Gotham City’s Dark Knight is a character that the masses can’t help but be obsessed about, and that remains true no matter which medium of entertainment he’s gracing his presence with. In gaming, there was a lengthy period, when the Arkham series was still ongoing, when he constantly loomed large in our minds, but ever since Rocksteady Studios brought that particular story to a close with 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight, the Batman has remained hidden, funnily enough, in the shadows.
Rocksteady hasn’t released a single new game in the near-decade that has passed since then, and though we did get to play an open world game set in Gotham where you play as superheroes not all that long ago, sadly it was Gotham Knights, where Batman himself was very much MIA. How long it will be exactly before we get to step into the Caped Crusader’s boots again is anyone’s guess at this point- though fortunately, it looks like Batman is going to make an important appearance in a game not long from now.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is set to release in a matter of days at this point, and though it’s obviously not a new Batman game the way so many of us were hoping close to a decade ago Rocksteady would make, it is set in the Arkham series’ universe. Yes, we’ll be playing as the titular Suicide Squad, and yes, the game is set in Metropolis rather than in Gotham, but Rocksteady is making it abundantly clear that there will be more than a little bit of connective tissue between its upcoming Suicide Squad game and its Arkham trilogy.
Most prominent of those connections will obviously be Batman himself. The upcoming third-person shooter will see the Suicide Squad (or Task Force X, or whatever you prefer to call it) going up against the Justice League itself, which means the likes of Superman, The Flash, and Green Lantern will serve as the game’s antagonists and big bad bosses to take down. Batman is also going to be to be in that group. We have, in fact, already seen glimpses of what he will look like in the game, while Rocksteady has also confirmed that the Dark Knight is once again going to be voiced by the legendary Kevin Conroy, who sadly passed away a little over a year ago.
But what exactly do we know about the role that Batman will play in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League? We know that, like other members of the Justice League, Batman has been brainwashed by Brainiac, following which he has turned to evil, so to speak, and become a target for the Suicide Squad. We know that the squad will take Batman on at some point, which means a boss battle against him is all but guaranteed. It’s worth acknowledging that significant portions and details of the game have leaked ahead of release, which means there are spoiler-filled details out there about a number of characters, Batman included- but for obvious reasons, we’re not going to go into those details here. What we will say is that if Rocksteady is indeed planning post-launch content that will take players back to Gotham City and Arkham like rumours have claimed, we’d be surprised if Batman didn’t continue playing a major role in the game throughout its post-launch period as well.
Rather than theorizing about what his fate will be, however, what’s more interesting to focus on here is what kind of a dynamic the Dark Knight is going to have with the individual members of the Suicide Squad- because, this being set in the Arkhamverse, he does actually have a notable history with some of them. There’s Harley Quinn, of course, who has had her fair share of run ins with the Bat over the course of the Arkham series, which makes us more than a little curious to see how the two characters will interact in Kill the Justice League, and how frequently they will call back to their shared history.
Then there’s Deadshot, who obviously wasn’t anywhere close to being as prominent in the Arkham games as the aforementioned Harley Quinn was, but did still have an important role to play in Arkham Origins, where he was one of eight deadly assassins paid by the Hoker to kill the Batman, and (to a lesser extent) in Arkham City, where he was central to an entire side questline that saw him going toe-to-toe with Batman, and ended with his defeat and arrest by Commissioner Gordon. So there’s certainly history between Deadshot and Batman as well, which should make encounters between the two in Suicide Squad interesting- from a narrative perspective, at the very least.
Interestingly enough, Batman also had run-ins with all four of the playable characters in Kill the Justice League in the animated film Return to Arkham, which was actually considered canon for quite a while, before being rendered definitely-not-canon by Suicide Squad’s mere existence (seeing as King Shark flat-out explodes and dies in the movie and is a playable character in the upcoming game).
Beyond that, it’s also worth keeping in mind that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is being built as a live service games, with Rocksteady Studios having confirmed that it plans to release plenty of post-launch playable characters as part of those plans. How those characters will fit into the story, and if Batman will have a role to play in those stories in particular remains to be seen (especially depending on what his fate in the base game’s story will be), but if we were to see the likes of, say, Deathstroke being added into the game, could Batman reappear as well? In such a scenario, there would also be the question of who he will be voiced by in the future.
Meanwhile, leaks have also claimed that the Joker is one of several post-launch characters in Rocksteady’s plans. And yes, at this point in the Arkhamverse, Joker has been very conclusively dead for quite some time- but not only is he a comic book character (all of whom have ways of cheating death), he’s the Joker, for crying out loud, which makes him especially immune to being permanently dead. We wouldn’t be surprised if Rocksteady did manage to find a way to bring him back- but again, it would be interesting to see who he’d be voiced by, since Mark Hamill has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t intend to return to the role without Kevin Conroy voicing Batman opposite him.
It’s no secret that the Batman is the character many are going to have their eye on above all others when Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League rolls around not long from now, and especially with this being a Rocksteady-developed game – a studio that has done such wonders with the character in the past – there’s no shortage of curiosity around what the game is going to have in store for the famous Caped Crusader. Thankfully, it won’t be too long before our questions are answered, with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League set to release for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on February 2.
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