<\/div>I’m really conflicted on the Riddler. On one hand, I think this is a brilliant adaptation and portrayal of the character. Building all of the item-gathering, door-opening, and secret-finding around his need to outsmart Batman was the perfect way to integrate the Riddler with gameplay. I love his design, I love the voice actor, and the resolution to his quest is really satisfying. <\/p>\n
The idea is that Riddler has a bunch of hostages, and he’ll kill them if Batman doesn’t do his puzzles. The vast majority of this task involves collecting these glowing green question marks scattered around Arkham City. Once you get enough, Riddler will give you the location of one of the hostages, and Batman will have to navigate an obstacle course of navigation and door-opening puzzles to save them. At the end Batman tracks down Riddler’s lair. I don’t want to spoil how it ends, but I’ll give you a tiny hint: Fist<\/em>.<\/p>\n It’s a fun quest with a few good moments in it, and offers an ongoing project to work on when you want a break from the main story.<\/p>\n On the other hand…<\/p>\n This quest is a complete chore that ruins the look of drowned Gotham. <\/p>\n There’s just too much. There are too many damn items to collect, too many secrets to track down, and too much busywork to get to the end of it. I’ve done the Riddler quest multiple times, and even using a guide it easily takes far more time than the main story. It wouldn’t be so bad if the puzzles were interesting, but in most cases collecting a Riddler trophy involves solving a puzzle you’ve done a dozen times already.<\/p>\n You need 440 Riddler secrets to complete his quest, and the vast majority of them feel like busywork designed to eat time. You’ll come across a random question mark in the open world, hiding behind some obstacle. “FINALLY! A worthy puzzle!” You’ll blow ten minutes trying to figure out how you could possibly access this deviously placed thing. Sooner or later you’ll give up because it seems impossible. Later in the game Batman will unlock a new tool and you’ll return to the trophy in question and realize this “puzzle” wasn’t a puzzle at all. With the tool, it’s so trivial it’s insulting. And there are a dozen other trophies out there “hidden” using the same “puzzle”. So it wastes your time enticing you with a puzzle you can’t solve, but once you can solve it, it’s boring and trivial. That’s all of the downside of having a puzzle and none of the benefit!<\/p>\n There are so many that they completely clutter the landscape, dotting the rooftops with a pervasive blanket of red and green lights. It makes the supposedly ruined city look too alive. Without all of this crap, the few lights in Gotham would really pop. I know this, because the city looks so much more interesting once you’ve done all the puzzles and the trophies are gone and all of the lights on the various trophy cages are off. <\/p>\n Rather than having 440 trophies of busywork, I’d rather they just had (say) 44 that were interesting to collect.<\/p>\n I haven’t read a Batman comic in a quarter century, so the Arkham series was the first time I’d ever heard of this guy. He’s a serial killer. His only gimmick is that he prefers to stab people to death, and after doing so he carves a tally mark into his own skin. He’s got this intense, unhinged way of talking like he’s busy jerking off to the idea of shanking people. <\/p>\n
<\/div>Victor Zsasz<\/h3>\n
<\/div>
<\/div>
<\/div>
<\/div>
<\/div>