Batman: Arkham Knight, Let's Play #6 - Simon Stagg

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!


Episode 6 of my Arkham Knight Let's Play is my personal favorite of the ones I've released so far, but that's going to be the case for each one from here on out - which is another way of saying that I felt AK04 was slightly stronger than AK05. But that's not to say that all of the episodes aren't incredibly entertaining and extremely well edited...

I must admit that before playing the Arkham games, my Batman experiences were limited to the 1990's Animated Series and the theatrical films, I had never heard of Simon Stagg prior to Arkham
Knight. Thus, I don't know if the character is associated with his stylish airships in any media other than the game, but either way, they provide an exciting location for one of the game's most diverse and challenging levels. It's just an added bonus that they also resemble the iconic police blimps created for the above-mentioned Animated Series.

As fun as the airships are, there are a couple of prerequisites before we can enter them about halfway through Act 1. The first is to take out some armed soldiers guarding the airships, where I demonstrate a cool move for the first time in this series: the Batclaw Slam. The Batclaw itself, introduced in Arkham Asylum, is an attachment for the grapple gun that lets you latch onto objects and pull them towards you. In Arkham City, they added the ability to follow up with a powerful attack if you use the Batclaw on an enemy, in very much the same way as the Mortal Kombat character Scorpion uses his trademark Spear. In the video, I overlaid Scorpion's famous "GET OVER HERE!" audio under this attack to prove that point.

But that was only the first reference to the Mortal Kombat games in this episode, as the Act 1 finale consists of a one-on-one match against a Militia Lieutenant armed with blades mounted to both forearms, which is a virtual echo of Mortal Kombat II's Baraka. I added some special music here to drive home the comparison: it's two versions theme from the "Courtyard" stage, one from the original arcade game and one from the 2011 remake. My training as a reality TV producer came in handy here too, as I was able to make a fairly convincing Frankenbite of "Batman wins!" using in-game audio.

It's not until Act 2 that we first meet the pharmaceutical magnate for whom the episode is named. Right away, Simon Stagg gives off a nervous manic energy, which I would like to see portrayed in a film version of Arkham Knight by Richard Dreyfuss. My first instinct is to say that Stagg isn't a major enough character to warrant being played by an A-lister, but his next scene is what prompted my casting choice.

It turns out that Stagg betrayed Scarecrow after partnering with him on a mysterious project (which is very similar to the dynamic between Dr. Penny Young and the Joker in the original Arkham Asylum) and as payback, Scarecrow puts Stagg in a cage and doses him with fear toxin. His resulting freakout is almost a shot-for-shot copy of a scene from Scarecrow's first appearance in the Animated Series, when Scarecrow (voiced by the wonderfully talented Henry Polic) gasses a security guard with fear toxin during a bank robbery. In fact, I used the music from that sequence to exhibit this similarity for purely scientific reasons.

Come to think of it, the climax of "Nothing to Fear" also happens on an airship (or rather a blimp), so I thought it was appropriate to continue with music from that episode for one of THIS episode's climactic moments: when Batman receives yet another dose of fear toxin and hallucinates himself shooting Scarecrow with a giant revolver. Of course, the version of the Caped Crusader from Batman v Superman wouldn't have batted an eye over brutally executing a villain, based on the number of lives he ends with his Batwing-mounted artillery cannons... But for a more traditional "no guns, no killing" version of the character, this is still a very powerful scene.