Darth Strelok
The Arkham Games are, at the moment, the last word on proper Batman simulators. I would argue that in terms of sheer effort and attention to detail, they are also among the finest immersive Sims available in any videogame category other than Red Dead Redemption 2. They have their flaws, but are remarkably consistent in theme and tone.
I would also argue that in each of the games, Batman's most serious villain is not his rogue's gallery. Not even the Joker is more than a secondary antagonist.
Batman's true villain is the environment, or rather, the soul that inhabits that environment:
Case in point, Arkham Asylum.
1: The Set Up
Few videogame environments are as sinister as that of Arkham. From the very moment you start, it's oppressive architecture is smothering, so smothering it's almost like humans are not meant to inhabit it. And indeed, as you go on, it's clearly not fit for operating... various parts of the facility are in a state of severe disrepair. It's "therapies", if they can be called that, are brutal and inhuman at worst, or questionable and ineffective at best. Batman has donated and installed security, but it proves to hinder him more than anyone else, and made no difference when the Joker staged a takeover. He's constantly fighting measures he himself put in place. He's fighting his own poorly thought out choice, in a sense.
Sure, it's a $&#@show, but how does that make it a villain?
To answer that, it helps if you think about the events of the Asylum as what happens when you drop Batman into another person's equivalent to the Batcave, long decrepit, and quite possibly haunted.
Part 2: Environment as a Villain.
If you think of the the island itself as the main villain, it's actually quite an impressive one: it's motives (Physically and emotionally breaking it's victims) are nothing less than nightmarish, like it's true self, and like some of the most frightening villains in real life, it's capable of masking itself, when necessary, in a veneer of legitimacy, that comes apart the longer you dig, and the closer you peer. It has minions, constantly screws with the hero, and the hero doesn't fully understand or perceive the threat it poses until it's almost too late, and quite possibly gets the hero to question the worth of their own effort as well as the purity of their motives.
One gets the impression when Batman enters The Asylum that he is aware of the surface level problems, at least on a superficial level...he clearly has walked it's grounds before, but tonight is different. By the time the story is concluded, Batman (and the player) understands more about the Asylum than he ever wanted, and understands why no one ever gets better going there, after being literally forced to run through its rotting innards and confront it's horror right at its heart.
It's worth noting that Batman never comments on the state of disrepair too much as he goes through the facility, but as he blasts through walls, enters hidden chambers that seemingly serve no real purpose, discovers chilling remnants of the Villain's history, one does have to wonder what is going through his head as he goes through the islands metaphorical and physically manifested subconscious.
The Backstory is that it was built by a man named Amadeus Arkham, who was determined to treat and cure those afflicted by insanity, people the rest of the world had given up on. As Batman struggles to get past the many barriers the island throws his way, it is surely impossible that he wouldn't start picking up on the similarities between Himself and Amadeus, and especially how Amadeus eventually lost the struggle Batman himself wages.
Batman and Amadeus Arkham actually have a lot of similarities, if you outright stop and think it out. They both stamp everything they own with their motif of choice (Bats for Batman, Beetles for Amadeus), their mansions contain hidden, secret chambers and both are willing to go outside the confines of the law to do what they actually want to do. Batman is exploring the living breathing tomb of one man's sanity, seeing the long wrought consequences of what happens when someone tries to do what Batman does, but doesn't have Batman's moral code or strength of will.
Amadeus first starts out sincerely wanting to do his job, but the madness and evil of the city eventually drives Amadeus to hatred and despair, manifesting in the form of Martin Hawkins, who slaughters his family, and making him a direct parallel to Batman himself. Amadeus gives it a try at sincerely attempting to cure Hawkins, but when Hawkins proves himself incurable, murdering his secretary with the fountain pen of Amadeus's own father, Amadeus at last completely loses it against his equivalent of the Joker, goes mad, and electrocutes his family's killer, eventually going so crazy in his crusade to at first imprison, than punish the madness of Gotham, he eventually has to be locked in a hell of his own making, which, not so coincidentally, ends up sorta being the fate of the Arkham Batman. The resemblances only grow more pronounced as the series goes on. They both have a love that is cruelly taken from them by their chief tormenter, for one...
3. Evidence of Malevolence
On the surface, much of the asylum's problems can simply be explained away by bad maintenance and personnel with questionable ethics, but it's in this easy to explain and believe answer that the asylum is at its most evil. The areas Batman opens up simply do not make sense, even from an architectural malfeasance perspective. There are hidden spaces and chambers that just serve no practical purpose for why they are there. The vent system that Batman uses is probably one of the biggest elements of nightmare fuel about the Asylum. There are clear signs of habitation. Skulls. The ratcatcher's gear is even hidden in one section, yet all inexplicably tie into sections otherwise inaccessible and serve as perfect routes. Batman clearly would not have designed it in such a way--even in character, it wouldn't make much sense for him to do it. But it does make sense if one remembers that as Amadeus slowly broke down running the Asylum, he started putting all these hidden spaces in to hide whatever crime he needed to hide and move through its walls to reach the patients he despised most without being observed...Quincy Sharp arguably simply took advantage of what Amadeus already set up.
Case in point, remember when you encounter the Scarecrow for the first time? There is a wall you have to bust through to reach the morgue area, and you go through this weird area full of metal and papers and gears arranged in a way that doesn't really make any sense? There's massive problems with the whole set up.
Seriously, does no one notice the massive eyesore that is that clearly patched up and covered wall? If Batman didn't have to go through it to save Gordon, would he pay it any mind?
It's clearly leading to somewhere that has no real Purpose beyond inexplicably connecting to another area, and this is the first spot where the madness and evil of the facility really pokes through in a major way.
One of the most frightening lines in the whole game that I think everybody misses is when Scarecrow says he thinks Batman needs a stronger dose of the toxin. He gives a direct needle injection.
Wait a minute...the Scarecrow was giving him a bull$#@+ dose? Like he gives everyone else? Why would he bother with a lowbrow dose against Batman? There's even a recording in the game that shows Batman busting in on the Scarecrow while under the effects of his toxin. Batman is clearly taking that stuff like a friggin' champ, so why wouldn't Scarecrow dose him with something much stronger right from the get go?
The easy answer is that Batman is boss, so even a stronger dose wouldn't work, which leads to a much more horrifying possibility: it's the asylum itself that is increasing and hijacking the effects of the toxin. It's not really Scarecrow attacking Batman in the nightmare sequence, but the Asylum, assuming Scarecrow's form and just taking advantage of what Scarecrow is doing so Batman does not appreciate fully the true level of danger he is in until it's too late. And it grows more aggressive in its attempts to destroy him as the night wears on. Think about it: Scarecrow actually outright says at one point that Batman has enough fear toxin in him to break someone many times over, yet he powers through it. Why doesn't it break him, beyond the fact that Kevin Conroy is awesome?
Because Batman cannot be broken by mere chemical means. He is way past that. It requires the evil of the Asylum itself hijacking his mind while the toxin weakens it enough for the Asylum to slip through. There is something that "Scarecrow" says in the hallucinations that stuck with me. He said Batman's mind would shatter like glass.
In the Arkham Library, there is a stained glass artwork that serves as the floor of the entry level. It's a beautiful floral pattern at the center. You know what it's surrounded by?
Beetles.
Beetles on all sides. It's symbolic, of a beautiful and orderly mind surrounded by and slowly being eaten away at by insanity on all sides. Batman is later forced to shatter it completely by crashing a giant chandelier into it to reach hostages. It's a visual metaphor of Arkham's ultimate failure and descent into madness.
Why would "Scarecrow" know about that? Why would "Scarecrow" have to say "everything you see here is under my control?" in the nightmare world if it's just Toxin? In the Scarecrow interview tapes, Scarecrow eagerly asks what it is Batman sees while under the effects of the Toxin--implying he doesn't control what Batman experiences while under it's effects. What changed in the Asylum? How does he control what Batman is now seeing when he enters the nightmare world? Mere chemicals could not allow him that level of control. It's something else. It's not actually Scarecrow. Which makes the Nightmare sequences even more frightening: If it's not really the Chemicals, then it means that during those nightmare sequences, Batman is at least partially somewhere else. Reality becomes blurry. It can't explain Batman's movements in the real world too easily when he is under the effects of the gas--he ends up in a place at the end of the second sequence that logically, he would have had to jump through quite a few hoops to reach physically. More actions then we see him take in the nightmare sequences, certainly, which would have required more care and deliberation than he should be capable of, being so busy evading "Scarecrow's" horrors. But Batman proves too strong for whatever evil spirit may actually haunt the place--but in the process, it forces him to confront his hidden fears about himself in truly hellish ways.
Which brings me back to why Batman does not comment on any of it. There is the doylest explanation, which is for the purpose of immersion, but the real answer, I think, is that Batman is silent at what he discovers, even in private, discovering things like Arkham's actual cell, where he spent the remainder of his life after being committed, is out of shock and fear at what can happen to a person with a similar mission that he has. He literally can't comment on it out loud, lest he confess to a now very real fear that he could end up just like Amadeus. Who cares if Quincy Sharpe is just cribbing off Amadeus' notes? The fact of the matter is that Amadeus is essentially who Batman is, stripped of pretense. This leads into the idea (Which is also hinted at in the comic it is based off of written by Grant Morrison but translated much more strongly in the actual games) that Batman is the reincarnation of Amadeus Arkham, still trying to control the insanity of Gotham by more aggressive means than what he was willing to try in his previous life, but we will get into that in the next article I write.
The events of the story, however, force Batman to question whether or not his motives are not the same as Arkham's...does he actually want to cure these people, or simply punish them endlessly, as Arkham did? After all, he makes no move to cure these people with his advanced science, seemingly content to watch them flounder and suffer, and his relationship with the Joker is in many ways, a rerun of the one between Amadeus and Hawkins (And poses the possibility that Joker is the reincarnation of Hawkins). It confronts him for the first time, on how ineffective his policy truly is to dealing with Gotham's actual problems, and whether or not he is more about the criminal suffering than actually being rehabilitated. Joker knows this, and in a twisted way, the Riot is Joker's (and by extension, The Asylum's) way of calling Batman out on this hidden desire to simply punish instead of cure. At the end of the horrific night, it can be argued that not even Batman is truly certain of what he wants or expects from this place he keeps trying to stick his problems in and bury them...he overcomes the agent of its evil, the Joker, but only by the skin of his teeth, and through no real introspection. Arguably, this could be because he simply doesn't know of a better way, and it is not entirely certain he would take a better way even if he knew of it, as Arkham City proves. He makes some small progress--at the end, even Batman understands how evil the Asylum truly is, and why it must be closed, and permanently, this time. But he is merely taking the problems of the Asylum, and transferring them somewhere else, somewhere that it's evil can follow him and really mess with him, the next time in a place that he is very familiar with...
I would also argue that in each of the games, Batman's most serious villain is not his rogue's gallery. Not even the Joker is more than a secondary antagonist.
Batman's true villain is the environment, or rather, the soul that inhabits that environment:
Case in point, Arkham Asylum.
1: The Set Up
Few videogame environments are as sinister as that of Arkham. From the very moment you start, it's oppressive architecture is smothering, so smothering it's almost like humans are not meant to inhabit it. And indeed, as you go on, it's clearly not fit for operating... various parts of the facility are in a state of severe disrepair. It's "therapies", if they can be called that, are brutal and inhuman at worst, or questionable and ineffective at best. Batman has donated and installed security, but it proves to hinder him more than anyone else, and made no difference when the Joker staged a takeover. He's constantly fighting measures he himself put in place. He's fighting his own poorly thought out choice, in a sense.
Sure, it's a $&#@show, but how does that make it a villain?
To answer that, it helps if you think about the events of the Asylum as what happens when you drop Batman into another person's equivalent to the Batcave, long decrepit, and quite possibly haunted.
Part 2: Environment as a Villain.
If you think of the the island itself as the main villain, it's actually quite an impressive one: it's motives (Physically and emotionally breaking it's victims) are nothing less than nightmarish, like it's true self, and like some of the most frightening villains in real life, it's capable of masking itself, when necessary, in a veneer of legitimacy, that comes apart the longer you dig, and the closer you peer. It has minions, constantly screws with the hero, and the hero doesn't fully understand or perceive the threat it poses until it's almost too late, and quite possibly gets the hero to question the worth of their own effort as well as the purity of their motives.
One gets the impression when Batman enters The Asylum that he is aware of the surface level problems, at least on a superficial level...he clearly has walked it's grounds before, but tonight is different. By the time the story is concluded, Batman (and the player) understands more about the Asylum than he ever wanted, and understands why no one ever gets better going there, after being literally forced to run through its rotting innards and confront it's horror right at its heart.
It's worth noting that Batman never comments on the state of disrepair too much as he goes through the facility, but as he blasts through walls, enters hidden chambers that seemingly serve no real purpose, discovers chilling remnants of the Villain's history, one does have to wonder what is going through his head as he goes through the islands metaphorical and physically manifested subconscious.
The Backstory is that it was built by a man named Amadeus Arkham, who was determined to treat and cure those afflicted by insanity, people the rest of the world had given up on. As Batman struggles to get past the many barriers the island throws his way, it is surely impossible that he wouldn't start picking up on the similarities between Himself and Amadeus, and especially how Amadeus eventually lost the struggle Batman himself wages.
Batman and Amadeus Arkham actually have a lot of similarities, if you outright stop and think it out. They both stamp everything they own with their motif of choice (Bats for Batman, Beetles for Amadeus), their mansions contain hidden, secret chambers and both are willing to go outside the confines of the law to do what they actually want to do. Batman is exploring the living breathing tomb of one man's sanity, seeing the long wrought consequences of what happens when someone tries to do what Batman does, but doesn't have Batman's moral code or strength of will.
Amadeus first starts out sincerely wanting to do his job, but the madness and evil of the city eventually drives Amadeus to hatred and despair, manifesting in the form of Martin Hawkins, who slaughters his family, and making him a direct parallel to Batman himself. Amadeus gives it a try at sincerely attempting to cure Hawkins, but when Hawkins proves himself incurable, murdering his secretary with the fountain pen of Amadeus's own father, Amadeus at last completely loses it against his equivalent of the Joker, goes mad, and electrocutes his family's killer, eventually going so crazy in his crusade to at first imprison, than punish the madness of Gotham, he eventually has to be locked in a hell of his own making, which, not so coincidentally, ends up sorta being the fate of the Arkham Batman. The resemblances only grow more pronounced as the series goes on. They both have a love that is cruelly taken from them by their chief tormenter, for one...
3. Evidence of Malevolence
On the surface, much of the asylum's problems can simply be explained away by bad maintenance and personnel with questionable ethics, but it's in this easy to explain and believe answer that the asylum is at its most evil. The areas Batman opens up simply do not make sense, even from an architectural malfeasance perspective. There are hidden spaces and chambers that just serve no practical purpose for why they are there. The vent system that Batman uses is probably one of the biggest elements of nightmare fuel about the Asylum. There are clear signs of habitation. Skulls. The ratcatcher's gear is even hidden in one section, yet all inexplicably tie into sections otherwise inaccessible and serve as perfect routes. Batman clearly would not have designed it in such a way--even in character, it wouldn't make much sense for him to do it. But it does make sense if one remembers that as Amadeus slowly broke down running the Asylum, he started putting all these hidden spaces in to hide whatever crime he needed to hide and move through its walls to reach the patients he despised most without being observed...Quincy Sharp arguably simply took advantage of what Amadeus already set up.
Case in point, remember when you encounter the Scarecrow for the first time? There is a wall you have to bust through to reach the morgue area, and you go through this weird area full of metal and papers and gears arranged in a way that doesn't really make any sense? There's massive problems with the whole set up.
Seriously, does no one notice the massive eyesore that is that clearly patched up and covered wall? If Batman didn't have to go through it to save Gordon, would he pay it any mind?
It's clearly leading to somewhere that has no real Purpose beyond inexplicably connecting to another area, and this is the first spot where the madness and evil of the facility really pokes through in a major way.
One of the most frightening lines in the whole game that I think everybody misses is when Scarecrow says he thinks Batman needs a stronger dose of the toxin. He gives a direct needle injection.
Wait a minute...the Scarecrow was giving him a bull$#@+ dose? Like he gives everyone else? Why would he bother with a lowbrow dose against Batman? There's even a recording in the game that shows Batman busting in on the Scarecrow while under the effects of his toxin. Batman is clearly taking that stuff like a friggin' champ, so why wouldn't Scarecrow dose him with something much stronger right from the get go?
The easy answer is that Batman is boss, so even a stronger dose wouldn't work, which leads to a much more horrifying possibility: it's the asylum itself that is increasing and hijacking the effects of the toxin. It's not really Scarecrow attacking Batman in the nightmare sequence, but the Asylum, assuming Scarecrow's form and just taking advantage of what Scarecrow is doing so Batman does not appreciate fully the true level of danger he is in until it's too late. And it grows more aggressive in its attempts to destroy him as the night wears on. Think about it: Scarecrow actually outright says at one point that Batman has enough fear toxin in him to break someone many times over, yet he powers through it. Why doesn't it break him, beyond the fact that Kevin Conroy is awesome?
Because Batman cannot be broken by mere chemical means. He is way past that. It requires the evil of the Asylum itself hijacking his mind while the toxin weakens it enough for the Asylum to slip through. There is something that "Scarecrow" says in the hallucinations that stuck with me. He said Batman's mind would shatter like glass.
In the Arkham Library, there is a stained glass artwork that serves as the floor of the entry level. It's a beautiful floral pattern at the center. You know what it's surrounded by?
Beetles.
Beetles on all sides. It's symbolic, of a beautiful and orderly mind surrounded by and slowly being eaten away at by insanity on all sides. Batman is later forced to shatter it completely by crashing a giant chandelier into it to reach hostages. It's a visual metaphor of Arkham's ultimate failure and descent into madness.
Why would "Scarecrow" know about that? Why would "Scarecrow" have to say "everything you see here is under my control?" in the nightmare world if it's just Toxin? In the Scarecrow interview tapes, Scarecrow eagerly asks what it is Batman sees while under the effects of the Toxin--implying he doesn't control what Batman experiences while under it's effects. What changed in the Asylum? How does he control what Batman is now seeing when he enters the nightmare world? Mere chemicals could not allow him that level of control. It's something else. It's not actually Scarecrow. Which makes the Nightmare sequences even more frightening: If it's not really the Chemicals, then it means that during those nightmare sequences, Batman is at least partially somewhere else. Reality becomes blurry. It can't explain Batman's movements in the real world too easily when he is under the effects of the gas--he ends up in a place at the end of the second sequence that logically, he would have had to jump through quite a few hoops to reach physically. More actions then we see him take in the nightmare sequences, certainly, which would have required more care and deliberation than he should be capable of, being so busy evading "Scarecrow's" horrors. But Batman proves too strong for whatever evil spirit may actually haunt the place--but in the process, it forces him to confront his hidden fears about himself in truly hellish ways.
Which brings me back to why Batman does not comment on any of it. There is the doylest explanation, which is for the purpose of immersion, but the real answer, I think, is that Batman is silent at what he discovers, even in private, discovering things like Arkham's actual cell, where he spent the remainder of his life after being committed, is out of shock and fear at what can happen to a person with a similar mission that he has. He literally can't comment on it out loud, lest he confess to a now very real fear that he could end up just like Amadeus. Who cares if Quincy Sharpe is just cribbing off Amadeus' notes? The fact of the matter is that Amadeus is essentially who Batman is, stripped of pretense. This leads into the idea (Which is also hinted at in the comic it is based off of written by Grant Morrison but translated much more strongly in the actual games) that Batman is the reincarnation of Amadeus Arkham, still trying to control the insanity of Gotham by more aggressive means than what he was willing to try in his previous life, but we will get into that in the next article I write.
The events of the story, however, force Batman to question whether or not his motives are not the same as Arkham's...does he actually want to cure these people, or simply punish them endlessly, as Arkham did? After all, he makes no move to cure these people with his advanced science, seemingly content to watch them flounder and suffer, and his relationship with the Joker is in many ways, a rerun of the one between Amadeus and Hawkins (And poses the possibility that Joker is the reincarnation of Hawkins). It confronts him for the first time, on how ineffective his policy truly is to dealing with Gotham's actual problems, and whether or not he is more about the criminal suffering than actually being rehabilitated. Joker knows this, and in a twisted way, the Riot is Joker's (and by extension, The Asylum's) way of calling Batman out on this hidden desire to simply punish instead of cure. At the end of the horrific night, it can be argued that not even Batman is truly certain of what he wants or expects from this place he keeps trying to stick his problems in and bury them...he overcomes the agent of its evil, the Joker, but only by the skin of his teeth, and through no real introspection. Arguably, this could be because he simply doesn't know of a better way, and it is not entirely certain he would take a better way even if he knew of it, as Arkham City proves. He makes some small progress--at the end, even Batman understands how evil the Asylum truly is, and why it must be closed, and permanently, this time. But he is merely taking the problems of the Asylum, and transferring them somewhere else, somewhere that it's evil can follow him and really mess with him, the next time in a place that he is very familiar with...