{"id":37478,"date":"2017-03-23T06:00:56","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T11:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=37478"},"modified":"2017-03-24T14:29:41","modified_gmt":"2017-03-24T19:29:41","slug":"arkham-city-part-9-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=37478","title":{"rendered":"Arkham City Part 9: Surprise!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Batman punches his way into Joker’s lair. When he gets there, he finds Harley Quinn crying over what appears to be Joker’s dead body. Batman ponders the scene with a dumb look on his face until the REAL Joker ambushes him from behind and doses him with knockout gas.<\/p>\n

Times Batman has been knocked unconscious so far this evening: 3<\/b><\/p>\n

Fumbling Around in the Dark Knight<\/h3>\n

I gave Arkham Origins crap for having a lot of out-of-scale assets, but it looks like the problem has always been part of the series. That door is WAY out of proportion in relation to Batman. Same goes for the floorboards. Taken together, Batman looks to be about five feet tall. Maybe four and a half without the pointy ears.<\/div>
I gave Arkham Origins crap for having a lot of out-of-scale assets, but it looks like the problem has always been part of the series. That door is WAY out of proportion in relation to Batman. Same goes for the floorboards. Taken together, Batman looks to be about five feet tall. Maybe four and a half without the pointy ears.<\/div><\/p>\n

As the Arkham series went on the developers have increased Batman’s combat prowess to make the gameplay more empowering, while at the same time they’ve made him less competent in cutscenes. His powers of observation and preparedness have languished while his face-punching powers have grown. In particular, this scene is one of those moments that really highlights the difference between Arkham Asylum and Arkham City in terms of writing. <\/p>\n

Batman walks into this ambush like a dumbass. To be clear, I’m 100% fine with Joker getting the drop on the Caped Crusader. He’s a dangerously clever foe and totally capable of catching Batman off guard. The problem isn’t the ambush, it’s how Batman behaves before the ambush. We need to be selling the audience that this happened because Joker is smart and knows his adversary, not because Batman is dumb and inert. <\/p>\n

Again, there are lots of moments like this in Arkham Asylum. The entire opening scene shows how Batman is completely prepared for an escape attempt. At one point the lights go out for a moment, and when they blink back on we find Batman has the Joker in a choke hold. He knows Joker is planning an escape, and he’s working to thwart it. That sort of anticipation and preparedness is his superpower, so showing him being inert in a cutscene is like having a cutscene where Superman forgets he can fly. <\/p>\n

The Joker is a patient adversary.<\/div>
The Joker is a patient adversary.<\/div><\/p>\n

Here is how I would fix this scene:<\/p>\n

INT: STEEL MILL: NIGHT<\/p>\n

\"Dead Joker\" is slumped in a wheelchair, surrounded by medical equipment. Harley Quinn is kneeling on the floor, crying and grieving. Batman looks at Joker's dead body in the wheelchair. For a moment our view focuses on the IV bag and the heart rate monitor, which is beeping and showing a flatline.<\/p>\n

BATMAN:
\n(Accusingly, to Harley Quinn.) Nice try, Quinn. But this heart rate monitor isn't set up properly and the IV isn't even connected to the patient. What are you up to?<\/p>\n

HARLEY:
\n(Angry, accusing.) YOU did this to him! This is all your fault!<\/p>\n

BATMAN:
\n(Firmly.) I know<\/em> this isn't Joker. Where is he?<\/em><\/p>\n

(Joker blindsides Batman.)<\/tt><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This might seem like a trivial change, but I think this is really important to preserving Batman’s character. The problem with the original scene is that Batman spends several seconds with a blank look on his face. He never does or says anything clever. Since he just punched his way in here, this just drives home the impression that he’s a dull brute. We need to show him making observations and being clever before he gets ambushed. In my version, we create an expectation in the audience that Batman is about to figure something out. We get them pondering this little mystery, so they’ll be just as distracted (and thus surprised) as Batman when the ambush happens.<\/p>\n

Joker’s Gambit<\/h3>\n

This shot is actually a flashback from the big reveal at the end of the game.<\/div>
This shot is actually a flashback from the big reveal at the end of the game.<\/div><\/p>\n

The game is hiding a really big secret at this point, but we’re going to spoil it. The secret is this: There are two Jokers<\/b>.<\/p>\n

One is the real Joker. He’s sick. His normally white skin is marked with nasty red pustules and he’s got a gross cough going. He’s apparently dying. His explanation for why he’s employing a doppelganger is that he wants to “keep up appearances”.<\/p>\n

The other guy is actually Clayface, who has shape-shifted into Joker. He doesn’t really have an angle here. He’s just doing it because it’s “the role of a lifetime”. (Clayface was originally an actor before he became a shapeshifting supervillain.) <\/p>\n

The game doesn’t cheat here. In fact, it constantly drops hints about what’s going on. When talking about Joker being sick, Harley Quinn said that “Joker hasn’t been himself lately.” While Batman was trying to puzzle his way into Joker’s lair, there was a conversation you could overhear if you stayed put instead of dashing off to your next goal. <\/p>\n

You can hear Harley say, “Mister J, you all better! Oh wait. It’s not you, is it?”<\/p>\n

To which Clayface Joker replies, “Be quiet Harley! You’ll ruin the surprise!”<\/p>\n

The two Jokers have slightly different personalities and once you’re in on the joke you can usually tell which one you’re dealing with, even if you can’t see his face. Real Joker is nursing an occasional cough. Clayface Joker speaks clearly and uses a lot of film and theater based idioms and analogies. The real Joker is fighting to survive and trying to preserve the existing status quo. He doesn’t want to kill Batman and he doesn’t want to unmask him, because that would spoil their “game”. Clayface Joker is willing to kill Batman outright.<\/p>\n

This is a wonderful twist, simply because of how careful the writer was to make the two Jokers distinct and to hide all of these clues in plain sight. It’s fun to re-play the game after you know the secret and look for all the little details you missed.<\/p>\n

After Batman is knocked out, we cut away and play as Catwoman for a bit. I’ll talk more about the Catwoman plot later in the story. For now let’s just jump ahead to when Batman wakes up…<\/p>\n

Plot Poison<\/h3>\n

You'll never get away with this! I mean, you won't CONTINUE to get away with this. Er, I guess you'll STOP getting away with this very soon!<\/div>
You'll never get away with this! I mean, you won't CONTINUE to get away with this. Er, I guess you'll STOP getting away with this very soon!<\/div><\/p>\n

Batman wakes up to find he’s tied to a wheelchair. Harley tries to unmask him, but Joker won’t allow her. He even foreshadows the Big Twist by saying, “No one’s who you think they are, my dear.” I love this version of the character that doesn’t<\/strong> want to know who Batman is. Everyone else is trying to unmask him, but Joker likes the game they’ve been playing and doesn’t want to spoil it.<\/p>\n

Joker reveals that the Titan formula he took at the end of the previous game is now killing him. He’s been looking for a cure, but hasn’t any success. He wants Batman to help. To make sure Batman is properly motivated, he’s given Batman some of his poisoned blood while Bats was knocked out. This means Batman is doomed to die if he can’t find the cure. <\/p>\n

Batman replies, “So we both die. I’m fine with that.”<\/p>\n

But then Joker tells him that he’s been shipping his tainted blood to hospitals around the city. At that point Batman is motivated to help. Which means these poisoned civilians are his central motivation for everything he’s going to be doing for the next 9 hours. <\/p>\n

Except, he’s going to delegate this job, never check up on it, and then forget all about it by the end. The writer is going to lose track of Batman’s main motivation for undertaking this quest.<\/i><\/p>\n

This Titan business doesn’t really work if you think about it for more than two seconds. The writer is either hoping we’ve forgotten or they’ve forgotten themselves, but Batman actually got a dose of Titan at the end of Arkham Asylum. He “resisted” turning into a giant murder-beast by sheer force of will. He hasn’t had any adverse side-effects as a result of that dose since then.<\/p>\n

I've just donated enough blood to infect everyone in Gotham General, and boy are my arms tired!<\/div>
I've just donated enough blood to infect everyone in Gotham General, and boy are my arms tired!<\/div><\/p>\n

Moreover, these two aren’t the only people to take Titan. Lots of goons took Titan in the first game. Obviously Batman didn’t kill those guysAlthough the very first one did apparently die of heart failure.<\/span>. Those guys are still around (they show up now and again as a miniboss) and don’t seem to be dying of any toxin-related problems. And hang on, why did Joker shrink back down to normal size while all the other Titan freaks stayed big? <\/p>\n

One of these must be true:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Titan monsters we fight here in Arkham City are leftover from the Asylum. (Why didn’t these guys shrink back down? Why aren’t they sick and dying?)\n
  2. These Titan monsters are new creations. (What happened to the old ones? Did they get sick? If so, why is this the first time anyone is hearing about Titan poisoning?)<\/ol>\n

    The point is that the main ingredient in the Titan formula is contrivance. I know we’re not supposed to notice stuff like this, but sometimes analyst gotta analyze.<\/p>\n

    Having complained about all of that, I have to say that I LOVE this scene Between Batman and Joker. Complaints about the plot aside, it’s my favorite scene in the game. The moment where Joker steps into the light is a great reveal. The dialog is really clever, the cinematography is perfect, and (of course) the vocal performances are brilliant. <\/p>\n

    Bat-sidetracked!<\/h3>\n

    Penguin! I'm trying to stop Protocol 10 and save Gotham from Joker's poison, but I guess I have time to fight you, beat up all your men, defeat your traps, and battle the crazy monster you've got hidden in the basement.<\/div>
    Penguin! I'm trying to stop Protocol 10 and save Gotham from Joker's poison, but I guess I have time to fight you, beat up all your men, defeat your traps, and battle the crazy monster you've got hidden in the basement.<\/div><\/p>\n

    Batman is now truly and irrevocably sidetracked. He’s supposed to be investigating Protocol 10, but now he needs to find a cure for this disease or toxin or whatever. Joker lets Batman go (by throwing him out a window, because Joker) and tells him that Mr. Freeze was working on a cure. But Freeze has been kidnapped by Penguin.<\/p>\n

    So we need to fight Penguin so we can rescue Freeze so he can cure Batman so Batman can save Gotham from Titan toxins so he can get back to finding out about Protocol 10 so he can stop Hugo Strange. We’re now hopelessly lost in a side-side-side quest, and Batman should be ashamed of himself for getting distracted like this.<\/p>\n

    Like most side-side quests, the events of the next chapter aren’t really important to the story. Batman enters the museum Penguin is using as his base and has to endure a gauntlet of brawling, stealth, climbing, and puzzles. He rescues some people, gets some new gadgets, and fights some minor bosses. He ends up cleaning out the museum, parts of the city, and the subway tunnels before he finally manages to rescue Freeze.<\/p>\n

    If you’ve never followed Bat-lore, the hook for Freeze is that he’s not really a for-profit criminal like the other rogues. He’s motivated by his dying wife. She’s got some fatal disease. While trying to save her, he managed to screw up his own physiology so that he’ll die if his body gets above freezing, which means he needs to wear this huge refrigerator suit all the time. His wife is now cryogenically frozen, and if she thaws out she’ll quickly die of the disease. Most of his capers involve plans to steal technology or resources needed to sustain or cure her. <\/p>\n

    The guy who voices Mr. Freeze somehow ALSO voices Kif from Futurama.<\/div>
    The guy who voices Mr. Freeze somehow ALSO voices Kif from Futurama.<\/div><\/p>\n

    So having Batman come to him for help with the Titan toxin makes some kind of sense on a comic-book level. Sure, in the real world scientists might spend most of their career on one particular<\/i> disease and we’re long past the point in the tech tree where one person can go around single-handedly curing multiple things in a single lifetimeAlone. While fighting Batman and spending half his time in jail.<\/span>, but that’s not how things work in comic book land. Again, this is another place where making Batman too gritty and grounded really works against the character. Try to imagine how Mr. Freeze might work in Christopher Nolan’s<\/a> Batman stories. His super-science schtick and refrigerator suit would be far too cartoonish and it would probably need to be dialed back or require a bunch of exposition and hand-waving to make his key attributes fit in the more realistic world.<\/p>\n

    But here in Arkham City, Freeze fits right in. He’s a fun and interesting guy and provides a nice contrast to the other supervillains. <\/p>\n

    Freeze says he can’t work on the cure for Titan without his suit. This is plausible enough I guess, although it means that he was thrown into prison while still wearing his high-tech weaponized super suit. We also learn that Penguin has stolen Freeze’s ice gun. So Freeze was also thrown into jail with his signature weapon<\/i>?! Later we learn that his frozen wife is in here, too. A terminally ill, cryogenically frozen patient who has committed no crime is thrown into an anarchic open-air prison and the only person to take care of her is her heavily armed mad scientist husband?<\/p>\n

    Yeah. Just try to pull off a premise like that one, Zack Snyder<\/a>. I dare youI’m kidding. Please don’t try to do that.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

    Given how devastatingly powerful Mr. Freeze is, I’d love to know how Penguin managed to capture him. As the story presents it, the Mr. Freeze gun is stronger than Batman, who is stronger than Penguin and all his goons, who is stronger than Mr. Freeze.<\/p>\n

    Officer Batman<\/h3>\n

    Thanks for temporarily saving me, Batman. It's always nice to take a break from being captured.<\/div>
    Thanks for temporarily saving me, Batman. It's always nice to take a break from being captured.<\/div><\/p>\n

    Batman runs into several police officers here in Penguin’s museum. Commissioner Gordon sent in a team of undercover police posing as inmates to see what was going on inside of Arkham City. Their cover was blown, and Penguin has been terrorizing and killing them for sport. <\/p>\n

    In some stories, the police view Batman as a vigilante criminal. In other stories, he’s a phantom and they don’t really believe he exists. Sometimes they’re scared of him because they’re not sure what his agenda is. But the Arkham games are cut from the more classic version of the stories where Batman is an explicit and longstanding ally of the police. <\/p>\n

    You could even make the case that Batman has been unofficially integrated into the police force. Aside from the Bat-signal, there’s the fact that all of the officers he rescues treat him like a superior. It’s not just gratitude, either. They call him “sir”, follow his lead, and even take orders from him. <\/p>\n

    I like this more traditional take on the character. Batman’s skill at knocking out teeth and hyperextending limbs is easier to accept as heroic if we understand this is a universe where the police are clearly outclassed and everyone realizes how much they need him. <\/p>\n

    The Arkham games blend two very different versions of the Batman. It takes the “unofficially sanctioned by the police” version of Batman (story) and blends it with the physical brutality (gameplay) we associate with darker versions of the character. That’s a hard line to walk. It’s another area where I think Arkham Knight struggles to hold together because they intensified the violence and destruction to the point where it feels ill-fitting. Batman’s wrecking-ball Bat-tank and his Death Race 2000 approach to law enforcement don’t look like something that belongs in the same universe as these explicitly honest cops calling Batman “sir”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Batman punches his way into Joker’s lair. When he gets there, he finds Harley Quinn crying over what appears to be Joker’s dead body. Batman ponders the scene with a dumb look on his face until the REAL Joker ambushes him from behind and doses him with knockout gas. Times Batman has been knocked unconscious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[607],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-batman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}