Batman: Arkham Asylum/YMMV

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• Alas, Poor Villain: Essentially the reaction most people have to Penny Young. Sure, fundamentally a lot of this whole mess is her fault, but good lord she didn't deserve the fate she ended up getting. At the very least she didn't have to be burned to death.
  • If it makes you feel any better, she was killed instantly by the explosion, not by being burned to death.
• And the Fandom Rejoiced:
  • Written by Paul Dini, and starring Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin? We're sold! The Riddler at his most insufferable!
  • What's that? We're getting a video game based on Arkham Asylum a Serious House on Serious Earth? Sign us up!
  • Mark Hamill had made a statement that Batman: Arkham Asylum would be his final work as the Joker. When he was told the planned plotline for the sequel, he changed his mind And the Fandom Rejoiced.
    • He never said that, but that the first game would be hard to top.
• Anticlimax Boss: Depending on the player, can include Killer Croc (if it works for you, Croc's lair is a tense slog through a Nightmare Fuel factory; if it doesn't, it's just tedious), Harley Quinn (when Batman confronts her, it's cutscene time), Bane (he's basically the same as any other Titan Henchman -- though it should be noted he's the first true fight with one) and Titan-powered Joker. ESPECIALLY Titan Joker, as his battle is essentially a glorified henchman fight.
• Badass Decay: Poor Aaron Cash. In Living Hell, the man was the hero of the comic and a total badass. He could take down anyone in the asylum, including (at the very end) Killer Croc, and with the help of Etrigan, he saved the prison staff from a demonic sacrificial ritual. In the game? Well, he's still got his attitude, that counts for something.
  • To be fair, his attitude alone still makes him quite badass; he's the only one not afraid of any of the thugs and the Joker, and one gets the feeling they're only so cocky around him because they outnumber him and have managed to get the drop on him. As for why Cash isn't saving the day, it's still a Batman game, not a Warden Cash game.
• Breather Boss: Combined with Anticlimax Boss. The very first boss encounter (with a random mook who was exposed to a prototype version of Titan) seems like it'll be a fair challenge... but he suddenly dies from heart failure after a fairly brief amount of time, no defeat necessary.
• Complete Monster: The Joker, who actually has the doctors believing that he's not crazy at all, "just Evil".
  • Victor Zsasz as per usual, given his psychotic obsession with racking up kills for the sake of his tallies.
• Counterpart Comparison: A lot of people who have played the game a few years after its release have noticed a coincidental resemblance between Arkham Asylum's high-security henchmen and Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Inverted, as the incarnation of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises is the more recognizable of the two despite making his first appearance a few years later.
  • People have also drawn many parallels between Scarecrow and Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid, as both characters are shown to directly mess with the player themselves during their sequences, and share a similar fashion sense involving gas masks and skimpy garb.
• Demonic Spiders: Henchmen who are armed with guns are easily among the toughest enemies in the game as they can tear off chunks of your health with their bullets from a distance, and fighting two or more at once is pretty much suicide. That's pretty much the point as they're mainly encountered in stealth sections and you're meant to slowly and stealthily pick them off one at a time, but they sometimes appear among packs of normal melee thugs, which makes their presence a lot worse.
  • The stun baton wielding henchmen also deserve a mention. Any physical attack you inflict on them will result in you getting hurt by their electric weapons, and unlike the knife wielding thugs, stunning them doesn't help a bit. While you can use the grappling gun to disarm them, good luck doing so when you have a bunch of other thugs trying to beat you to death!
  • Poison Ivy's hostile plants are also this to a degree. They react when you get close by firing off nearly undodgeable spores that do a decent amount of damage. While they're meant to be taken out while doing a stealthy crouch-walk, you have to do it at a fast pace, not a slow one which is not very intuitive at all.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Scarecrow is easily the most popular villain in the game outside of the gloriously hammy Joker due to his terrifying and memorable Fear Gas segments.
  • Killer Croc as well for being a genuinely intimidating and memorable villain.
• Evil Is Sexy: Harley and Ivy flaunt their hotness fairly openly. The few non-villainous female characters in the game (most notably Dr. Young) are far more button-down and conservative.
• Goddamned Bats: You're playing as the Goddamn Bats, but he's not the only one around:
  • The knife-wielding mooks are this, due to having attacks that can't be countered unlike most other enemies, and will shred off tons of health if you ignore them in favor of fighting other mooks.
  • The mooks in general, when you're fighting any of the bosses. Contrary to what the developers have said, combat with mooks is generally a static affair, and usually the easiest way to die against a boss is to stay still.
  • Arkham Inmates in the DLC map Totally Insane. Remember those crazies who you dispatched with one counter and a ground takedown? Yeah, they show up here alongside lots of thugs. Except now you barely have time to do a ground takedown on any of them. Which means that they keep coming. And coming. And coming. And COMING. And that's not the worst part. Said crazies cannot be dispatched by any of the special takedown maneuvers and will simply leap over Batman. The worst part is that doing so will break your combo and leave you open to thugs, or even worse, more crazies.
  • While they can't hurt you, the gag teeth do show some elements of this, considering how numerous, omnipresent and annoying they are.
    • And that they don't show up on either the main map or the ones Riddler leaves lying around, yet are required to finish off Riddler's challenges.
• Hell Is That Noise: Batman causes this in the thugs sent to stop him, especially as their numbers dwindle lower and lower by a seemingly invisible assailant.
  • Killer Croc's breathing is this whenever you're in his lair. It's absolutely perfect for setting the intense air for his sort-of boss fight.
  • During the Scarecrow sequences, the creepy voice who responds when Batman tries to call Barbara and the voices demanding you to get out of the morgue in the first hallucination as well as the monotone woman on the intercom saying "Did anyone catch the game last night?" before the third one are incredibly creepy.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Just before the final boss fight, Joker turns his TITAN gun on himself while talking like he'd been Driven to Suicide "I have nothing to live for." Fast-forward to Batman: Arkham City, and his death by TITAN poisoning.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: During the beginning sequence of the game, Frank Boles insults the Joker, who tells him to keep his mouth shut or it'll get him into trouble. Later on in the game, Boles is revealed to be a double agent working with the Joker, and Batman is able to trace him via a bourbon trail he'd been drinking. The Joker finds out and has Boles killed.
• Les Yay: Harley and Ivy get their usual dose of this despite only having one (very short) scene together. Harley lets Ivy out even though she isn't on the Joker's list, and Ivy blows her a kiss as she leaves.

Joker: "I could watch those two all day. What a riot!"

• Magnificent Bastard: The Joker is this as well as a Complete Monster. He counted on Batman being able to figure out that something was up with his behavior when being taken into the asylum, causing Batman to follow him to his cell. This ended up causing him to trap Batman on the island after all the prisoners broke free which meant that he had no choice but to fall right into the Joker's trap. He basically turned Batman's Genre Savvy nature against himself!
• Memetic Mutation: "You heard the boss!"
  • Use the middle stick to dodge Joker's gunfire.
• Most Annoying Sound: Mooks and bosses jeering as you're hit are incredibly annoying, which makes turning the tables on them even sweeter.
  • The Joker teeth chattering.
  • As awesome as Mark Hamill as the Joker is... hearing the same two or three lines repeated over and over and over again as you try to Gold the challenges can get very annoying.
• Narm: Killer Croc's lair can be this for some players. While it sounds scary on paper (You have to slowly make your way around Croc's lair while he can suddenly pop up without warning and try to murder you with a Scare Chord playing), once you realize that Killer Croc almost always announces when he's about to get you giving you plenty of time to wait for him as well as the fact that one Batarang is all it takes to send him back into the water makes him more of an amusing inconvenience for some players.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
• Paranoia Fuel: You, to the various mooks in the game. Listen to their chatter after you encounter them and then hide in the rafters. "Oh my god! I've lost him! He... he could come from anywhere!"
  • On the player's side of things, there's Killer Croc. You're in his lair, a creepy sewer level with the only sound being his breathing. Waiting for you to slip up and trigger his Spider Sense. Which you will do. Several times.
• Rescued From The Scrappy Heap: This is the treatment the Riddler got in this game. While he had his fans before, there were still a ton of people who found him to be an obnoxious and embarrassingly campy villain. In this game however, his intelligent side is showcased by him hiding all sorts of trophies and making riddles for you to solve around the island, which is very fun to do. The fact that he's a lot creepier as his patient interview tapes shows helps a lot as well.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Players and critics complained that Detective Mode is just so damn handy, you'll never not want to use it - the downside is that you have to play the entire game in a blueish hue, seeing every character as a translucent skeleton. The loudest complaints came from Rocksteady's own art directors, who were upset that players weren't seeing the game as they intended it to be seen, so they're altering the mechanic for the sequel. No, don't think about why Batman would make one of his best crimefighting tools less effective.
  • For others, it's ground takedowns. While they're meant to be a way to keep dazed mooks from getting up, you're usually fighting packs of mooks who are usually able to knock you out of a takedown, making it almost useless to do as simply fighting them and beating them unconscious is more convenient.
• Special Effects Failure: The Sanatorium is apparently the only place on the island that is experiencing a thunderstorm.
• Squick: During the parts with Scarecrow, Joker asks Batman what his fears are, this would have been fine, but then he just had to say "Me? In a thong!?!". Ugh...
  • Doubles as a Crowning Moment of Funny, as the "Blaaaahahahaha!" that the Joker gives right after indicates that he knows that it'd be more Squick than scary, and that laugh he gives is absolutely hilarious.
• That One Boss: Poison Ivy. During her battle she constantly assaults you with thorny vines that will do tons of damage even if you break free, and will alternate by blasting you with pollen while she taunts you. While this leaves her open for you to nail her with a Batarang, you need to have almost perfect timing to hit her both before she retreats back into her plant barrier as well as dodge her homing spores. And if that wasn't bad enough, her second phase has her bring in brainwashed asylum guards to hinder you with. While they're no tougher than your average mooks, the fact that you have to fight them while being bombarded with her aforementioned spiky vines makes taking them down a much more tedious and frustrating process. Thankfully, the developers made it to where if you die (Which you probably will) on her second phase, you don't have to start all the way back at the beginning of the fight.
• That One Level: Your return later on to Intensive Treatment, where the gargoyles (the key to your superiority over gun-wielding Mooks) have been set to explode when you climb onto them. It is much harder than it sounds (though you can use the Batclaw on the roof of the control room to just yank mooks off the ledges and severely whittle down their forces.)
  • Killer Croc's lair. The fact that it's a rather lengthy, tedious level where it's a bit easy to accidentally fall off of a platform and die makes it a bit hated for some.
  • The Aviary is this. It's another stealth mission, and one of the rare ones where you can't allow any of the patrolling Blackgate thugs so much as think you're there, or they'll kill their hostages and you'll have to start over. You're supposed to make your way over to the thug who is in charge of dropping the prisoners to their deaths and take him out first, you have to be near perfect with your stealthy maneuvers as it's very easy to accidentally get spotted by the thugs due to there being little room for error. And unlike other levels like this, you can't silently take down the other thugs before you get the main one, they where collars that make noise when they're taken down which will alert the main thug to drop the hostage to their deaths. Thankfully, taking him down means that you no longer have to be as stealthy to wipe out the others.
• That One Sidequest: On your way into the Visitor Center to the final boss, there's a short hallway with 20 mooks in it who won't attack you unless you attack them. Though they are unarmed, so many of them in such a tight space is extremely difficult, even with all the upgrades you have at this point.
  • Joker Teeth are the most loathed of the Riddler's challenges. It might have something to do with them not being an actual riddle, tape, or Arkham chronicle. Also, while about 90% of the teeth show up more or less naturally as a result of the story progression, there's that set that hide above the hallway to the warden's office, which happens after the player has basically realized this, and then notice they missed them after the sequence is over.
• What an Idiot: Both Poison Ivy And the Joker would be unbeatable if they didn't stop to taunt you and show off to the circling helicopters respectively which leaves them open to be hurt. Guess what they do during their boss fights the entire time?