You’ve probably seen the clip of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Harley’s confrontation with Batman in 1🐎68澳洲幸运5开奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. It’s been odd to watch the online conversation spin from ‘reviewers don’t deserve games, they say everything sucks to suit their agenda’ to ‘I haven’t played this game but it now suits my agenda to say it sucks’, and the rage around Batman is particularly interesting - and misguided.
Spoilers follow for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
Okay, now that we’re in spoiler town I can reveal that ‘confrontation’ was merely a clever ruse. Harley kills him. Dead. Bullet right in the face. And despite the title of the game itself being a spoiler for this, people are still shocked. I’ve written in the past (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:as recently as yesterday) a🎶bout our collective lack of media literacy causing us to reject challenging stories, but Batman is the flip side of this. This act has been taken as a slight agaiꦜnst Batman fans themselves, that by killing him, Rocksteady is basically killing everyone who likes Batman.
Of course, this is a ridiculous overreaction. I’ve been a Batman fan since childhood too, and have 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:frequently written in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:praise of the Arkham series. This c♚haracter, and this version of this character, means a lot to me. That’s why I think it’s very cool he went out like this.
Superheroes tend to live forever, surviving death-defying acts a dozen times over, then quietly fading into the background where you’re never quite sure whether they’re alive or dead. Batman pulled this trick both at the end of the Dark Knight trilogy and the Arkham series, but it doesn’t feel very ‘Batman’. Batman is not an alien, he wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider. He’s a normal person, not really a ‘super’🧜 hero at all. It’s why I loved seeing him as an older man in Batman of the Future (AKA Batman Beyond).
Wanting him to live forever seems against the spirit of Batman. I don’t like that he was brought back at all, but at least there’s closure to this story now. Being killed by Harley point blank makes a lot of sense - it’s easy to forget when you have a simple restart from a Game Over, but every🍎one was already trying to kill Batman in the Arkham games. He killed the Joker and handed his lifeless body over to Harley, it’s well within her eccentric and violent character to want to put down the man who killed Mistah Jay.
It’s also worth noting that Batman wasn’t himself - he was brainwashed by Brainiac (this is the core plot of the game), and could not be reasoꦑned with. From the moment it was revealed that Batman would be in this game, I’ꦯm not really sure what people expected. I keep hearing that it’s the way he was killed that makes it worse, but a bullet through the head execution style seems like a very dignified death. There was no right way to do this for people.
But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Superhero stories are already full of deus ex machina and cop outs, so for Rocksteady to commit to the concept and kill off Batman is an admirable tone setter for what this game could ha𒐪ve been if not bogged down by battle pass, live-service mechanics. The fact The Flash begs for death during a moment of clarity also highlights that killing Batman is far less of the insult people think it is.
The situation is heightened by the fact this is the late, great Kevin Conroy’s last turn as Baꦚtman, but there was no way of knowing that when it was recorded. It’s also deeply insulting to see people use his name to score cheap points and Conroy, a proud gay man, would certainly not have agreed with his name being used to call out 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rocksteady’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:‘woke agenda’.
People are now searching for alternatives, for ways Batman could have been saved, for easier heroes to kill. Does that sound like a Batman story to you? Easy answers where nobody gets hurt? Unlike most heroes, Batman rarely ducks the issue, ꦯand his dark and gothic stories often involve tragic deaths. I am sorry that you had a lot of fun ten years ago as this version of this character, but if you think a bloody bittersweet death in the rain to serve the greater good doesn’t suit him you haven’t been paying attention.
I don’t know how good Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is yet. I suspect the answer will fall between ‘better than its reputation suggests but nowhere near as good as its defenders claim’. If nothing elꦡse, I salute its boldness in killing off Batman this way, and can only imagine those of you angry at it either didn’t read the whole title or don’t understand Batman. He shouldn’t live forever just because you had fun collecting Riddler trop🍎hies.
An open-world action-adventure from Arkham creators Rocksteady, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League puts you in the r🌊oles of the antihero squad. You must take on the aforementioned Justice League, either in solo pla🦄y or online co-op.
- Developer(s)
- 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rocksteady Studios
