This Week In Retro: Batman: Arkham City (Patreon)

October 18, 2011: When you get caught between a loon and Gotham City

by Diamond Feit

Holy rebounds, Batman! After a few shaky years of lousy scripts, directors dropping out, and controversial casting choices, a new trailer has the internet buzzing about the Caped Crusader's next incarnation coming in Spring 2022. It's a testament to the Dark Knight's staying power: After 80+ years of patrolling the city of Gotham, fans remain excited to see him back in action after a brief hiatus.

It's a reminder of how filmgoers reacted in the late 2000s to the then-new revival of Batman by director Christopher Nolan. Nearly a decade after the meltdown that was Batman & Robin, Nolan quite literally started over with Batman Begins, rewriting the origin story of the famous billionaire superhero, winning over critics and reigniting the fanbase in one fell swoop. Just two years later, Nolan's The Dark Knight became an even greater success, earning a billion dollars worldwide and a posthumous Academy Award to actor Heath Ledger for his greasy take on the Joker.

Arriving hot on the heels of those two pictures, Batman: Arkham Asylum proved to be a surprise blockbuster in its own right. After years of licensed superhero games maligned as quick-cash-grab fare, Rocksteady's hybrid stealth-action game landed at the end of summer 2009 to rave reviews. The game benefited from the gritty Nolan films, but it also reached back to the 90s by casting Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill as lead voice actors to reprise their heroic and villainous roles from the famed Batman animated series (skipping the Burton/Schumacher movie era entirely).

While hardly the biggest wheel at the cracker factory, I was amongst those in the press taken aback by the excellence of Batman: Arkham Asylum. The game perfectly balances Batman's many appealing qualities, allowing players plenty of time to beat up waves of crooks, sneak through the shadows, use expensive gadgets, and even ensure Batman lives up to his nickname of "World's Greatest Detective" by examining crime scenes and solving The Riddler's many puzzles.

Arkham Asylum hinges on the great rivalry between Batman and the Joker, with the Clown Prince of Crime teasing and tormenting his favorite foe throughout the game. Even if the final confrontation is underwhelming, requiring Joker to mutate himself into a beast in order to actually threaten the much stronger hero, the hours that players spend leading up to that moment are full of anticipation. One reason the Joker is such a popular villain is his ability to amuse, intimidate, and irritate all at the same time. I'm not a violent person but he's got the most punchable face in comics; his evil deeds are indefensible and his giant grin makes him a man you love to hate.

I don't remember who pointed it out to me for the first time, but another reason I loved Arkham Asylum was its status as a stealth Metroidvania. Locking Batman into an enclosed island, forcing players to explore every building from top to bottom, and incentivizing them to revisit past areas by granting Batman new abilities...Arkham Asylum may be a 3D action game but it has more in common with Super Metroid than a typical 2000s third-person brawler. Asylum's RPG elements proved to be icing on the cake, as they allowed clumsy players such as myself an avenue to strengthen Batman through experience point farming.

Batman: Arkham Asylum proved to be a Game of the Year contender in December 2009, an outcome no video game or comic book fan could have anticipated. In contrast, its sudden success led to a most unsurprising trailer that same month teasing an Arkham sequel, complete with a withered, sickly Joker laughing at the audience lest they think he actually died in the first game. Just as Asylum was a "sleeper" hit, its sequel received a full-court press of hype as nearly two years would pass before its launch. This time, expectations would be sky high. Could the Bat strike gold a second time?

Batman: Arkham City arrived on store shelves 10 years ago this week to instant accolades. Just as Asylum crept into living rooms in August 2009 without much fanfare, City landed amidst peak blockbuster season where it cleaned up, moving millions of units within weeks and scoring near-perfect grades from many media outlets. By February 2012 it had already outsold Arkham Asylum's entire print run, earning City a prized "Game of the Year edition" which, aside from its egregiously ugly cover art, proved just as popular.

Arkham City doubles-down on everything that players and critics had hailed in Arkham Asylum. With the correctional facility officially closed in the previous game, Gotham's most destructive criminals have been relocated to a massive walled-off section of the city, giving Batman a much larger, densely-packed urban environment to navigate. This expansion allows for a bigger story as this concrete jungle is home to multiple gangs pledging allegiance to different crime bosses from Batman's storied gallery of rogues. He's not alone anymore, however, as Catwoman is also wandering the city streets and players have select opportunities to control her in a side-story that crosses-over with Batman's adventure, complete with her own set of Riddler trophies that only she can collect.

The simplest way to describe Arkham City is with three words (which I suspect were actually written on a whiteboard inside Rocksteady at some point with glee): "Grand Theft Batman." If Arkham Asylum has Metroid DNA in its veins, City feels closer to Grand Theft Auto, as Batman has free reign to leap from Gotham's rooftops in any direction. Players can rush through the main story or they can idly seek out supplemental challenges by exploring the map, with the pacing and sequence of those events largely left to their whims. Even though the main narrative dictates that Batman must find an antidote for a deadly toxin to save Gotham from ruin, I had plenty of time to chase the Riddler for a while and even accept a quest from Bane before I advanced the allegedly urgent plot.

Despite all my Batman fandom and the countless hours I sank into Arkham Asylum, I reacted negatively to Arkham City upon its initial release. Video games generally operate under the axiom that "bigger is better," which is why so many sequels seek to overwhelm players with more than their progenitors had to offer. Yet a game built on exploration must maintain a balance that cannot simply quintuple in size without warping. By pursuing an open-world sandbox formula, Rocksteady inflated the experience of the first game so much that it burst the Metroidvania bubble.

Batman: Arkham Asylum has 240 Riddler challenges, but Arkham City has over 400, plus a variety of "training" missions scattered around town. Asylum takes 10 hours to complete (not including extraneous exploration), lasting about as long as one frigid winter night might take in Gotham City. Arkham City takes at least twice as long, especially given that the format encourages idle wandering. Revisiting the game for this column, I spent about six hours in Arkham City and the game says my completion rate is a mere nine percent.

I should immediately amend that last statement with this emphatic truth: Giving Arkham City a second chance in 2021 has been a very rewarding decision. Ten years ago I bristled at the size and scope of the sequel, treating the changes as a misguided embellishment, the kind of excess that plagues AAA game development. Yet I have struggled to put Arkham City down all week, and find myself even now wondering what new trouble Batman might be able to abate if I stopped writing this column and booted the game up again.

On the whole, I don't think the Nolan Batman or the Arkham Batman hold up well to modern eyes due to their overly dark outlook. Even if Batman as a hero prides himself on never taking a life, the Arkham games are built on the premise that Batman can brutally beat hundreds of men within an inch of their life and it's all A-OK as long as they're declared "unconscious" in the end. In my aforementioned six hours with Arkham City, I'd conservatively estimate my classic blue & grey Batman has a higher body count than all three Christian Bale films and Batfleck combined.

Yet taken on its own merits (which is something we could all make a habit of striving for instead of judging a work by what we wish it could be), Batman: Arkham City is tremendously fun. Gliding around the city and grappling to high ledges feels great. The rhythmic combat is a delight to experiment with, as I challenge myself to see how many different techniques or gadgets I can link in a single combo. The stealth segments reign supreme over all imitators, allowing me to crawl under grates and swing between gargoyles as I pick off increasingly frightened gunmen one by one. Is Arkham City as fun as Arkham Asylum? I would say no, but it's still one of the best action games I've played this year. Too bad for me I waited a decade to discover that.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.