Finally playing Batman: Arkham Knight now that I got my PC fixed up (started a few months back but then the RAM thing happened).
There’s this moment in the story that I am not entirely a fan of but because the Arkham games are basically linear stories with free roaming action stuff in-between I understand that there was only one way this key choice they ask you to make could have gone.
Not quite a fan of being given a seemingly crucial choice when it’d be more interesting to play the choice out. May as well have been a cutscene rather than give us a decision to make otherwise.
I’m talking about this moment where Batman is infected with a Joker virus and also he’s hopped up on residual Scarecrow gas, so he has a chance to lock himself up and let Tim Drake handle an encroaching army of enemies.
But of course because of the Bat’s guilt he is reluctant to do it. But he is too dangerous and it would make sense to have him stay in quarantine and let Tim and Dick handle the city. I choose to go inside.
The trick here is that if you do go into quarantine, it’s a hallucination (you get those frequently throughout the game). I tried it twice. Basically the game is forcing you to lock up Tim instead. Which, makes sense given Batman’s current guilt complex for legitimate reasons. You know, make sure he doesn’t put his third son into a dangerous situation, especially since he’s been hallucinating Jason’s death.
But uh, actually I did want that lockup to happen, it’s literally the most sensible course of action.
I understand that this is Batman’s game, but there have been a lot of moments where you just play as Catwoman or Nightwing, and we just went through a course where we played as Robin.
Wouldn’t it have been an interesting choice to diverge the story just a little bit? Like, you choose to be locked up, and then you play Tim for, like, two missions and then either return to Batman or Batman breaks himself out after the guilt becomes too much for him?
Like, it would be an ultimately meaningless choice for the sake of the overall narrative but for that brief moment it would’ve been cool to let it play out.
Also on a side note can we talk about how they massacred my boy for a brief second, what on earth is going on with Tim Drake’s design? When I saw I could change to something a little more colorful and a little less buzzcut I was relieved. I understand that these games were going for a more grizzled “realistic” so we were never going to get fun choices like DCAU Nightwing’s long hair (even though I prefer it). But what is with this hunched over broody pose they give Tim with the buzzcut? He’s supposed to be the genius Robin not the Call of Duty Robin, give him a smile.
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Cruel choice #137: a video game's lineup of playable protagonists lets you be a girl or a robot, but you cannot be both.
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