Back in February, I did a retrospective marathon of the three Batman: Arkham games developed by Rocksteady. Initially, I decided to do that marathon because I recently played through those games and wanted to write about them in anticipation for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, the next game to come from Rocksteady and their first one for home consoles since concluding the Arkham series in 2015 with Arkham Knight. While that turned out to be too soon/pointless as the game has been delayed yet again until February 2024, I certainly did have fun talking about those games and giving my perspectives on them.
When it comes to Batman: Arkham Knight, while a critical and commercial success, there were certain things that stuck out about the game that left many fans feeling underwhelmed. While I still found it to be a great game in it’s own right and a strong conclusion to the series, I did find myself agreeing with the two most common criticisms of the game that held it back for a lot of people. Those two main criticism being the addition of the Batmobile and the character of the Arkham Knight itself. Granted, the Batmobile itself was something that really only got on my nerves towards the last third of the game to where it became very tedious and bloated with too many tank battles. The Arkham Knight, on the other hand, I certainly had issues with.
During my Arkham Knight retrospective, I claimed I wanted to make an entire piece talking about the character of the Arkham Knight himself and why I don’t think he works in the context of this game. Ever since I first beat Batman: Arkham Knight, there was something about the Arkham Knight himself that just didn’t land with me. While the idea of having a mysterious opponent that knows Batman’s every mood is interesting on paper, the execution of it in the game was quite iffy. It was only in my recent playthrough that I was able to understand why the Arkham Knight itself doesn’t work for me and I imagine for many others as well. However, before we talk about the main issues with the Arkham Knight, let’s first discuss who the Arkham Knight really is.
(Spoilers from here on out! You have been warned!)
Who Is The Arkham Knight?
Right before the main confrontation with Scarecrow, it is revealed that the Arkham Knight itself is no other than Jason Todd. For those unaware, Jason Todd was formerly known as Robin, Batman’s sidekick, and also is know in other Batman media as the Red Hood. The two had a strong bonding together until one day, Jason was thought to be dead by Batman. However, his death was faked by the Joker and held him captive at an abandoned wing of Arkham Asylum for over a year to break his sanity. The Joker would torture him on a daily basis until one day, he filmed himself shooting Jason at point blank rage, supposedly killing him. Joker sent Batman the film of his staged execution, which made Bruce himself believe that Jason was in fact dead. However, once again, that was all fake.
Sometime after being left for dead by the Joker, Jason was able to survive being shot at and was able to escape from the Asylum. According to the prequel comic book of Batman: Arkham Knight along with a 6-issue miniseries titled Batman: Arkham Knight Genesis, Jason had planned his vengeance against Batman by spending years assembling and training his own militia in Venezuela with the help of deadly assassin Deathstroke. It’s then he would later transform himself into the Arkham Knight itself. Once he was fully prepared and trained, the Arkham Knight would team up with Scarecrow on a Halloween night to take over Gotham City and destroy Batman once and for all.
When looking at those ideas and set-ups, it sounds really interesting. However, once you play the game, I couldn’t help but feel the Arkham Knight itself left plenty to be desired. Here are the main reasons why:
No Build-Up
The first main issue is how the character of Jason Todd seems to come out of nowhere in the context of the Arkhamverse itself. At this point and time, the universe of these games was so well-defined and explained where you basically knew every single important character in Batman’s lore. From his allies to his villains, there was no more room to throw in any more.
That didn’t stop Rocksteady from wanting to add in the story of Jason Todd/The Red Hood and have that be the main hook of the game. Before Arkham Knight, there was little to no build-up towards a potential appearance of Jason Todd himself. Sure, some might argue there was a reference or two from the other games but that was clearly all that it was meant to be, a reference or two, and not setting up Jason Todd later on down the road in the series. The Bat family had already been introduced and defined with Alfred, Robin, Nightwing, and Oracle/Batgirl. There was nothing hinting about another member of that family that happened to exist in Bruce’s decade-plus run as Batman in this timeline.
It’s also hard to buy how Batman, the World’s Greatest Detective, wasn’t able to discover an abandon wing in Arkham Asylum and find that’s where the Joker has been hiding Jason all along. If it was another place in Gotham City, I could buy that. But the Arkham Asylum itself, where Batman frequently visits to lock up the major criminals, no chance whatsoever. Yes, I know it was technically over just one single year but that is still plenty of time for Batman to be able to discover a secret hideout of his greatest enemy.
The inclusion of Jason Todd this late into the series comes across as a giant-cop out from Rocksteady. Instead of being able to come up with a wholly original villain of their own, they just made a re-skin version of another well-known Batman foe except with a different grudge against the Caped Crusader. While one could argue that Arkham City introducing as much allies as it did that weren’t in Arkham Asylum was starting to push it, having Jason Todd come out of practically nowhere at the last second is where Rocksteady took it a step too far in that regard.
He’s Not Scary Or Intimating
This might be more of an subjective criticism but another main problem I had when confronting the Arkham Knight was that I was never scared or intimated by him. Throughout the game, he is constantly going on and on how he knows everything about Batman and how he’s gonna kill him. Whenever he talks like that, I don’t get afraid of him, I just want him to shut up!
I get the Arkham Knight is suppose to have a grudge and obsession with Batman but his constant gloating gets tiresome really quick. By the third or fourth time you confront him and he is still going on and on about how much better he is than Batman, you are over his threats and almost want to mute the game every time he shows up. The character always talks and acts like he’s intimating but he barely ever showcases it throughout the game.
The Arkham Knight doesn’t really do anything worthy of making him stand out as a menacing bad guy in his own right except for capturing Barbara. Sure, he leads his own militia forces that would take over Gotham but almost any other Batman villain could do exactly that so that’s not worth giving credit where it’s due. If anything, it’s basically Scarecrow that forces the citizens of Gotham to evacuate as unleashed the fear toxin is what helps them take control of the city.
Rocksteady was clearly motivated to make a mysterious bad guy that would get under the skin of Batman but it honestly felt like he more got under the skin of the players more, which I don’t think was the intention. Instead of the Arkham Knight being scary or intimating, he was mostly just annoying. And considering he’s suppose to be one of the two main villains and represent the title of the actual game, that’s not a good thing whatsoever.
Lack Of A Satisfying Resolution
When you are building a character throughout the majority of the story and keeping their identity a secret for a long time, you have to make sure you find the proper resolution for that story arc so that it does not feel like so much time was wasted on keeping that identity a secret. Unfortunately, Arkham Knight falls into that exact trap with the way it wraps up the story of Jason Todd, both with the campaign and the Red Hood DLC story pack.
Once Batman defeats Jason after he reveals himself to be the Arkham Knight, he tries to convince his fallen Robin to come back home and find redemption in himself again. Because Jason feels like there is no redemption left in him, he refuses and escapes from Batman. At that point, he had now fully accepts his identity as no longer the Arkham Knight but now as the Red Hood.
However, during the final confrontation with Scarecrow after he unmasks Batman and threatens to kill him, the Red Hood appears and frees Bruce from captivity, who subdues Scarecrow with his own fear toxin. And then, he disappears once again and that’s about it. He just stops by as almost a deus ex machina to save Batman to let him defeat Scarecrow and then screws off again.
We don’t get a resolution, we don’t know if Jason just did that because he wanted to help Batman or he just hates Scarecrow more, and we don’t even get a dialogue exchange between the two or even a word spoken of him. He just comes in as some last heroic act and then goes back to being whoever the hell he is now. Is he now a hero, villain, or anti-hero? Your guess is as good as mine.
And before anyone makes a comment, we should also talk about the Red Hood DLC story pack that was released sometime after the game’s official release.
Since I imagine everyone had similar complaints as I did, Rocksteady would later release DLC for the Red Hood which was meant to take place after the events of Arkham Knight where Jason Todd has fully embraced his identity as Red Hood and goes up against Black Mask. It’s during the DLC where you go up against Black Mask and his army killing them off one-by-one, which ends with Red Hood bringing Black Mask to his death by tossing him out the window. While the concept of taking control of Red Hood, who is basically Batman with no restrictions, is fun in terms of gameplay, it’s very unsatisfying in terms of story.
All of this basically means that Jason himself has learned nothing from his experience as the Arkham Knight. His noble act at the end of the main story of saving Batman basically means nothing as he just went back to being the exact same guy as the Red Hood as he was as the Arkham Knight. So much so, that it feels like there’s very little difference between the two. It makes you wonder why they even bothered to have Jason take on two different identities if he never really changed as either one of them. Sure, he’s more of a killer this time than he was as the Arkham Knight but the game itself basically states that the only thing stopping himself from killing Batman and those close to him is strictly due to Scarecrow wanting them alive and not because he’s too cold to pull the trigger. And yes, I know that’s technically faithful to the source material to have Red Hood going off and killing his foes but that further goes to show how little he fits in this story.
You would also think that Batman would have at least wanted to check in on Red Hood to see where he had gone before faking his own death. Did he just assume Jason would be the same Robin he had before after saving him or that Robin and Nightwing would just track him down themselves? It’s way too much of an important plot detail to simply gloss over and makes you wonder if Bruce had second thoughts on activating the Knightfall Protocol before letting the Red Hood become a thing?
With so much time focused on this character and the way his identity was kept a secret from the majority of the game, you had to have the most satisfying payoff to his story imaginable that perfectly tied everything together to make it all worthwhile. Unfortunately, the way that the Arkham Knight/Red Hood story concludes left me as empty as it possibly could have been.
Marketing Over Storytelling
Back in 2013, a blockbuster known as Star Trek: Into Darkness made it’s way to theaters. Up to that film’s release, the marketing campaign tried their hardest to keep the mystery of Benedict Cumberbatch’s character a secret. Right when the trailers debuted, many Trekkies figured that character, who at the time was named John Harrison, would be the well-known series antagonist, Khan Noonien Singh. Despite the efforts from director J.J. Abrams and Benedict Cumberbatch of trying to throw everyone off by claiming that wasn’t Khan, it was revealed about an hour into the movie that the character of John Harrison was in fact Khan himself.
Even to this day, it felt like such a bizarre marketing tragedy to keep his identity a secret. Not only was the reveal of Khan thuddingly obvious to anyone who is familiar with Star Trek, but it served no importance to the narrative of the movie. Characters such as Kirk and Spock have virtually no reaction to that reveal and him being Khan didn’t really seemed to change anything aspect about the character. When looking at it from a fan’s standpoint, the reveal felt pointless and obvious. When looking at it from a casual audience standpoint, the reveal likely had them scratching their head in confusion because they had no idea what John Harrison being Khan was suppose to mean. It came across as hollow fan service that I don’t think even the people who wrote the script understood themselves.
Khan in Star Trek: Into Darkness was basically an incident of a character existing solely for the purpose of marketing and not because the character itself adds anything to the story. While handled in a different fashion, I can’t help but feel like Rocksteady fell into a similar trapping with the way they handled the Arkham itself in terms of the marketing for him and the story revolving around him.
To give credit to Rocksteady, the Arkham Knight itself was certainly MUCH better handled than with Khan in Into Darkness. At least the mystery of who the Arkham Knight is plays some importance to the narrative of the story and does provide some context from the source material as to who Jason Todd is and why him being a main villain is a shocking reveal to those not familiar with Batman lore. While the Arkham Knight is certainly more functional than Khan, I still can’t help but feel like the character’s main existence serves more from a marketing standpoint and not a storytelling one.
Similar to the lead-up to Into Darkness, Rocksteady did try to throw everyone off of who their mysterious character was. They even went on record that the Arkham Knight would be a completely original character created by themselves with collaboration from DC Comics. While that might technically be true from a certain point of view (*insert Luke Skywalker’s “A certain point of view?”*), from another view that basically comes across a blatant lie. Yes, the character of the Arkham Knight himself is an original one as this was the game that the character debuted in, but the identity of who he is not original in the slightest.
For those who are unaware of who Jason Todd was before this game, he was formally known in previous Batman lore as the Red Hood. In the film Batman: Under The Red Hood, he was a former apprentice of Batman who was left for dead, tortured by the Joker, was left dead again, and then survive to pursue his own sort of vigilante justice. Except this time, he would go a step further and kill his enemies one-by-one instead of sending them to jail. However, at a certain point in the film, the Red Hood reveals to Batman that he is no other than Jason Todd himself, his student who he thought was dead but is fully alive. If you are paying attention, the backstory of the Red Hood in the movie is basically the exact same as that of the Arkham Knight. However, there is one slight chance, his grudge against Batman.
In Under the Red Hood, Jason actually forgives Bruce for not saving him as he felt that he had every reason to believe he was dead. What pushed him over the edge was the fact that Batman had let the Joker live and never killed him despite the fact that the clown prince of crime may have been responsible for the death of his own partner. It’s then that Batman gives a fantastic speech as to why he hasn’t killed the Joker or any of his main enemies. Even though he has constantly thought about torturing and killing the Joker many times, he will not do it because if he starts to kill there, he may never stop once he starts down that dark path.
In the context of the Arkham Knight, Jason’s grudge against Batman is changed completely. They can’t have him being pissed at Batman for the Joker being alive because he’s now dead. So, they decided to make it to where Jason is in fact ticked at Batman for leaving him to die with the Joker and replacing him with haste. That in of itself might make for an engaging conflict for some but because Jason himself has had little to no build up in the series up to this point, the whole thing feels very tacked on and isn’t as important as the game wants you to believe.
Before the reveal, the only context we are given of Jason in the Arkhamverse is through these out-of-nowhere flashback sequences where we see the Joker torturing Jason Todd before he shoots him on camera, potentially killing him. Not to mention, these sections don’t appear until about a 3/4 of the way into the game and is inserted in the most forced and awkward way possible. I don’t know if it’s because Rocksteady thought that waiting that long to reveal Jason Todd would make it more appealing but at that point, anyone who hadn’t guessed who the Arkham Knight is yet probably had it spelt out for them during these sequences. Instead of feeling like smart foreshadowing, it comes across more as stalling an inevitable fate.
What makes it even worse is how little the Arkham Knight actually matters in terms of the story. The only main thing he accomplishes on his own that any other one of Batman foes couldn’t is that he captures Barbara and helps Batman at the very end. Just about anything else he does in the game is either a.) not important or b.) could have been handled by any other one of Batman foes. Despite being a part of the main title of the game and is suppose to be the main draw of the game, the Arkham Knight practically feels like a footnote in his own game.
This is where we go back to the marketing over storytelling claimed I made earlier. After Arkham City ended with Joker dying and having DLC later on with Harley Quinn attempting to get her revenge, Rocksteady likely found themselves hitting a brick wall on who the main villain of the next game would be. Because they felt like Scarecrow himself wouldn’t be enough to draw people in, they decided to make a mysterious “new” baddie for Batman to take down. Even if the character is basically a re-skinned version of another known Batman character, just change up his name and appearance so the marketing can set him up as being the main ultimate bad guy so that might get people interested in seeing how the Arkham series would conclude. While that makes for clever marketing, I don’t think it made for the best storytelling for the game. While it’s certainly not the worse version of this trend, the Arkham Knight plays with that exact trend nonetheless.
In Conclusion
Despite my main criticisms, I don’t think the Arkham Knight himself is a bad character or one that I hate. I just don’t think he works for this story.
The reveal of Jason Todd as the Arkham Knight is too obvious and on the nose, there’s hardly anything that makes him standout as being the next worthy foe of Batman, he’s not scary or menacing, there’s no satisfying resolution to this story, and he doesn’t have as much of a presence as the game thinks he actually does. While there are a few redeemable qualities to him such as the idea around him, his sick suit and Troy Baker’s performance, the character himself left plenty to be desired.
Above all, the Arkham Knight himself just seems like a character made for marketing purposes and not for story purposes. It’s as if Rocksteady was too caught up in trying to sell everyone of making their own badass villain that they never bother to put in as much effort into making sure he fits with the story organically.
This all makes me wonder how Paul Dini, the long-time Batman writer who wrote the scripts for Asylum and City, would have tackled the character of the Arkham Knight himself if Rocksteady had him return for this game. Would he gone the same direction as they did? Would he had Damian Wayne be the Arkham Knight instead? Would he had used a fully original character and find a way to make it fit in the context of the Arkhamverse? We will never know the answer to any of that but that is a question I imagine many Batman fans are still asking themselves to this day.
Let this be a lesson to future storytellers out there. When crafting a character whose identity is suppose to be a mystery and have that be the main selling point, make sure to put just as much (if not more) effort into the storytelling of the character as you do with the marketing. In order for a mysterious character to work, they have to be a character that makes sense in their own right and be interesting enough to where future viewings or playthroughs won’t be harmed once you know who the character really is.
While I still stand by the fact that Batman: Arkham Knight itself is a great game that ended the Arkham series on a high note, I also stand with the fact that while not necessarily being bad in his own right, the Arkham Knight just doesn’t work in the context of the Arkhamverse.
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