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Arkham City: Hushier than Hush.
WARNING: Arkham City spoilers ahead.
I finished Arkham City a couple nights ago, even the terribly frustrating last Catwoman level that’s totally tacked on and doesn’t play like anything else in the game (respawning guards? Come on!). I don’t think I’ve ever played anything, even Arkham Asylum, that makes you, the player, feel as much like Batman as this game does. It’s a hell of an achievement on developer Rocksteady’s part. I kind of miss the elements of mystery solving you got with the first game (here, the most you do is sort of a CSI, examine-the-scene sort of thing), but the fighting mechanics are great and there are enough Riddler trophies to keep me busy for weeks.
Unfortunately, the game’s plot is a big, soupy mess. Apparently I’m in the minority in thinking that. Over at IMDb, commenter coltsfan18288 says, “If you thought Inception played mind games, then this will blow you away.” For what that’s worth.
The more I played the game, the more I thought of Jeph Loeb. Paul Dini, the writer of a ton of classic Batman: The Animated Series episodes and some not-so-great issues of Gotham City Sirens is the credited writer, but the whole thing feels very Loeby. There’s even a tribute to The Long Halloween, in that you can find Calendar Man sitting in a jail cell below the courthouse, and on holidays, he’ll get up and do a little monologue. (Though why Calendar Man is in confined to a cell when the city outside is itself a giant prison goes unexplained.)
What I was reminded of most, though, was Hush. Not the character, who just makes a cameo appearance in a side mission, but the 12-part megastory from about eight years ago, by Loeb and Jim Lee. Not so much in the story beats themseves — though there was an element of Batman in mortal danger in both — rather, in how the stories both seem to mostly be delivery systems for as many Batman villains as you can stuff into one thing. Here you’ve got Penguin, Riddler, Joker, Harley Quinn, Two-Face, Ra’s al-Ghul, Mr. Freeze, Talia al-Ghul, Hugo Strange, Poison Ivy (in the Catwoman parts), Deadshot, Solomon Grundy, Mad Hatter, Killer Croc (in a short cameo), Bane and, in the end (again, spoilers), Clayface.
How’s Clayface come into play? A lot like he did in Hush. Turns out, he’s been impersonating one of the characters you’ve been seeing a lot of all along! In Hush, it was actually two people (Jason Todd and Hush). Here, it’s just one. Either way, where some see a mind-blowing twist, I see something that’s…kind of cheap.
Why’s Clayface involved at all? A great role, he says. That’s pretty dumb. (It’s more than I remember us getting from Hush, though.)
Then there’s the whole matter of the sick Joker. He had the cure for a long time, right? Why didn’t he cure himself? (Correction: Apparently he never had it until he kidnapped Talia. So many baits-and-switches.) And there’s other questions: What’s Hugo Strange’s deal? Why’d Ra’s al-Ghul come up with a plan this stupid?
I guess I should just be happy that a story this frustrating at least has a pretty awesome video game built around it.
