Batman: Arkham Knight, Let's Play #10 - Poison Ivy

Batman: Arkham Knight, Let's Play Archive!

UPDATE: While the video has been updated, none of the commentary below (from 2016) has! Please consider this a re-post!

In the end of the last episode, we used the newly acquired sonar attachment for the Batmobile to locate and free the long-buried roots of one of Gotham's oldest plants on Miagani Island, so that Poison Ivy could use it to help manufacture her anti-fear toxin spore. However, because giant plants erupting out of the ground tend to attract a lot of attention, the Arkham Knight immediately dispatched a squad of rocket launcher-wielding militia soldiers onto a nearby rooftop to bring it down. We pick things up in this episode with Batman making short work of these glorified henchmen.

But the Arkham Knight's assault didn't end there: the next stage involves an army of 25 drone tanks (Rattlers, Twin Rattlers, and Diamondbacks) trying to attack the other plant at the Botanical Gardens, only this time Poison Ivy's ready to fight back. Now, in case you were thinking that adding the ability for Ivy to destroy the odd tank here and there with her plant roots in any way redeems the frustratingly repetitive monotony of these Batmobile tank battles, it doesn't. It might not seem too bad to viewers of this video series, because this is the first full fledged tank battle I've shown you guys since Episode 5, but keep in mind there are at least five big ones that I didn't show you. And that's not even counting the near endless supply of optional tank battle side missions that I had to slog through in order to get the precious XP that allows me to get all those cool gadget upgrades. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of including the Batmobile in this game, but the sheer volume of the tank gameplay left a bad taste in my mouth.

And as if the regular drone tanks weren't bad enough, after we're done with this challenge, we immediately have to face a squadron of much larger and tougher Cobra tanks. These are too well armed and well armored to attack head-on, so you have to sneak around them from behind and use an X-Wing-style targeting computer to hit it with a precision strike right in the exhaust port. Basically, if drone tank battles are to the Batmobile as Combat challenges are to Batman, then Cobra challenges are the Batmobile equivalent of Predator challenges. What I find the most frustrating and illogical about this whole situation is that if there were just one or two of these Cobra tanks included in the swarm of regular drones from before, it would be basically impossible for the Batmobile to defeat them both together. It seems like a blatant excuse to shoehorn some variety into the gameplay while completely ignoring the logic of the game's world.

But the game's world is about to befall much worse than some nonsensical tank deployment strategies, because Scarecrow is finally ready to launch his long-awaited fear toxin attack! Using the Cloudburst, a chemical weapon dispersal device developed by Stagg Enterprises, Scarecrow is able to engulf the entire city in a cloud of gas that causes anyone exposed to completely lose it. Fans of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy might notice some similarities between this part of the game and the climactic sequence in Batman Begins where Scarecrow uses a similar device to vaporize Gotham's fear toxin-infected water supply, causing mass hysteria throughout the city. The difference here is that the Cloudburst also fried the Batmobile's power cell, meaning we'll have to find a way to fix the car before we can destroy the device.

But skipping back a bit, at the moment when Scarecrow detonated the Cloudburst, we were checking on Poison Ivy after the drone tank assault on her plant at the Botanical Gardens, which is the only scene in the episode named after Poison Ivy where we actually see her in person. So this is as good a chance as any to make a casting suggestion for who I would like to see play the role in a major motion picture adaptation of the game: Lena Headey. I must admit, I'm not familiar with much of Headey's work outside of Game of Thrones, but her extremely compelling performance as Cersei Lannister exhibits many of the attributes associated with Pamela Isley: a mix of cunning, charm, ruthlessness, and strength of convictions. Plus, she wouldn't even need to cover up her arm tattoos!

After a fairly uneventful trip back to Simon Stagg's airships (including a Legend of Zelda reference when Batman finds the means to repair the Batmobile) and a journey underground (including a fairly hilarious goof on my part when Batman attempts a daring stunt jump in the Batmobile), we're faced with our biggest tank battle yet, again with the goal of defending another one of Ivy's plants. We all know how I feel about these tank battles at this point, but I hopefully made this one more fun (or at least tolerable) to watch by drawing some comparisons to another one of my favorite video games: F-Zero X. What first got me thinking about the futuristic racing game for the N64 was how the tank battle music track in Arkham Knight sounded a lot like the Port Town music from F-Zero X. But then I had the epiphany that the voice modulator used by the Arkham Knight makes his voice sound pretty much exactly like the synthesized announcer's voice in F-Zero X! I haven't been able to look at either game the same way since making this discovery.