The Story So Far
When I first played Arkham Asylum back in 2009, I had very limited knowledge of the greater Batman mythos. I never read comics growing up, I had only seen snippets of films like the 1989 Batman or Batman Returns, and most of my knowledge of the character or the villains came from half-remembered episodes of Batman: The Animated Series and the then-recent Christopher Nolan movies, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Suffice to say, I did not go into this game overburdened with knowledge of the character or the world. I had just heard the game was fun and the combat controlled well, and I wanted to get some use out of my XBox 360.
Initial Impressions
And you know what? I did have a good time with my first playthrough! The hand to hand combat was dramatically simplified from most action games, trading in complex button combinations and stick movements for a straightforward attack/counter/stun/dodge configuration. You could learn additional abilities over the course of the game, but I was never good enough to make the most of them in the moment. Even more impressive to me, however, was the stealth-based Predator sections, where Batman picks off armed henchmen while trying to remain unseen. At the time I had much more experience with stealth games than with action games, so while the fist fights were simple enough for me to muddle through, the stealth sections let me exercise my love of sneaking around and terrorizing unsuspecting bad guys. And finally, though I hadn’t watched Batman Animated since I was 8 years old, it was still nice to hear Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and Arleen Sorkin return to voice Batman, the Joker, and Harley Quinn, respectively.
It wasn’t all positive, though. The game’s color palette is that same sludgy brown that the PS3/XBox 360 era became infamous for, to the point where individual details and characters are difficult to pick out from the background, even on a good sized TV. The rogues gallery adds some color with their outfits, but it’s muted and mixed in with a lot of drab tones. The story was functional, weaving in several recognizable Batman villains as boss fights to break up the overarching story about fighting the Joker. However, Joker’s plan to make ‘roided out supersoldiers out of his henchmen is painfully old hat even by video game standards, far below his usual standards of murderous mayhem. This culminates in the Joker himself turning into a hulking monster for the final boss fight, which just ran counter to my knowledge of what made the character appealing. Giant bruiser Joker didn’t work for me in The Batman, and it doesn’t work for me in Arkham Asylum. Still, I found far more to like about Arkham Asylum than dislike, and wrote off most of the game’s flaws as either lack of knowledge on my part about more modern Batman or compromises arising from adapting comics to a video game format.
Return to Arkham
Fast forward to this year, and I am revisiting Arkham Asylum with not only more experience with action games, but with a lot more knowledge about Batman lore and DC in general. Of special note is that I’ve spent the last few years gradually watching every entry in the DCAU I could get my hands on: Batman Animated, Superman Animated, Justice League, Justice League Unlimited, Batman Beyond, and Static Shock. Batman: the Animated Series is the big one here, as it casts an inescapably large shadow over every Batman iteration that has followed. I promise I won’t spend this entire article just comparing Arkham Asylum to Batman Animated, but the casting of B:tAS alumni to reprise their roles certainly invites those comparisons.
I’ve also played a lot more 3D action games in general. From character action games like Monster Hunter and Dante’s Inferno, to hack and slash spectacle fighters like Dynasty Warriors, to my first steps into the Soulslike genre with Elden Ring and Tunic, I have a much better framework for how to play an action game than the flailing and button mashing that comprised my first playthrough. So with that background laid down, let’s at long last get to the game itself.
Gameplay
One of the big reasons I wanted to revisit Arkham Asylum for this series is because of the legacy the game has had in video games. When I first played the game, it was merely a popular, well-received video game; in 2024, the action gameplay pioneered here has spawned their own subgenre of action game. The simplified, easy to learn button inputs in particular have made inroads in AAA games. Warner Bros Interactive would reuse the combat system in its Lord of the Rings action games, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. Assassin’s Creed would increasingly lean into the counter-heavy action gameplay in its later iterations. Even Marvel would borrow from DC and bring this style of action combat to Sony’s Spider-Man, Miles Morales, and Spider-Man 2 games. It’s fair to say that Arkham Asylum was as formative for the modern action game as Dark Souls.
But how does it play now? Video games are an iterative medium, and sequels and imitators can often render the original version of a gameplay mode feeling archaic. Thankfully, in my replay I found the combat still felt snappy and intuitive. Even on hard mode, which omits the warning icons when an enemy is about to attack, enemy movements are readable enough to time dodges and counters effectively. Some of the challenge modes stretch what the combat engine is comfortably capable of, but they also do a solid job of training you to weave more advanced abilities into fights. The biggest flaw by far in the combat system is the dodge mechanic: executing a dodge roll requires a double press of the dodge button, instead of a single press. I had no issue with it when I first played, but years of Soulslikes have trained me to rely on dodging within a fraction of a second opportunity window. Having to double press the dodge button completely threw off my timing, and it by far feels like the most outdated part of the combat system.
While plenty of AAA action games have taken inspiration from Arkham Asylum’s combat system, relatively few have made use of the game’s Predator stealth system. I find this a shame, because even more than the hand to hand combat gameplay, the Predator stealth sections feel fresh and fun. Each Predator section is a meticulously designed arena of hiding places, choke points, and blind spots that offer a wide variety of ways to incapacitate enemies. Hanging goons from overhanging gargoyles by their feet with the inverted is fun and in character for Batman, but it almost feels like a letdown once you realize the sheer breadth of ways the game lets you knock out the unwary. The stealth challenge maps in particular reward fully exploring the space, as they require you to incapacitate enemies under specific conditions in order to pass. Perhaps just as important as the open endedness of the Predator sections are how much they feel in-character for Batman. Using stealth and cunning to overcome enemies with guns feels very in-character for him. During my full watch of Batman Animated, I could even pinpoint the exact episode that likely inspired the Predator gameplay system.
Arkham Asylum’s Predator sections are the kind of contained, hand-crafted gameplay that doesn’t translate to the open world sandboxes that would borrow so heavily from the Arkham combat formula, which probably explains why it didn’t percolate out of this game quite as aggressively.
Story
While the gameplay of Arkham Asylum was popular enough to create its own subgenre of video game, the story is much more divisive. I had a few minor quibbles with the story back in 2009, but I also had very little experience with Batman stories to compare it to. Having absorbed a lot more Batman lore, especially recently, I was looking forward to reevaluating Arkham Asylum’s story for myself.
My verdict? The haters are right, this story is bad. The past several years has seen Batman as a character draw a lot of online discourse, typically from the perspective of how Bruce Wayne could use his limitless wealth to address the root causes of crime in Gotham, but instead chooses to run around dressed as a bat, beating up the poors who have no choice but to sign on as henchmen for Batman’s villains. I grew increasingly frustrated with this interpretation while watching Batman Animated, because that show seems to go out of its way to address those arguments decades before they reached the popular consciousness. Bruce Wayne is shown donating to soup kitchens and directly taking on corrupt land speculators trying to bulldoze and gentrify low income housing. The second season has an extended subplot about the challenges of Batman trying to help his villains reform while also being the guy who routinely flattens their faces with his fists. More than once Batman went out of his way to save a henchman who ceased to be useful to the villain of the week and got shot or thrown off a building for their trouble. There’s a lot of nuance to the show that my little kid brain was not prepared to absorb when I first watched it, and seeing the show pre-empt criticisms of the character that wouldn’t gestate for years was one of the most satisfying parts of revisiting that element of my childhood.
The Batman in Arkham Asylum, however, aligns much more closely with these criticisms, to the point where I wonder if the arguments against Batman as a concept were using the Arkhamverse Batman as their point of reference. Every henchmen you encounter is a meatheaded bodybuilder who revels in crime and murder. Every member of Batman’s rogues gallery has their lethality significantly amplified, even dorks like Mad Hatter and The Riddler. Terminally boring villain Victor Zsasz is given a surprising amount of screentime, presumably because he’s the kind of one-note murderous psychopath the game seems to enjoy. Any attempt to treat them ends in failure, and usually costs the administering doctor their life, as recounted in the game’s collectible audio logs. TAS Batman has a complicated and compelling relationship with many of his villains; Arkhamverse Batman sees them as little more than animals to be put back in their cages. Many of the Arkham guards wonder aloud why Batman doesn’t just kill his villains, and the only reason they stop vocalizing this thought is when Joker’s gang break out of containment and kill them. The narrative, subconsciously or otherwise, seems to agree that Batman would save more lives by killing his foes. By the end of the game, a diligent Batman player will discover that Arkham itself was built by a philanthropist driven mad by his inability to rehabilitate criminals, and so bent his fortune towards building an elaborate prison-stroke-torture-chamber to quarantine them from proper society. Yet the game ends with Batman just restoring the status quo, throwing all his villains and their henchmen back in their cells at Arkham and flying off to fight more villains. It’s an even more reductive take on Batman than the strawmen in the arguments against him, which makes it all the more baffling that the game’s primary writing credit went to famed comics author Paul Dini.
In his defense, “I wrote ‘Heart of Ice’” is an effective rebuttal to most criticism
So how did one of the most famed writers of Batman in the past, whose work I have cited in this very article as a positive example of how to write the Dark Knight, turn in a script like this? Was it a compromise required by the medium of video games? Was it just that Batman Animated was a long time ago and he’s not that same writer anymore? The most compelling explanation I can find comes from a 2009 interview Paul Dini gave with the Telegraph. I won’t burden you with a Telegraph article in your life, but this summary on Wikipedia gives the gist well enough: apparently Paul Dini was encouraged by Rocksteady to specifically target the game’s writing towards people uninterested in Batman media. He was specifically discouraged from fleshing out too much story or giving characters complex motivations. That detail made the narrative choices in the game make sense to me: Batman Arkham Asylum is less a Batman story and more a Batman-themed amusement park.
Conclusions
There is one Batman film that contains what is in my opinion the most succinct and accurate distillation of Batman as a character, both as a ridiculous power fantasy and as a genuine, tragic character. That film is, of course, The Lego Batman Movie, whose opening segment depicts Batman beating up his entire rogues gallery at once while playing a guitar solo, then going home to his empty mansion, alone and unfulfilled, trying to hold onto the idea that making his parents proud makes all the effort worth it. Arkham Asylum as an experience plays like just the first half of that section. Combat is smooth to the point of effortlessness on lower difficulties, and Batman is the only moral paragon in a world of compromised law enforcement fighting against cackling maniac villains. Batman defeats no fewer than seven of his major villains in a single night, and shrugs off both Scarecrow’s fear toxin and Joker’s super soldier formula with little more than heroic willpower. What little character introspection Batman is given is relegated to the Scarecrow sections, but these moments only help to shade his character, contributing nothing to the story itself. Rocksteady made the game to appeal to people who had limited knowledge of Batman and wanted to offer a surface level experience of what a (very eventful) day in the life of the superhero would be like.
And I would argue that’s not altogether a bad thing! I was exactly that kind of person when I first played the game. I didn’t need a primer on the full history of Batman and his complex motivations in order to have fun with this game. I would in fact probably be likely to turn off the game and do anything else if this game opened with a recap of Identity Crisis or some other infamous contemporary Batman story. The MCU would soon make staggering amounts of money by offering up broad strokes adaptations of Marvel comics, and Rocksteady had the same instinct when creating Arkham Asylum. It’s a puddle-shallow interpretation of the character from a story perspective, but the gameplay is revolutionary on multiple fronts, with a legacy that endures in the games industry to this day. The Riddler trophies offer a number of deep cut references to Batman lore and characters, but the Batman on display here is very much not the same complex character from film, TV, and comics.
Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing
By the Numbers:
- Percentage Completed: 100%
- Riddler Trophies Collected: 240
- Allegedly Adult Criminal Masterminds Making Dead Baby Jokes: 2
- Times CedricTheOwl Lied About Not Comparing this Game To Batman Animated: 4
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