The Batman Canon Coundrum

 Did we end up in the wrong timeline?

With the dropping of the preview period of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, I'm pretty sure it's open season on spoilers given the breakdown of the story- so if you are someone who cares about the events of the much maligned menagerie of mistakes that is 'Kill the Justice League'- I would recommend giving this one a miss until the floodgates have opened a bit more. And for everyone else- let me ask you a question- do you think that Suicide Squad and Gotham Knights ended up in the right places? Lore wise? I came across a Gamerant article that put a very decent argument for why both games should have been switched, but I want to take that even further to a systems level as we compare and contrast two desperately undervalued sectors of the Batman mythos. How could we have avoided the shame we share today? Switcheroo!

So the Gamerant article made the very sensible case that Gotham Knights should have been tweaked to be canon to the events of the Arkham franchise whilst Suicide Squad wanted desperately to be free into it's own fresh canon and would have benefitted much from the freedom. Gotham Knights literally bills itself around a world where the Dark Knight has died following a eye-wateringly stretched out cutscene against Raj Al Ghul in which the game leaves no doubt that Batman is fully dead. Not only does the Batcave literally explode- we find Batman's corpse among the wreckage- he is definitely dead. But what if he wasn't? Arkham Knight ends with the Batman's identity getting revealed to the world and then blowing himself to smithereens alongside Wayne Manor- all to disguise himself going underground to continue his campaign as a 'Demon Bat'. Who's to say that Gotham Knights couldn't have instead followed a Batfamily thrown into that situation? Left in the dark about Bruce's deception and left to grapple with a world where their mentor is either dead or left them to grow up quickly?

As for Suicide Squad? Well for some utterly bizarre reason, that takes place in a world wherein Batman has unceremoniously stepped out of the shadows and joined the Justice League- making his flashy pretend suicide at the end of Arkham Knight functionally perfunctory. That big and memorable ending had absolutely no impact on his story whatsoever. He just came back out as the Batman to the public, cowl and all, despite everyone knowing exactly who he is. How is he meant to resume duties as the 'embodiment of fear' now that everyone knows him to be a flesh and blood man? Some playboy douche with too much money and free time? Potentially interesting questions that don't get explored at all as Batman is relegated to villain in his own Arkham franchise. Beyond ingame summations of the events of the Arkham series, there's no narrative link between the two periods of game whatsoever- which boggles the mind a little.

And then there is the 'taste' angle to take into account. Arkham Batman is special to a lot of people out there for establishing the defacto combat system that all action adventure games have just adopted from that point onwards. It was a lovingly crafted and detailed exploration of the wider Batman mythos that weaved a complex and resonant journey wherein Batman came to confront his most challenging foes and overcame the extremes of his own limits in order to save the world. And then he was just chucked into the 'what if good guy bad' machine and came out a surly, thug who literally falls for the trope of 'we couldn't figure out how to make a boss fight out of this guy so here's a big monster fight with his face on it' cliché! The most embarrassing failure of a design team! Which is doubly insane because he is actually the one hero boss fight I could see genuinely fitting into a shooter-style game; maybe if you played up the gadgets angle and the cat-and-mouse predator style of Batman...

But what I want to really talk about, is how Gotham Knights could have better utilised it's systems if it committed itself to being a Live Service like it clearly already was. That story about the Batfamily coming into their own would neatly fit into the 'villain of the season' style narrative presentation that Live Services demand- we could have actually conclusive finales to plotlines whilst building up the meta narrative of each character becoming the heroes they were destined to be. Of course, Gotham Knights gameplay couldn't live up to that amount of sustained content, but we're living in a world of concepts right now- bear with me for a bit. Besides, in this very same merit- wouldn't of Suicide Squad been a lot better off as an ex-Live Service turned good?

Just as how Gotham Knights lost it's terrible Live Service elements and told a single contained story, Suicide Squad would have benefitted much more from reducing it's scope and shoring up the content they already had instead of desperately trying to stretch what little is available over a thirteen season period. Not least of all because no complete story exists meaning that the majority of the players who are going to drop off will remember this game as the one that didn't really have an ending and merely stretched on forever recycling the same one bad guy forever. If we actually let Suicide Squad be a normal game instead of a monetisation platform, we wouldn't have to wait months to here the stereotypical 'everyone gets resurrected nullifying the events of the entire game' plotline which has already been leaked from unreleased files. (Great job, WB. You never learn, do you?)

From every logical angle there's no reason why we ended up with the games that we did, both of which are a total betrayal of the franchise that made Rocksteady great. In fact, Suicide Squad feels like an active assassination attempt against everything they stood for as a company. As WB Montreal didn't have much of a reputation to lose! And to think that this is the trash we're being fed in place of genuine quality such as the rumoured follow up to Arkham starring adult Damian and old man Bruce! Gah! And you know we're still not going to get that legendary game, even with Batman getting resurrected before the year is out, simply because the original studio directors up and left when they saw what a mess Suicide Squad was shaping up as! (Why is there no justice in this screwy world of ours?)

At the end of the day, Rocksteady and Warner Bros are both guilty of the most shameful thing any game can fall to- obstinance. Of course it pays to be have confidence and stick to your guns- but there nothing about the Suicide Game worth sticking to except the promise of an easy cash cow that became less and less viable as the years ticked by as more and more like-minded would-be franchises crashed and burned around them. Now people are looking at the moderately healthy player numbers and noting how easily their dwarfed by others of the genre type and everyone is already counting the days until the game slinks away with it's tail between it's legs to be roundly forgotten. And it's all a damned unfortunate shame.