the player starts as Catwoman, and if there's any character Dini has no idea how to write, it's Catwoman. Her lines couldn't be more hammy if she did them with a Porky impression (and yes, that's a joke Catwoman would make under Paul Dini). Playing again though, City feels like an admission from the Devs that they knew they weren't going to succeed at aping Metroid Prime's level design. Very few, if any, really can.
So why bother? Sure, they kept the environmental puzzles, but that's not the draw here. Instead, we get ourselves a story full of zips, twists, and turns, a grapple accelerator letting Batman fly around an open world, combat and basic mechanics that mostly improve on all the other complaints I had about Asylum, and some really great side-quests that give you the tour of Batman's history and villains without letting those moments distract from the narrative. Rocksteady doubled down on what really worked with Asylum, making an incredibly enjoyable game that mostly plays great moment to moment. And added a buttload of dumb puzzles for those masochists out there.
Also that Mr. Freeze boss fight. Man, that Mr. Freeze boss fight is so good.
Sure City's more distracted than Asylum, but looking back, the distraction is a good thing. The side-quests are far and away City's greatest contribution. Each mini-narrative adds variety mechanically and gives those lore-maniacs a little more of what they love. Not all are winners, but, like the Witcher 3, when the quality is generally so uniformly good, you have to take notice. Even when the narrative is gets a little too convoluted for its own good, City always has the narrative of its excellent side-quests to fall back on.
In the end, while I commend Asylum for its excellent seminal work, I'm walking away with a lesser amount of appreciation for it while holding a much higher appreciation for City. Both games are far from perfect, but City takes the many recent frustrations I had with Asylum and either improves on them or throws me something shiny to look at once I start noticing otherwise. If you haven't yet and are interested, I highly recommend both.
(Please note that Asylum runs fine in the collection on PS4, but there are some frame-rate hitches in City. Let factor into your decision making how you will)
TL
R: I liked Asylum better than City originally, but now I like City better than Asylum
Now that's off my chest, let's go for the narrative jugular: Batman: A Telltale Series.
Like most people, my experience with Telltale games are mixed. I loved Strong-Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. I loved Walking Dead Season 1. I loved the Wolf Among Us. Mostly avoided everything else until Telltale got their shit together with their engine. A friend recommended I try this new Batman thing after I talked to him about returning to Arkham, so I picked it up on the cheap.
Telltale's engine is still a problem. It's mostly fine visually, but there's still bugs all over, frame-rate hitching at weird points, and full blown crashes. It didn't eat my save data, but that doesn't mean that hasn't happened before (I'm looking at you Bigby).
That all said, holy shit is this a fucking solid Batman narrative.
Batman usually has a problem of being outshined by his villains. And why wouldn't he? Bruce Wayne is dull, and Batman, as a concept, is crazy silly. What always drove me to Batman was less the actual character and more the horror-elements, weird philosophy clashes, and fun moral quandaries. Telltale reboots Batman and most of the characters surrounding him in a way reminiscent of Scott Snyder's recent run with Batman at DC. Gordon is not exactly who you remember him, Harvey Dent is on a slightly different trajectory, Falcone may be as much enemy as ally, and your parents, well, that's the fun focal point. Telltale has a whole lot of fun using Penguin, Mayor Hill, Falcone, and Alfred to mess with Bruce Wayne's moral foundation, forcing Wayne into an existential crisis in the process. What results is a story feeling ripped straight from the comics (and in some ways better than many of the current comics). It doesn't necessarily end on the most conclusive note, but, c'mon, it's not like most of the comics do anyway.
In short, if you can stomach the MANY technical problems, and you're a Bat fan, I really recommend this Telltale adventure. It's a run ride for Gothamites, that, at the very least, is really worth watching via a youtube playthrough.
Most nerds can't get enough of the man-child running around in long-underwear speaking in a deep, gravely voice to other disaffected weirdos about justice. Including myself. I've loved Batman and all his various iterations since early childhood, having the fortune of being raised on Batman: The Animated Series and the Adam West Batman all around the same time.
Naturally there's been a whole lot of games about playing the Batman, because, why wouldn't there be? But a grand amount of them (but not all) sucked for various reasons. With the release of Arkham Asylum though, that all changed. By transforming the world of Batman into a character-action "Metroid Prime-Light" style game, devs appeared to finally crack the Batman formula. Helping make the whole game go down smooth, Paul Dini, Kevin Conroy, and Mark Hamill all lent a helping hand. It spawned three sequels, each of which has their own devoted fans. I hadn't played either of the original two entries for a few years, and after feeling a heavy Batman kick due to a favorite podcast of mine running through an analysis of Nolan's Batman trilogy (Blank Check with Griffin and David), I decided to pick up Return to Arkham on a sale. I also decided to pick up TellTale's Batman Series on the cheap because, hey, Batman.
For some background, my Arkham rankings prior to this playthrough are as follows:
1. Asylum
2. Origins
3. Knight
4. City
While I enjoyed the story in each of these games, I'd always felt that, for Asylum and City, the narrative was more about sending Batman around from villain to villain. Playing again, while I appreciate all the unique narrative choices Asylum made, the story feels at odds with the game design. There's some big elaborate party the Joker has planned with Batman being the guest of honor, only to repeatedly try to kill Batman over and over and over again. With the constant threat of death in game mechanics, it feels weird to know that supposedly Joker has this grand old plan that is VERY contingent on Batman staying alive. And the weird fetch quests that Batman is sent on that lead to his encounters with villains like Croc and Ivy feel perfunctory narratively, less to do with what they can get out of Batman in a character, and more to do with: Hey here's a villain with a unique boss battle. And some of the time (see the Killer Croc battle) the boss mechanics are just plain rotten.
That all changes is every fight with Scarecrow. While the Scarecrow sequences are relatively simplistic in terms of actual mechanics, the preludes and postludes are some of the best things about this game. I won't spoil anything, but each of these fights does a great job of shifting character perspective, game perspective, camera perspective, and even mechanical expectations. Rocksteady appears to have a great deal of fun with these moments trying to scare and disorient the player, and even with knowing all the tricks, these moments are still a whole lot of fun (and help demonstrate why Knight, despite its flaws, is still so so so good). These moments also reveal more about Batman and the player's relationship with Batman that are literally non-existent in the rest of the game.
What the game is lacking in narrative, it makes up for in atmosphere with ease. Every moment in the Asylum has Hamill's Joker taunting you over the loud speaker. Every death is punctuated by one of the villians taunting you over your failure in a manner that's admittedly unsettling. The goons have some really great lines that sell their fear of the Bat and the other supers they're surrounded by. The art style hearkens back to the best of Burton, the Animated Series, Schmaucher, and Nolan. And there's so lore for days with audio logs, Arkham entries, and other unlockables, most of which are thankfully still accessible while still solving a puzzle or fighting a buttload of goons. On top of all that, Rocksteady decided to link environmental puzzles to the Riddler, who goes from glib to enraged with every puzzle you solve.
All this contributes to Rocksteady's greatest feat. In Asylum, you truly feel like you're Batman, you truly feel like the Joker is out to get you, you truly feel like everyone is terrified of you, you truly feel like you're in the world of Gotham, with all its people, all its kinks, all its quirks. The combat (which has been written about over and over again) lifts from Ultimate Spider-Man (UNDERAPPRECIATED), in keeping the focus of the fight on one button, pressed in sync with the reading enemy prompts, resulting in beautiful, brutal clashes. The stealth encourages using various devices to sabotage and scare armed enemies in mini-sand boxes. And the toys the given you feel right at home with what Batman is.
That's not to say there isn't room for improvement. Because many of the crucial buttons, like running and jumping, are context specific, there's a whole lotta jank as to when those buttons will do what you want them to do. Expecting to jump over a railing to avoid an armed enemy spotting you, Batman will just run into the railing over and over, ramming it with his bat crotch. Think you just engaged the jump over enemy button? Ha! Batman's just gonna keep on running into that dude with the smeared make-up who just really wants to punch you. There's camera problems in fights as well. The camera usually pans out in combat sequences, allowing you to see all the enemies you're fighting at once. At that works...most of the time. The times that it doesn't feel really cheap and frustrating, particularly when you've got a good combo streak going. It's real hard in this game to cancel out of an action after it's been initiated, which would normally be fine, if it weren't for the counter prompts coming at moments where you literally can't counter.
Lastly, for a game that's aping Metroid Prime, the solutions to how to get to where you need to go next are pretty much arbitrary. The problem isn't Batman's devices, which are great, the problem is the environmental prompts, which are insanely bad. You often won't know that a piece of wall is breakable with explosives without keeping detective mode on at all times. You won't know that there's a wall you can link to with the double sided rope grapple without having the rope grapple aimed at every wall you can find. Metroid Prime partly works as well as it does because its environmental puzzles are teaching the player a language about the world around it, with rewards hiding behind understanding the language. In Arkham Asylum, level design is much more haphazard regarding puzzles. It's not that these enviornmental puzzles are hard (or that there isn't a language, the player learns the meaning of an air vent or sewer grate very quickly), it's just that, many of the devices don't feel like they contribute to some new meaningful understanding of the environment based on a language learned by the player. For me, that's rough.
City took things in a whole different direction, to my chagrin at the time. Where Asylum was tight in its construction, City was an open world, arguably full of the same haphazard decision that frustrated my experiences with Arkham. Making things worse, the player starts as Catwoman, and if there's any character Dini has no idea how to write, it's Catwoman. Her lines couldn't be more hammy if she did them with a Porky impression (and yes, that's a joke Catwoman would make under Paul Dini). Playing again though, City feels like an admission from the Devs that they knew they weren't going to succeed at aping Metroid Prime's level design. Very few, if any, really can.
So why bother? Sure, they kept the environmental puzzles, but that's not the draw here. Instead, we get ourselves a story full of zips, twists, and turns, a grapple accelerator letting Batman fly around an open world, combat and basic mechanics that mostly improve on all the other complaints I had about Asylum, and some really great side-quests that give you the tour of Batman's history and villains without letting those moments distract from the narrative. Rocksteady doubled down on what really worked with Asylum, making an incredibly enjoyable game that mostly plays great moment to moment. And added a buttload of dumb puzzles for those masochists out there.
Also that Mr. Freeze boss fight. Man, that Mr. Freeze boss fight is so good.
Sure City's more distracted than Asylum, but looking back, the distraction is a good thing. The side-quests are far and away City's greatest contribution. Each mini-narrative adds variety mechanically and gives those lore-maniacs a little more of what they love. Not all are winners, but, like the Witcher 3, when the quality is generally so uniformly good, you have to take notice. Even when the narrative is gets a little too convoluted for its own good, City always has the narrative of its excellent side-quests to fall back on.
In the end, while I commend Asylum for its excellent seminal work, I'm walking away with a lesser amount of appreciation for it while holding a much higher appreciation for City. Both games are far from perfect, but City takes the many recent frustrations I had with Asylum and either improves on them or throws me something shiny to look at once I start noticing otherwise. If you haven't yet and are interested, I highly recommend both.
(Please note that Asylum runs fine in the collection on PS4, but there are some frame-rate hitches in City. Let factor into your decision making how you will)
TL
R: I liked Asylum better than City originally, but now I like City better than AsylumNow that's off my chest, let's go for the narrative jugular: Batman: A Telltale Series.
Like most people, my experience with Telltale games are mixed. I loved Strong-Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. I loved Walking Dead Season 1. I loved the Wolf Among Us. Mostly avoided everything else until Telltale got their shit together with their engine. A friend recommended I try this new Batman thing after I talked to him about returning to Arkham, so I picked it up on the cheap.
Telltale's engine is still a problem. It's mostly fine visually, but there's still bugs all over, frame-rate hitching at weird points, and full blown crashes. It didn't eat my save data, but that doesn't mean that hasn't happened before (I'm looking at you Bigby).
That all said, holy shit is this a fucking solid Batman narrative.
Batman usually has a problem of being outshined by his villains. And why wouldn't he? Bruce Wayne is dull, and Batman, as a concept, is crazy silly. What always drove me to Batman was less the actual character and more the horror-elements, weird philosophy clashes, and fun moral quandaries. Telltale reboots Batman and most of the characters surrounding him in a way reminiscent of Scott Snyder's recent run with Batman at DC. Gordon is not exactly who you remember him, Harvey Dent is on a slightly different trajectory, Falcone may be as much enemy as ally, and your parents, well, that's the fun focal point. Telltale has a whole lot of fun using Penguin, Mayor Hill, Falcone, and Alfred to mess with Bruce Wayne's moral foundation, forcing Wayne into an existential crisis in the process. What results is a story feeling ripped straight from the comics (and in some ways better than many of the current comics). It doesn't necessarily end on the most conclusive note, but, c'mon, it's not like most of the comics do anyway.
In short, if you can stomach the MANY technical problems, and you're a Bat fan, I really recommend this Telltale adventure. It's a run ride for Gothamites, that, at the very least, is really worth watching via a youtube playthrough.
