Batman goes to the funny farm

Batman: Arkham Asylum is celebrated Batman title of 9 years that still being touted as the gold standard of Batman video games. After playing it for a second time, I’m giving it a general review in the hopes of finding the things that give this title it’s noted accolades.

Tie-In video game-breaking

If you had the fortune of playing with an Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, Nintendo Gameboy, et al, you’d know of a game or two that was based off of an existing entertainment intellectual property. Disney had its games based on their animated shows and movies, Mattel had their based on their Barbie doll franchise, and even Nickelodeon had theirs with some based off of their animated hit shows of the time such as “Ren And Stimpy”, “Rugrats”, and a few others. The only thing that I can say about all those games of those times is one thing: they sucked.

Oh sure it was a barrel of laughs for likely a lot of kids out there that are now all grown up and now have rose-tinted nostalgia glasses for them but I’d like to believe that I was one of the fortunate few that knew that if something was boring, it was likely because it was a badly or cheaply designed video game.

An anecdote: sometimes I would ask the kids back in elementary school what video games that they wanted or played regularly and they would express learned taste from their older siblings as to what was good, what was popular, and what other games to explore although most, more often than not, would just like the mainstream stuff because it was ubiquitous in their video game habits and the systems they owned with their family.

And by majority these would be typically either first-party games like anything by Nintendo and Sega respectively along with popular third-party developed and published games. So whenever there was a title that came along that was developed by a third-party, it had to be good in order to succeed and have people really get interested in it as they did with first party titles. This was true for both Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Megadrive/Genesis owners.

And if the intellectual property tie-in was something that was already in the awareness of children at the time, it was going to be taken into consideration whole-heartedly at first.

So naturally it was good fit for something like Warner Brothers, fresh from the success of the first two Batman movies and tie-in video games that made it successfully in both the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Megadrive/Genesis, that they would make another tie-in game to the most recent movie that, although initially did well in the box office at the time - turned out to be seen today as a terrible film: Batman Forever.

Let’s take this example of what I’m talking about in the following commercial for this game shall we?

Impressive commercial isn’t it? Now let’s look a bit at the actual game itself. Mind you, you don’t need to see the whole longplay (LP) of the video game, but just the first couple of minutes because you don’t need to see much to get the idea of how…

…not so impressive, clearly, the game is. But to be fair, to make a video game based off what is considered now a not-so-good movie is a really hard feat to make a video game out of. And let me be honest, when I was ten years old, I didn’t care about nuance and depth, I just cared that it was Batman on the big screen (whether it was movie or video game). Couple this with the fact that, at the time, I was a really big Mortal Kombat fan and really was impressed with so-called “live-action” sprite graphics as I tended see then as an interesting direction for making video games (this was before the advent of real-time textured 3D graphic video games debuting the markets around 1995 and 1996).

But let’s move on to another example to further illustrate of what I’m talking about. While the live action movies were not doing too good, the animated series of Batman was doing excellent as it was stemming directly off the style and atmosphere of the first two Tim Burton live-action Batman movies. The animated television series had good writing, it was dark and had depth to such a point that it spawned a new entries into the Batman’s rogue gallery (namely Harley Quinn, a newest addition that, since debut, been slowly become canonically validated to be a super-villain in her own right).

So there’s a lot of room and space for development for original story ideas and gameplay adaption in relation to those ideas to that could generate new material to make a video game out of. And you’d believe that of course, until you end up with something like the Sega Genesis port of The Adventures of Batman & Robin where you have some techno-dance track play as the background music and simply able to spend most of the time shooting batarangs onto enemies till they’re out cold (there’s some melee but that’s negligible).

or the Super Nintendo Entertainment System version which was more polished and closer to the source material from which the game was based on, but turned out to be no different in essence.

So it is that, in either case, they’re both just beat’em up brawler titles and don’t offer much else. You can excuse such titles due to the limits of the game development technology as such titles relied on sprite animation and whatever else was around at the time to make a video game within budget.

In short, a Batman video game was a beat’em up or platformer video game at the core - no matter how you wanted to never admit, it was just simply either kind with just a Batman skin. Because no matter what you got at the time, you were going to have something akin to Deadpool (2013) where it was nothing but a generic third-person action game with a popular comic book character featured along with all associated concepts and tropes to that character in said game (including the wisecracking of the fact that the game itself was just an otherwise “okay” third-person action game).

Now I didn’t play Batman video games after playing the Sega Genesis port of The Adventures of Batman & Robin but I did indeed hear that there were games coming out on latter generation console systems and I out-right dismissed them as bad games and held any game that was based on comics, movies, and other intellectual properties that were not exclusively conceptualized to then develop a video game from were not good at all.

That was a notion that I held even for when Arkham Asylum came out in 2009 and it wasn’t until the announcement of Batman: Arkham City in 2012 that I began to check out what the excitement was about for the previous game of which fueled enthusiasm the latter and what I got was a really great surprise.

Because once I heard the voice of Kevin Conroy (Batman/Bruce Wayne Batman: The Animated Series), Mark Hamill (The Joker, Batman: The Animated Series), and Arleen Sorkin (Dr. harleen Quinzel / Harley Quinn, Batman: The Animated Series), I knew that I had stumbled into something that reminded me of fond times watching the animated series on television. I was not seeing things with a pair of rose-tinted glasses, but was moved to walk in memory lane in brief, explicit glimpses. And from there, as it’s usually said, “the rest is history”.

Enter The Funny farm

The environment

So where do we start off in looking at such a game as this? The graphics of course! There is one thing that was a dead give away that this game was not going to be some quick “cut-and-paste” job when it came to real-time textured 3D graphical assets. From Batman’s cape and accompanying sound effects to the architectural designs of the buildings throughout Arkham Island, everything is done with such attention to detail so as to do something to tell a story.

For instance, when you go in the buildings of the asylum’s island campus, you find yourself noticing the differences in architecture between the older Arkham mansion and the other facilities that have been subsequently constructed over the years throughout the island. You immediately recognize where modern architecture was applied and where modern electronic equipment was affixed onto the older buildings for surveillance and security. This all tells you a story implicitly as to the history of the environment of game world you’re playing in and I have seen this kind of so-called “environmental story telling” in Bioshock. And I don’t know if a lot of people realize this yet but having a game that takes care for the environment setting that you’ll be playing in as much as that of the game mechanics is what gets a lot of people praising such games and end up having it be put in high regard almost immediately after picking up and dropping the controller.

In Bioshock you have the environment tell you more about what happened and is happening. You are an agent of a change that will come to be witness to the last vestiges of life that that the environment has left and whatever echo of charm that is only kept alive artificially by the byproducts of what had transpired there.

The element of mystery accompanies the implications noted by the style of storytelling via environment. The thing is that there is an element that must be kept at all times held somewhat elusive in that you are doing, as the playable character, the catalyst of change to keep you going and be continually interested. And although that is obviously clear once you pick up the controller to play, it only becomes even more nuanced until you pay attention to the changes that are brought upon the environment once you have made the actions that you initially came to do that make the actual, acute change in setting environment immediately .

If you’re familiar with the term “show not tell” in writing, then paying close attention to the game environment to let you know whether you cleared a path area or have changed something or have clues here and there scattered around to implicitly inform you something about the world - adding it depth in the process, is the equivalent of that; it challenges the player to not take the environmental settings for granted as with whatever previous games. the player may have not been expected to pay attention to.

Going back to Arkham island: you learn about the environment of the island through the building architectural designs, the flora, geography, weather, landmarks. They set a backdrop that prepares the stage for letting you know that everything that you are seeing transpire is actually possible to happen in a place like Arkham island because even Arkham island itself is a bit of a generator for the invisible evil that presides in not just in the island, but also Gotham City and the surrounding areas itself. It’s almost Lovecraft in a sense - this concept of a corrupting invisible evil that only manifests itself via a living breathing host and could only be perceived between the lines by a very perceptive gifted few (among them being of course Batman).

And as such, this “invisible evil” that, for those familiar with the Batman and his interpretation to what effects the city happens to have on people, is again shown and not told in the manner of how the backdrop of the entire affair which is Batman: Arkham Asylum is designed and presented. And so this invisible evil, in summary, is only possible to be implied and be used as to make the player understand that it’s not just the Joker and company of baddies that is to be suspicious about, but also the very place that you’re in.

The Batsuit and character designs

From there you can then start focusing on the character models starting with Batman himself. It’s always been an impression of mine, ever since I saw the 1989 Batman movie, that whenever batman dresses up in particular uniforms before having the “ultimate showdown”, it’s always going to be somewhat “different” or seemingly more “powerful” than before. This concept of the “upgraded uniform” or “updated uniform” has given me the impression of being a foreshadowing device.

Now I don’t mean to let on much but there are obvious and subtle hints about what will transpire given by how well armed Batman is going to be with his uniform. In the Burton/Schumacher films, every time there is a need for the character to fight the “end game” battle, Batman uses a modified “prototype” or improved upon version of the suit of some kind. Now in the Burton movies (Batman, Batman Returns), there really isn’t any “new” suit that is used but there is a presentation showing the donning of the costume in a ritualistic way that not only shows off the suit but also re-emphasizes the fact that the suit itself is symbolic and therefore should give a hint to where the story will be following after this ritualistic show of the suit being put on by Bruce Wayne.

But we don’t get that in any point of Arkham Asylum so what we get is something that is akin of what you find when watching a regular episode of Batman: The Animated series, where on a “good night” you have zero casualties but just a few concussions here and there involved in the entire scuffle of the pursuit against the criminals.

If you notice in any of the live action movies, animated series, and even action figures franchises such as “Legends of Batman”, you can get the gist that Batman’s uniform is not always the same and there will always be a slight variation from time to time and from story to story. But what I have sometimes gotten, in particular with the Arkham video game series is that you have this small nuance in where, the tougher and better equipped the uniform, the darker the episode will become (I interpret every game to be “an episode” here). I won’t go into specifics of this little theory of mine as to the symbolic design that the Batsuit has been designated throughout this series of video games but I’d like to state that it does give a bit of a hint in what kind of tone the story will have overall. It’s a cryptic clue in front of someone’s face that unravels itself until later to make sense.

In this entry of the Arkham series, you have Batman and the environments be more playful, well lit, and familiar (even Batman’s uniform is a light grey with little armor) somehow, in a manner that is more playful and cartoonish in some way. But make no mistake, this is not your children’s take on Batman, there is actual and higher potential loss of life to be had and there are casualties throughout this game found while chasing the bad guys throughout the island. And the fact that there is death around involved in this episode of Batman’s adventures lends to a hint that there is something indeed dark that is bound to happen later on - if not during the game’s transpiring events then later on in possible (now actual) sequels.

The Joker, the main antagonist in the game, is wearing his usual custom made purple suit. But this time he’s not looking as particularly average in build but more lanky and thin. This sort of begs the question as to how he can withstand the blows coming from a man that is bigger, bulkier, and well muscle tones to beat him to death easily. This gives you this impression that there’s something absolutely psychic that must make the joker definitely impervious to pain and not really care about his own personal safety and well being, much less for that of others - especially when taking into account that he’s an anarchic nihilistic homicidal sociopath. But this makes the joker no longer a mere annoyance as he’s shown to be in the animated series of the 1990s; quite the contrary, the Joker is now with an element of darkness that’s not too far from the surface that could come to lash out at anyone, anything, and at any moment.

The other characters, likewise, have a reflection of a character design that is both original and also very dark. This reminds me a bit of Twisted Metal: Black where there was, prior in the Twisted Metal series a very bright colored and very comical points in the story. But once Twisted Metal Black came out, the series became less akin to having elements of cartoonish comedy and more akin very dark and very serious tones and presentations. This also included a very dramatic change in the character designs. For instance, when Sweet Tooth, the iconic “killer clown” character that expresses no remorse for killing people, he represents himself at first in the series as this really psychotic, but foolish all the same, character. But once Twisted Metal Black comes around, he’s this bulking seriously sociopathic homicidal that overpowers the antagonist of the series, the ever mysterious Calypso.

And it’s just so but this time, what makes things even more twisted is that, this is a performance given by none other than Mark Hamill, who’s voice of the Joker is seen as nothing more than a comedic voice that behaves like a submissive pup once beaten into submission by Batman. But this Joker, this particular performance by Hamill in Batman - Arkham Asylum, this Joker plays on Batman not head on, but around Batman where he least expects it, really focusing on the essence of what makes up Batman as to what he is to the Joker: his total psychic opposite that represents order to his own of pure nihilistic chaos. So from his voice you see the reflection of it in his visage: his friendly, yet very untrustworthy permanent smile, the dead flower on his lapel (usually looking more fresh and alive), and most importantly, the grungy and dirty suit. And it’s this dirty state of his suit that strikes me the most. Reason being is that the Joker, with his small episodes of histrionic behavior, I figure, would be someone that would make sure that that looked their best always at all times.

But I think that this is not just the Joker design done incidentally as such, but it’s a reflection of the potential fall of his that is to come, again following along Batman’s own path as to how his own attire reflects the direction of the story and where it’s going. But where Batman’s attire is an omen for the entire storyline’s direction and tone, the Joker’s is a symbolic indicator of his own fate, something is going to happen to him that will change him permanently.

As for the other characters, from the police, the inmates, the other “super criminals”, their designs are also equally dark and reflect this new direction where everything in the DC universe hasn’t become “extreme” or “edgy” but simply, and somewhat frighteningly, dark.

But from this darkness, comes the sparks of light coming from Batman’s fists, so let’s move on to the combat.

Boom! Kapow! Bam! Poof!: Action Mechanics

Combat

The combat system is tight but flawed in some parts. The combat system consists of building up a combo of 12 uninterrupted hits and preventing from not following through with the hits in timely fashion or being hit by an enemy non-playable character. When you have reached your 12th consecutive hit, you have the option of then using a special eliminatory move to then take out one of the baddies at once instead of relying on repeatedly hitting them till they drop. This is something that allows for easy combating and crowd control in the fight against a large group of enemies.

To explain: if you have three enemies, it’s usually going to be best to be creative and not beat down the combatants at once because if you manage to make the most of what number of enemies and gain lots of consecutive hit points, you can earn larger point sums that can help you gain to level up, which in turn allows to select upgrades from the upgrades menu for things such as stronger armor, more health points, improved gadgetry.

Another example: If you have five or more enemies, that’s when you’re going to want to employing, not only the creativity of when working with smaller groups, but also crowd control to then focus on the remaining manageable number of enemies to then build up your combo number further.

The higher the hit count number, the higher the total score in the end as that very number serves as a base number to which multipliers of the other bonuses (such as using gadgets in your fight for instance) are then multiplied by. The total end result is what you get to then level up, upgrade, and then proceed to the other sections where your upgrades will matter and mean something later on different areas found in the game.

With such a system, you are taken to give every fight a consideration and treatment as if it’s a . The important thing to take is that once you master the combat, the fights are not only satisfying in the acquisition of points but in also that you’ve kicked ass, made it look good.

The combat isn’t just punches, kicks flips, but also countering attacks from behind and sides too you and you have to do it with this prompt system alerting you how many times you would have to select for the counter button to take out, usually, one to four enemies at once. So expect to button mash a few times here and there.

On top of this you have to also learn how to counter some attacks and avoid unblockable hits by enemies so as to prevent from your “attack flow” point acquisition not being stopped. The point of all this is that you have this challenge that lives up to the one thing about Batman: no one touches the Batman. ever.

So it all boils to a tough challenge that is also pretty fun if you happen to enjoy a challenge as there is some strategy involved.

The only complaint about this system is the fact that you are sometimes vulnerable to an enemy’s attack when it shouldn’t be the case. Enemies end up sometimes having a particular advantage of you.

So let’s say that you have an enemy that is going to come near you when you’re just about to land a blow on an enemy with suddenly another enemy that is coming behind you manages to, somehow, reach out and land a blow on you easily despite the fact that you managed to hit the counter button on time, causing for the enemy NPC’s blow to still land and you have the interruption to your combo streak.

It’s quite an annoyance and it forces you to proceed in making choices of when to crowd control your groups of enemies but then again the imperative is, playing as Batman, is to not get knocked out at all. And on top of that, the reason that I’m willing to give this annoying flaw a pass is because Batman is never going to expect any consideration of any kind from his enemies. So I have to play along with the parameters given, fair or otherwise, just like Batman would.

Gadgets

Even though combat in of itself usually involves physical attacks like punches and kicks, there are the gadgets that can be used to play in the role of taking down your enemies and help you trek through the semi-open world map that you’ll be going back and forth in. From the standard batarang to the more sophisticated electrical gadget doo-hickey, you can use them in combat or getting around obstacles of the environment to get to your objectives or to get out of a potential shark pile.

I could sit here and type away each gadget that’s in Batman’s belt this time around, but it should be noticed that this game has a strange way of having Batman equipped. You see, he starts off with just two to three items and then later on is going to gradually acquire equipment and improvements on some equipment he had initially. And what makes it strange is that Batman is not the kind of superhero that comes into the fight unprepared. He’s the obsessed boy-scout: he’s always prepared. But this is a video game and the convention of having the necessary equipment and tools be acquired “in due time” are all part of the gameplay design. There are some that have pointed out to me that have played Zelda on the Nintendo Entertainment System or Super Nintendo Entertainment System that it’s part of the “Zelda system” where you have equipment - be it weapons or tools to then use immediately to progress. And if it helps, I would assume that Batman simply didn’t find the need to be equipped much since he knew what he was doing and usually is known to just using the best tool he has, his head.

It could be taken as a form of in-game designed hand-holding but it’s not quite the case given that really there has to be had some kind of hand holding and that’s partially due to the fact that Batman, although an action character, is a character that was designed originally for a passive medium (comic books) and so when translating that character onto a video game, an interactive medium, you have to re-work the way of telling the story in such that will break expectations because it’s a video game.

So don’t expect Batman to start off armed to the teeth, he’ll need you to be good with the controller to fight, earn points, explore and then spend experience points for upgrades or get to where the gadget upgrade can be found. And then after, that to make use of those gadgets as much as possible while you traverse through the game world.

“Like a G flat major with an E in the bass”

The music in this game is straight out of the work that was done for Danny Elfman in the 1989 Batman movie or Shirley Walker from Batman - The Animated series from between 1992 to 1995. For those that are not aware, the style is characterized by using the theme motif introduced in the 1989 Batman film and the action movie sequence pieces in 1992’s Batman Returns. But there is something of an over-arching influence also being contributed by Hanz Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s work in the 2005 Batman Begins. With the use of percussion that works in a poly-beat which is sometimes described as “kinetic percussion”. And these styles are all blended together as appropriate in several ways as where it’s applicable.

You get is an orchestral score that is not too large and dramatic (we’re talking something typical of a studio orchestra with some track-by-track segregated recording on the fly), but something that is sizable enough to reflect the scope of the situation as applicable.

To illustrate: you have a fight of something of around 4 to 5 enemies, you’ll have your usual string and horn section first during parts of the game where you have to take out the bad guys in a room to then secure. It starts as follows: you have the room guarded with assault rifles in a room, you have to take them out but before that happens you have the use of synthesizers pulsating at ninety-six beats per minute (BPM). Once you take out the first bad guy, and say the other bad guys in the room found him unconscious and start getting nervous and calls out what happened, there’s no longer just the synthesizer, now it’s a layer of strings playing in fast and frantic manner to denote the obvious sense of urgency. Then, you take out the second enemy available out of the remaining, and then you have another discovery had; the number of baddies are dropping now and you have then the leader of the bad guys (the Joker usually) announcing that he’s seeing the drop in numbers and so the baddies left in the room start getting more anxious and split up. Now the second layer of music starts growing in volume and intensity with each bow sweep note with any string section instrument (i.e. the violin section).

Eventually, the result is a crescendo build up to a massive percussive explosion that ends up aligned to the final enemy being knocked out cold. The important thing to take is that music, although not always there, the music plays a role that allows for the setting to be felt throughout the entire time moment-by-moment. And if there is no music, there is always ambience that fills in the space that really gives the imagery the life it needs to come alive.

There is something else also to the music in that there is something about it that in this time around for Batman in a video game, it tries to find that particular “Batman theme” that is not really a nod to the Tim Burton orchestral theme for Batman but more something that would be of which it can build up on top of. But instead it goes for something more subdued in order to put the music in the background. Which is fine but I would have appreciated for something that would have announced that this Batman of this game’s universe have his own theme that is particular and synonymous to him.

But otherwise, the music is fantastic.

The Story - Joker strikes again as usual or does he?

The biggest draw for this game for me is the story. The interesting thing is that, like many other super hero comic stories, is that there is always a plot with a kind of theme that the episode tries to tackle. And I’ll admit, my expectations were pretty low when coming to this game given the aforementioned about the previous Batman titles that I’ve heard or played. There was even a Batman video game where Warner Brothers tried to have a new enemy be introduced to the Batman universe that would span all Batman universes (the comics, DC animated universe, and of course comics). So again, skepticism was strong within me as to the story being able to have something deep to base itself on.

But instead I’m given a surprise start:

Joker allows himself to be caught only to then setup and allows for inmates of the asylum to break free almost and go after Batman. It’s a simple plan, sure, but there’s more to it. The Joker is known to being essentially something that, in turn, defines Batman, as the Joker rightfully identifies as being a personal agent that defines him. Joker is chaos, while Batman is order; but with the Joker, being the chaotic psychic foil to Batman, he is not merely looking to kill Batman, he’s looking to break his mind, and then kill him if necessary. The Joker is in the pursuit of corrupting Batman by pitting him in the most psychically challenging difficulties of which can ultimately land him in being bent and broken to become nothing better than Joker himself.

Because Joker’s understanding that there is an inherent silliness to a vigilante dressing up as a humanoid bat with military or para-military grade equipment and gadgetry. He interprets it as being something of a mere gimmick whereas Bruce Wayne sees it as symbols, tools, and means to effectively perform his vigilantism. But more than that, the Batman, the vigilantism is itself a therapeutic means to seek out and role play revenge against those that did him wrong. Or at least, at the start, that’s what it is or was, or both. You can never tell really because it’s precise moments oscillate within Bruce Wayne often and frequently left amorphous for the sake of continuity. But even if internal conflict were to be resolved, the prior mentioned “invisible evil” that permeates throughout Gotham City and surrounding area is what will keep Bruce Wayne going to continue as Batman.

But even if homicide is the end result but that’s not the real aim of the Joker, it’s the corrupting of someone that is otherwise a still object that faces incoming force, that still object being Batman. Because to the Joker, his minions for instance, are nothing more than disposable play things. Even Harley Quinn, who after being corrupted by his taken advantage of her stupidity and not-so-innocent personality, is seen by the Joker a someone he pegged as a helping assistant than how Quinn sees him: her lover and partner in crime. And this is all on top of a foundational characteristic that can only be described as mercurial and inhuman.

But the outstanding thing that Joker does throughout the game, and as to what it leads up to, is characteristically Joker. It all amounts to giving a fantastic makeshift show that is punctuated by a macabre twist to his “killer clown” gimmick. To which Batman defeats and everything seems to be back to normal.

If there is anything to take from the entire premise of the story featured in the game it is that it can be taken as a nod to all of the recent Batman intellectual properties that would be familiar to those that have been around since the late 1980s and early 1990s

In hindsight, it would be understandable to be someone that would dismiss this game as merely superficial but the fact is that this game had more going on than it was letting on as far as depth was concerned, but we wouldn’t know that until the sequel later on with Batman: Arkham City. The

And other than that, nothing else could really be said about the story of the game. It was easy to understand as the initial set of live-action Batman movies and just as entertaining and amazing. A very fun story to follow which made a very fun game indeed.

In Conclusion

This installment of the Arkham series of Batman games is the video game that most Batman video game fans were starting to hope to be possible to have after many years of disappointing and lazy takes prior. In fact, it was likely the video game that would have been expected for it were not for the fact that the consensus by then would be to constantly give developers, publishers, but more importantly intellectual property rights owners, chance after chance to redeem and prove themselves.

And the end result, after many expensive attempts, Warner Bros. has gotten it finally right. The only thing of course is that now, with Rocksteady as a developer recently bowing out of making any more Batman games, where is the video game franchise of Batman going from here? I hope that Batman: Arkham Asylum does not end up becoming the golden age title of Batman video games because this would mean that there is nothing more to look forward to as far as a good Batman video game being involved. This would also mean that there is nothing more to really look for but that would be a very pessimistic view to take.

The best thing is to be positive that after the next two sequels after this title, will spell for a better period for the Batman video game franchise from the lessons learned from this and the two subsequent titles that will be reviewed later on.