UPDATE: While the video has been updated, none of the commentary below (from 2016) has! Please consider this a re-post!
After playing a major role in the Arkham City storyline, Two-Face is relegated to side mission status in Arkham Knight. But Harvey Dent's appearance is one of the highlights of the game, and he's one of the most important members of Batman's rogue's gallery, so he takes center stage in this episode.
But before we get to Two-Face, we have to wrap up the action in the movie studios. Rather than submit to Robin's request that Batman quarantine himself until the Boy Wonder can synthesize a cure for "Mad Clown Disease," Bruce Wayne pulls the ol' switcheroo on Tim Drake and locks his sidekick in the cell instead! The move is at the same time very uncharacteristic of Batman's noble nature, but also necessary for the sake of saving Gotham from Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight. I mean, honestly, Robin couldn't have handled this situation on his own - he's only got like four things in his utility belt! Also while Robin is locked up, Batman takes the opportunity to tell him the truth about Oracle's tragically fatal encounter with fear toxin and a pistol, leading to a heart wrenching show of emotion from voice actor Matt Mercer, which nevertheless went a long way towards me wanting to see Jake Gyllenhaal take on the role of Robin in a live-action blockbuster movie version of the game.
After a brief detour to make some progress on the Riddler side mission, our next goal is to go see Poison Ivy at the GCPD and convince her to help us deal with Scarecrow's imminent fear toxin attack. (Remember way back in the first episode when I said that her natural immunity to the stuff was going to be an important plot point?) Batman goes into Dungeons & Dragons mode, rolling a successful Charisma (Persuasion) check, and Ivy agrees to accompany our hero to the Botanical Gardens, the location of "the oldest plants in Gotham. They'll tell me what we need to do." So in other words, Poison Ivy's plan is to cast the 3rd level Druid spell "Speak with Plants" to learn how the plants can help produce Ivy's anti-toxin spore. However the resulting cutscene looks more like some combination of "Tree Stride" and "Plant Growth" on steroids, and the end result is that we need to find some way to free the plant's roots from deep underneath Gotham City.
But since it will take Lucius Fox some time to come up with a solution, this is the perfect opportunity to tackle a side mission, namely Two-Faced Bandit. In the game, this side mission is broken up into three different parts, where you have to stop Two-Face's crew from committing robberies at three different banks, but for our purposes I've condensed it into one sequence that includes highlights from all three parts. Almost more interesting than the gameplay highlights are the monologues delivered throughout the mission by Two-Face's voice actor Troy Baker. Now if you've played a next-generation video game in the last few years and you don't know who Troy Baker is, you're doing it wrong. He's voiced the leads in games such as BioShock, Uncharted, Last of Us, and countless other titles. He was the voice of Robin in his brief cameo in Arkham City. And he even provides several other voices in Arkham Knight. But as talented as Troy Baker is - and he's one of the industry's best - I've long fantasized (strictly platonically) about another actor playing a live-action version of Two-Face: Idris Elba.
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| Two-Face art by Jesse Sandler https://www.artstation.com/artwork/twoface-batman-arkham-knight-trailer |
While the suggestion of a black actor playing this role is hardly revolutionary - Billy Dee Williams had a cameo as Harvey Dent in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman - it's always good to get some diversity into Batman's rogue's gallery whenever possible. I thought of Idris Elba because he has experience playing both a criminal mastermind (The Wire) and a law enforcement agent (Luther), so he could bring two strong perspectives to the Two-Face/Harvey Dent duality of the character. And then there's his physical stature: Elba stands just over 6'2", which is a shade taller than the height of Bruce Wayne in the comics (the same as my first choice to play Batman, Daniel Day-Lewis), which would make it all the more satisfying when the two former friends go toe-to-toe.
This confrontation predictably happens at the very end of the mission, which contains two distinct gameplay segments. In the first, Two-Face's thugs are running around the bank willy-nilly trying to grab as much cash as possible. They're distracted, not only by their mission, but also by the sound of the bank's alarm blaring in the background, leaving them vulnerable to Batman's louder and more cinematic Fear Multi-Takedowns. In the second segment, Two-Face shuts off the alarm and heads into the bank himself for a little Bat hunting - along with an elite squad of Militia soldiers, reinforcing that he's been coordinating with Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight this whole time. But unlike the Catwoman vs. Two-Face boss fight in Arkham City, the binary-obsessed villain has neither a grenade launcher nor a health bar: he's armed with a regular shotgun (which is vulnerable to the disruptor) and he goes down after a regular-ass takedown. Which could have been a little anti-climactic if fortune didn't conspire to leave Two-Face as the last conscious enemy in a triple Fear Multi-Takedown to end the encounter! I take moments like these as a tacit reinforcement from the universe that I made the right decision to devote countless hundreds of hours to this project of mine...
Anyway, with Two-Face safely confined to the maximum security wing of the GCPD lockup, we can go see what Lucius has come up with to locate Poison Ivy's plant roots... but upon reaching Wayne Tower, we find that something isn't right. When we hail Lucius on the radio, he thought we were already in the building, which in my mind was the perfect lead-in to another side mission. Reviewing security footage of the Wayne Tower penthouse reveals that an intruder, who somehow looks exactly like the billionaire playboy, broke into Bruce Wayne's office and is holding Lucius Fox at gunpoint! Batman immediately recognizes the intruder as Thomas Elliot, a.k.a. Hush, a.k.a. the Identity Thief from Arkham City, who has surgically reconstructed his face to look exactly like his childhood friend Bruce Wayne! In a move that is certain to have some long-term consequences, Batman ends up distracting Elliot by revealing his secret identity, allowing him and Lucius to save the day.
The majority of this side mission takes place in the space of a single cutscene (minus some walking and approximately three button presses), but it does tie into the main story quite nicely. Also, its inclusion in a live-action version of the story would provide a nice opportunity for a cameo by one of the Batman universe's most influential actors: Kevin Conroy. The celebrated voice actor provides the voice of the Caped Crusader in the seminal Animated Series, all three true Arkham games, and several other animated films (including the upcoming Killing Joke), so what better way to get him into this project than as Bruce Wayne's dark double? Of course, in my fantasy world, he would have to spend most of his screen time in a full face prosthetic of Daniel Day-Lewis for the full effect, but there's always the opportunity for flashbacks to Arkham City to get Conroy's handsome mug on the screen. And on the bright side, both actors stand a very Bruce Wayne-like 6'2". Coincidence? Probably!
The remainder of this episode constitutes using the newly-acquired sonar attachment for the Batmobile to locate Poison Ivy's plant roots, but since the next episode is devoted to the "titillating tree-hugger" herself, I'll save that for next time.
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