Batman: Arkham Knight/YMMV

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These things about Batman: Arkham Knight are subjective - not everyone will agree with all of them.

• Anticlimax Boss:
  • The final battle with the Arkham Knight himself is a weird example of this trope. It's a predator challenge that can be genuinely tough, but that's just it: you're sneaking around defeating his henchmen, avoiding his drones, and grappling up to his sniper perch and hitting him while he tries to take potshots with a sniper rifle. Considering that the Arkham Knight is Jason Todd, a former Robin trained by Batman himself whose skills have been further honed while building up his militia, it's a disappointing waste of his skills when we could have gotten a truly intense Final Exam Boss.
  • Scarecrow doesn't fare much better, as he's defeated in a cutscene. Granted, it is a cool cutscene, but still.
  • Hush's sidequest in Arkham City painted him as a terrifying psychopath and brilliant criminal mastermind who could easily give Batman himself the runaround, and escapes with big plans for ruining Bruce Wayne's life. For years fans speculated on what kind of crazy schemes he could be planning and what kind of role he'd have in this game... and it turns out that turning his face into a perfect copy of Bruce Wayne's only amounted to him getting past the front desk at Wayne Enterprises, and his "grand scheme" is to try and magnificently fail to steal Bruce's money before being slammed into a table and detained. That's it. His sidequest here can easily be beaten in about three, five minutes tops, and most of that time will be spent simply driving to Wayne Enterprises.
  • And perhaps most disappointingly, Deathstroke rounds out the anti-climax boss quartet. He's the world's deadliest assassin and the Best Boss Ever in Arkham Origins... and you fight him in a dime-a-dozen tank battle that ends with Batman beating him in one move.
• Author's Saving Throw: Rocksteady listened to fans' complaints about the game including the PC version and made some improvements.
  • Rocksteady made a series of patches to have all eight playable characters on the combat and predator maps, including Harley Quinn, Batgirl and Red Hood. While the issue of wasting so many fun characters isn't entirely gone, it's good to be able to do more with them.
  • Rocksteady was aware of the lack of challenge maps and brought in multiple DLC packs with the traditional round systems like in the previous games.
  • There's a lot less Batmobile focus in the Season of Infamy DLC. And on top of that, four of Batman's key rogues get their own dedicated side missions that show them at their very best, with Mr. Freeze's sidequest giving his story a tragic, if heartwarming ending, while Killer Croc's has you fight him in an amazingly fun, proper non-Batmobile boss fight.
• Base Breaker: Two of the game's main threats are major points of contention.
  • The Arkham Knight, which is to be expected given his identity as Jason Todd. Fans view him as a threatening Badass and the emotional core of the series' story after The Reveal, but those who hate him find him insufferably whiny and arrogant, and hate how obvious of a reveal it is. There's also the issue of whether he should have been Jason or a different character altogether, like Damian Wayne, Hush, a rogue Batman clone, someone connected to Hugo Strange's grand plan to cleanse the world of crime, or an original character entirely.
  • The Joker is a beloved and wildly popular supervillain, and his presence as an illusion constantly haunting Batman throughout the game is welcomed for providing some gut-busting comic relief to lighten the dreary mood as well as being the one to kick off the climax where Batman briefly goes insane. Plus, you've got Mark Hamill back in the saddle clearly having a hell of a time with one of his most famous roles! But thanks to the Joker's omnipresence in the Arkham series to the point of stealing Black Mask's role as the main threat in Arkham Origins, plenty of Arkhamverse fans are sick and tired of seeing him in every game and wish that he could have just remained a distant memory, or at least be relegated to a single memorable fear gas hallucination. And even though Scarecrow manages to stick out as a threat in his own right, some think he deserved more focus and that Joker hogged his spotlight.
• Best Boss Ever:
  • The Riddler. After four games of dealing with his smug taunting, childish behavior, and annoying puzzles, you get to beat the crap out of him yourself! Catwoman helping you out is the icing on the cake for her fans and the BatCat shippers.
  • Killer Croc in the Season of Infamy DLC. It's you and Nightwing, master and pupil, against an entire room of thugs led by Croc, who is a nimble and deadly foe who endures a ton of punishment before going down. It's not quite on par with, say, Mr. Freeze and Ra's Al Ghul in Arkham City or Bane and Deathstroke in Arkham Origins, but it's a fun and satisfying fight in its own right.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Despite how controversial the Batmobile is, there's no denying that running over crowds of thugs or shooting them with its non-lethal cannon is a hilarious and satisfying source of stress relief.
  • As mentioned above under Best Boss Ever, Riddler's defeat in this game is probably the most satisfying in the entire Arkham series, because you actually get to beat him up yourself. Consider it payback for having to deal with his bullshit game after game.
• Contested Sequel: This game has neatly usurped the title of "most controversial game in the series" from Origins. Fans cite it as a great game to the series thanks to its effective use of psychological horror, humongous map, and fun combat mechanics. But those more critical of it hate the obnoxious omnipresence of the Batmobile, the meager amount of traditional boss fights, and questionable usage of Batman's rogues gallery. The story itself is its own can of worms, with some finding it to be an amazingly emotional and fitting conclusion to the series, while others are disappointed with the Joker hogging the spotlight yet again and the Arkham Knight's identity being laughably obvious and lacking the intended impact since Jason wasn't even mentioned in previous games, preventing players from truly caring about him during The Reveal.
• Demonic Spiders: Medics walk a fine line between being Goddamned Bats and this. In terms of combat potential they're hardly a threat, but they can revive really dangerous enemies that you've gone through great paints to neutralize, and their sizable health pools lead to them outstaying their welcome in a hurry. Even worse, if you're fighting multiple medics at once, they can revive each other. Thankfully, you can get the ability to remotely sabotage their gear so they're instantly knocked out when trying to revive people, but it'll be a while before you unlock it.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Man-Bat and Professor Pyg have gotten a lot of positive attention thanks to their memorable encounters in this game. Both are genuinely terrifying, with Man-Bat introducing himself with a nasty Jump Scare while Pyg is a total fucking lunatic who makes an art form out of Body Horror. Further helping their cases is Man-Bat's tragic character arc, as well as Pyg being every bit as entertaining and hilarious as he is disturbing thanks to Dwight Schultz's excellent voicework.
• Evil Is Cool: Scarecrow. He sets out to break Batman's mind and expose him to the public and wins, albeit at the cost of his own sanity, is a master manipulator who expertly strings the Caped Crusader along, and has a cool, creepy new appearance that builds well off his already creepy Arkham Asylum design. John Noble's excellent, menacing voice is definitely a plus.
• Fanon: A common fan headcanon is that the Black Mask killed by Red Hood in his DLC is not Roman Sionis, but a body double. There's a surprising amount of canon backing too, seeing as how Roman is shown to employ body doubles in Arkham Origins, his design doesn't match up with his appearance in the more chronologically recent Arkham City, and most damningly, his death scene. "Roman" dies begging for mercy like a coward, while Roman was shown to be ballsy enough to mouth of to the Joker despite having been kidnapped and horribly tortured by him in Origins.
• It's Short, So It Sucks: A problem with the game's sidequests is that they're subjected to weird and inconsistent pacing, with a good chunk of them being way too short while others are weirdly long. Hush gets this the worst since you get to and pacify him in under a minute, but Penguin, Two-Face, Deacon Blackfire, and Firefly all have short, incredibly easy sidequests while saving random firemen in peril is this grand ordeal that spans across most of the goddamned game.
• Magnificent Bastard: Scarecrow's got all the trappings of one: he's cool, stylish, well-acted, manipulative to a fault, and destroys Batman's life as Bruce Wayne by exposing his identity to the world. In a way, he won.
• Memetic Mutation: "Is he stupid?" is a meme that is hard to explain. It started as a post of the Batman Arkham subreddit pointing out the absurd levels of Superman Stays Out of Gotham of this game, but quickly it dived into incredibly more nonsensical questions until it turned into a internet-widespread Verbal Tic.
• Porting Disaster: The launch of the PC port was a disastrous one, because it was ridiculously glitchy and borderline unplayable. It has long since been patched and repaired, but even to this day, its buggy reputation continues to haunt it.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Ever since Arkham Asylum, fans wanted to drive the Batmobile and tear through the mean streets of Gotham. And initially, the reveal that it would be a major gameplay mechanic was met with a ton of praise... until the game released, where it turned out to be one hell of a Monkey's Paw wish. The driving controls are clunky, and the Batmobile is forced on the player a lot, with the fun boss fights from the previous games being replaced with fights against enemy tanks that must be destroyed with the car's own tank mode. It's far from hard to control in this state, but it's a lot less fun than the series' stealth and combat mechanics.
• Signature Song: "Look Who's Laughing Now"
• That One Sidequest: Once again, the Riddler throws a massive sidequest chain at you that requires you to find tons of Riddler trophies and solve annoying puzzles while he taunts and goads you. And this time, you have to find all 200+ Riddler trophies to defeat him. Thankfully, the payoff for this massive undertaking, like in Asylum and City, is well worth the tedium.
• The Unexpected: Nobody expected Deacon Blackfire, a lesser known Batman villain, to appear in one of the side missions.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The Arkham Knight is a tragic character, and the reveal that he is Jason Todd, driven insane by being tortured by the Joker for over a year is horrifying and heartbreaking. But his alliance with Scarecrow and willingness to butcher countless innocents as well as assist in a chemical attack that would devastate the entire Eastern seaboard is a step too far for some, and even his redemption at the end doesn't do nearly enough to absolve him of his sins.
• The Untwist: It's painfully obvious that the Arkham Knight is Jason Todd. Having the Red Hood's DLC spoils the twist before you even play the game since the Arkham Knight is an alternate skin for him, but even if you disregard that, the Arkham Knight is a hotheaded, angry young man with a personal grudge against Batman who shows up in the same game that Jason appears in, as well as the first where he's even mentioned.

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