A LOT of thoughts here so we should just jump right in. I played Batman: Arkham Knight on PlayStation 4, and completed 100% of the Story mode.

Narrative has never been the high point of the Arkham games. I always looked at the cutscenes and dialogue exchanges as thin tissue that connected one objective to the next, and while Arkham Knight tells the best story of Rocksteady’s trilogy, like its predecessors, it makes some major missteps in its ambitious attempt to blow players’ minds. The series’ approach to the character’s mythology and its stickiness to the Arkham name has also become more problematic as it’s continued.

Spoilers on the identity of the Arkham Knight follow.

At first, the Jason Todd reveal felt like a cheat, redressing an established character (who had already been resurrected with a new alter ego years ago in the comics) and claiming he was completely original. But after thinking about it, what irked me most wasn’t the reveal itself, but how blatantly telegraphed it was, and the fact that it ended up having no effect on Batman’s arc or the larger story the game was trying to tell, which as it turns out, was another Batman-Joker story.

Or I should say, the conclusion to the Batman-Joker story that was first introduced in Arkham Asylum. And while I’m a little confused about the details that set this final, deeply internalized conflict into motion (I thought Batman cured his Joker blood infection at the end of Arkham City), the way Rocksteady brought Joker back into the game worked beautifully, as did the game’s climax, a real head trip that shows how good the developer is at playing with players’ perception and gaming mechanics themselves.

Gameplay has always been the series’ greatest strength. Before Arkham Asylum was released in 2009, no game had ever been able to capture the feeling of being Batman, and as the series progressed, Rocksteady has refined its formula to extraordinary results (with one caveat that we’ll get to in a bit). Controls feel as responsive as ever, which is critical considering that combat has gotten more challenging. The sheer number of gadgets and abilities Batman has at his disposal is overwhelming, so much so that I would recommend that newcomers play one of the earlier games first before diving in. All of them are worth playing, but Arkham City, to which Knight is a direct sequel, is the best of the earlier games from a gameplay perspective, and will put much of Knight‘s story in proper context for non-Batman fans.

One of the criticisms against the game has to do with side missions, with critics and players complaining that the series has turned into an Assassin’s Creed style of open world game, with a map riddled (no pun, I swear) with icons denoting so much content that playing the game starts to feel like checking boxes off of a to-do-list.

There are two sides to this. On the one hand, playing side missions (known as Most Wanted missions in the game) is the best way to gain the XP needed to buy upgrades, many of which are key to the whole “Be the Batman” thing this series has been pushing from the start.

Next, and most egregiously, a certain number of side missions have to be completed in order to activate the “Knightfall Protocol,” which is essentially a second ending. Then, if you want to see the FULL ending, you have to complete 100% of the side missions, meaning collecting every single Riddler trophy scattered throughout Gotham City.

This is a mistake. Instead of earning some additional reward for being a completionist, players are being punished for not completing the entire campaign. Suddenly, the so-called “side” missions, a term that’s always been used to describe an optional objective, don’t feel optional to players who only want to experience the story without having to track down all 243(!) riddles, or disable watchtower-like checkpoints throughout the city, or battle an endless number of unmanned tanks in the Batmobile.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to this problem, and those who don’t have the time or the patience to make it to 100% should feel no guilt about it: watch the full ending on YouTube. Not only will it save you time, but you’ll find solace in discovering that this final cutscene really isn’t worth the effort.

On the other hand, Arkham Knight does a good job of parceling out side missions in such a way that it never feels overwhelming. Not every mission is accessible at the same time, and they all play out in stages so you can’t simply play them from start to finish in one go. This may seem like a bad thing, but it helps in mixing up gameplay and keeping one type of mission (whether it’s combat, predator, Batmobile-related, etc.) from becoming stale. So any complaints that the world map has too much stuff on it is unfounded. If anything, the game’s missions are structured in such a way that it actually feels more like Arkham Asylum than Assassin’s Creed or Grand Theft Auto.

Now let’s talk Batmobile. The biggest new addition to the franchise, and a polarizing one at that. Batman’s iconic car comes in two flavors: pursuit mode and tank mode, and there’s definitely a learning curve. The control scheme takes some getting used to, and I think it took me a good dozen laps around the Riddler’s first racing course before driving started to feel good, and I wasn’t instinctively hitting the left trigger to brake/reverse. There’s an alternate control scheme that is eventually accessible in the pause menu, but I found it to be even more awkward than the default.

Tank mode seems to be the biggest point of contention among players, and while I agree that the whole concept feels out of place for the character, I still found tank battles to be a fun, arcade-y minigame that added some variety to the campaign. The problem is that these tank battles seem to get more and more frequent as the campaign goes on, and there are sections where you’re forced to “stealthily” come up behind certain enemy vehicles in order to attack them. It’s nonsensical and the complete opposite of fun.

So overall, I think the good parts of the Batmobile (including using it as a gadget to solve puzzles and being able to control it remotely) outweigh the bad, but the thing that straight up made me angry concerns a side mission that’s introduced late in the campaign (Spoilers, I guess):

After defeating the Arkham Knight, his militia forces are overtaken by Deathstroke, who’s returning from Arkham Origins to exact revenge. The Deathstroke boss fight in that game is my favorite boss battle of the entire series (yes, I like it more than the Mr. Freeze fight in City), and instead of taking that duel and refining it with a Rocksteady-level of polish, defeating Deathstroke comes down to yet another tank battle. It’s the single biggest missed opportunity in the game, and there really is no excuse for it. Deathstroke is one of the deadliest assassins in the DC Universe and you put him in a tank?

But while we’re on the subject of Arkham Origins, I was pleasantly surprised by how often the events of that game were referenced in Knight, since Rocksteady’s PR seemed to be going out of its way to ignore its existence and refer to the Arkham games as a trilogy. Knight even borrows mechanics that were introduced in that game (i.e. the crime scene reconstruction). It’s good to know that Origins is an officially recognized part of canon because, and I’m sure I’m in the minority here, if I were to rank the Arkham games based purely on narrative, I would put Origins in first place, the reasons for which I’ve talked about on this blog before. WB Games Montreal, who developed Origins, wrote a solid prequel story that does something that Rocksteady’s games have not been very good at doing: putting things in context.

Let’s use Arkham City as an example. As a longtime Batman fan, I got why Batman felt so strongly about saving Talia al Ghul (while disregarding all the other lives at stake), but for casual fans and newcomers, who may not know who the hell Talia is and why she’s important, understanding Batman’s motives requires a lot of additional reading. This is one of the Arkham series’ problems as a whole. It pulls from so many different parts of the mythology – mostly from the comics but from the animated series as well – that you could easily end up getting lost when it comes to following this Batman’s story. Hell, the fact that Jason Todd even existed in this canon* doesn’t come up until midway through Arkham Knight, and this late addition to the story just undermines the mystery of the Arkham Knight’s identity (because seriously, there’s no one else it could possibly be, and you don’t need to be a hardcore Batfan to figure that out during Knight‘s campaign).

*Yes, Jason Todd is referenced in a few easter eggs hidden throughout the games, and they’re cool, but only confuse matters further.

The criticism surrounding the treatment of the game’s female characters is… well, it’s justified. There are four major female characters in the game, three of whom share the same body type and highly sexualized/impractical fashion sense, and Barbara Gordon has been cast as the game’s go-to victim, who isn’t allowed at any point to save herself even though she was once a superhero. Hopefully the forthcoming Batgirl DLC will be able to make up for at least some of the game’s problems.

Well, I’ve been pretty negative up to this point so let me say that despite all of these problems, Arkham Knight really is the best in the series – the ultimate Batman game. Gotham City is absolutely gorgeous – a rain-soaked, neon wonderland. It feels like every street corner and every building contains some hidden easter egg that really brings the city to life, that gives it a sense of history – something I rarely think or care about in open world games, even ones based in real places. The dual play battles are so much fun that I wish there was more of them. The game contains more jump scares than most horror games, which is a hell of a feat (I freaked out during Man-Bat’s introduction). And again, the way Joker is used during the game is ingenious, giving the campaign a feeling of momentum that most open world games simply don’t have since you’re the one setting the pace.

My personal philosophy on game sequels is they’re rarely ever meant to be all that different from their predecessors. They’re the next step in the iteration process. Developers are trying to refine their ideas, not transform them. It’s one of the reasons you see so many HD remasters out there right now. A game sequel shouldn’t be held to the same standard as a movie sequel, where a phrase like “more of the same” is a pejorative. I want more of the same gameplay. It’s the tech being used to build said gameplay that should be different. As a story, Arkham Knight is deeply flawed, but as a gaming experience, it’s almost perfect, and most of the things that make it so fun to play couldn’t have been possible on last-gen hardware. We needed an asylum, a city, and their origins to get to this knight, and the team at Rocksteady can rest easy knowing that their ultimate goal has been achieved. I was the Batman.

FInal, random thoughts:

• It made sense in Asylum, and even City, but there is absolutely NO reason this game needs to take place during ONE night. There’s at least 12 hours of gameplay here, it doesn’t make any damn sense!
• As stated previously, the whole Arkham Knight mystery was a bust from the start, and that whole part of the story was really just an adaptation of the “Under the Hood” arc from the comics, but because the game had to have the word Arkham in its name for some reason, this “new” character was conceived.
• As a character, the Arkham Knight is a whiny brat, not a menacing threat.
• John Noble was fantastic as the Scarecrow, though it does kind of suck that Batman was able to defeat him in pretty much the same way he did in Arkham Asylum.
• A lot of good voice performances all around, from Mark Hamill’s triumphant return to Jonathan Banks’ turn as Gordon, but if I’m being honest, Kevin Conroy just didn’t do it for me this time around. Maybe it was his dialogue, or the fact that Batman was just a straight up jerk throughout the whole game, but there was little nuance to his performance here.