So what is the “Knightfall Protocol?” Now that the world knows Batman is Bruce Wayne, he says he has to give up being Batman for reasons that don’t really make much sense to me. That meant taking down Harvey Dent, Penguin, Firefly, Man-Bat and a host of others, including Deathstroke who is brought in to replace Todd’s Arkham Knight once he goes AWOL, which was actually one of my favorite parts about the end of the game (though I hated that the final battle against the assassin is yet another tank war). I ended up doing everything I could except finding all the Riddler trophies after I freed Catwoman. The Fight For The Future Of Video Games is a warts-and-all look at the clashes between the video game business and its passionate fans. It’s here you’re told about something called the “Knightfall Protocol,” where after you put away enough of Gotham’s Most Wanted (read: complete side-quest chains), you can activate it and it does…something, the specifics of which are never made clear until you press the button. The story concludes there, and Batman returns to Gotham to finish cleaning up the streets even if the main villains have been put down. There’s also a fun little sequence where you play as the Joker inside Batman’s toxin-addled head, where you lock him away to be forgotten, his worst fear now that he’s dead. Todd switches sides and disappears, Scarecrow is injected with his own toxin because that always has to happen, and Batman is outed as Bruce Wayne. I almost wish they made the Arkham Knight Talia al Ghul, which was a theory I had early on. It works within the game, but it was more than a little deceptive for Rocksteady to insist his identity would shock and amaze us all. With that said, I understand why many avid Batman fans may consider it a letdown, given that they were promised a new character, and this is essentially a renamed and recostumed version of a character that has already existed for years, and most will spot the twist from a mile away as a result. Honestly, I might even like this telling of the Red Hood tale more than the original. At one point he literally locks the current Robin (Tim Drake) in a cell to prevent him from trying to take on Scarecrow, and so his rival turning out to be the Robin he let die is more than a little appropriate. The entire game is about Batman pushing away his friends when they try to help him because he deems it too dangerous. Batman convinces Todd he can be redeemed, and he intervenes to help later in the game after Scarecrow unmasks Batman as Bruce Wayne for the world to see.Īs a self-contained story, infusing Under the Red Hood with Rocksteady’s universe works really well. In their climactic battle, Batman rips off his faux-bat mask to reveal a sub-helmet that looks quite a bit like the Red Hood mask, and obvious nod from Rocksteady. Joker reveals that he simply brainwashed Todd and didn’t kill him, and in the game, Todd wants quite literally nothing but to see Batman suffer and eventually die. The Arkham Knight is a twisted variant of the Red Hood. There’s also a variant of this tale told in the more recent Hush story, where Todd is a fake-out for another masked villain (who weirdly also shows up in Arkham Knight). He tries to kill Joker who murdered him the first time, and also has it in for Batman for leaving him to die. There too, his identity is a mystery until it’s revealed that Ra’s al Ghul resurrected Todd in a Lazarus Pit, but it didn’t take and he went insane.
Joker’s hallucination would have been a big enough clue on its own, but I, like many Batman fans, am familiar with Under the Red Hood, a Batman story that has Jason Todd killed by the Joker (as occurred in a previous story, Death in the Family) and return from the grave to wreak havoc on both Batman and the Gotham underworld. At that point, I knew where things were headed, and I wasn’t wrong. During a main mission about two-thirds of the way through the story, the in-my-head Joker taunted Batman by showing him an elaborate flashback about when he executed Jason Todd, Batman’s second Robin. Ahead of launch, Rocksteady promised the Arkham Knight was a wholly original creation they cooked up in collaboration DC, so that had fans excited about the potential of the reveal.Īs it turns out, they weren’t being entirely truthful.
The entire game is focused on a pair of villains, the familiar Scarecrow and the unfamiliar Arkham Knight, an armored Batman clone who has no problem using firearms and commands a drone/merc army that swarms Gotham as Scarecrow devises his plan to drown everyone in fear gas for the millionth time.įor the duration of the game, the Arkham Knight’s identity is a big mystery to everyone, Batman included, and no amount of Alfred’s research turns up anything even resembling a clue as to who he may be. The first and most obvious ending of Arkham Knight, the story ending, is bound to be controversial in its own right.
0 kommentar(er)
