Arkham Asylum

For just about as long as there's been video games, there's been superhero video games. Some have been good, others have been pretty damn bad. Often times, especially back in the era of side-scrollers, the games sometimes seemed like rehashes of established games with sprites that happened to be superheroes to cash in on the popularity of the franchise. If you've played enough X-Men, Spiderman, Superman, Batman, etc., etc., games from back in the day, they probably sort of run together in your mind because a lot of them are all equally uninteresting beat 'em ups. Over time, more of an effort has been in giving superhero games the look and feel of the comics on which their based, but it hasn't always guaranteed their quality. I remember buying the tie-in game that coincided with the release of the first Spiderman movie, which just felt rushed and kind of uninspired. I've played a little bit of the X-Men Legends/Marvel: Ultimate Alliance series--which have the benefit of standing on their own and not having to be rushed out to match up with the release of a movie, or be tethered to the style and plotline of the movie--which are certainly fun, but games that I would describe as "good, not great."

Now has come Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game that I can confidently describe as great. In spite of the tremendous popularity of the Christopher Nolan movies, publisher Eidos and developer Rocksteady wisely decided not to use the style of the films as a crutch and decided to make a world all their own, in some ways more similar to the comics, but in other ways entirely dissimilar to anything. The amount of polish put into the same is incredible, and unlike the hastily thrown together beat 'em up reskins of old, the game absolutely smothers itself in Batman lore, and weaves a story that can be loved by casual and hardcore Batman fans alike. The game really does feel like it fits into the cannon of the Bat-verse, and was made by people who know and love the source material. All of the characters seem pretty much spot on to their comic book counterparts, aided by the fact that the voices of Batman, Joker (Mark Hamill!), and Harley Quinn from "Batman: The Animated Series" all reprise their roles here. The game's dialog is also pretty well written. I don't know if the script contains any great strokes of genius, but the essence of each character seems to have been captured well.

The game takes place a ways into the Bat-timeline. Its made clear that Batman has been doing what he's doing for a while, he's met and faced off against all the members of his rogue's gallery, and he's helped out by a wheelchair-bound Barbara Gordon, going by Oracle (the Joker paralyzes her in Alan Moore's graphic novel The Killing Joke from the late '80s). To this point, there hasn't been any sign of a Robin, although not ever Bat-Story in the era of Robins involves Robin anyway. The plot is pretty simple: Batman, for the umpteenth time, has apprehended the Joker and is delivering him back to Arkham. His transfers him over to Arkham's security, and they get him strapped into a Hannibal Lecter-esque board-on-wheels, but Batman decides to keep following them until the Joker is safely in his cell to ensure that everything goes smoothly. Surprise, surprise, it doesn't. With the aid of his ever-faithful girlfriend Harley Quinn, the Joker replaces the Arkham guards with an army of thugs that were transferred from Blackgate Prison, sets the inmates loose, and kidnaps Arkham's warden. Hence, as Batman, your goal is to stop Joker and save the day. It all takes place over the course of one night and entirely within Arkham, but Rocksteady nevertheless does a commendable job making the game varied and expansive.

Batman is like the Da Vinci of vigilantism: he's a scientist and a detective, he's trained in ninjitsu and can stalk around in the shadows, and he can also just straight-up kick the crap out of people. Arkham's gameplay is reflective of this. At any point as you're exploring Arkham, you can tap L2 which puts you in "Detective Mode." Using Detective Mode, you can see enemies--including those behind through walls--highlighted in blue, with those armed with guns highlighted in red. It also highlights anything interactive in the environment in orange, and shows you vents that you can pry the covers off of to crawl through, or structurally weak walls that you can blow up. From time to time, the game will also have you search a room for clues that you then may get a fingerprint or DNA sample off of, and which you can then follow the trail of in Detective Mode. Usually, this is a pretty simple task, but I think these moments in the game more to make it a detective story, like a good Batman story, and not just a fighting game. The game gives you ample reason to be in Detective Mode pretty much constantly, although sometimes I switch it off just because the effect of it (it gives everything a Tron-esque digital look with a purple hue, and all the enemies show up as these neon X-Ray figures) gets kind of annoying, which is my only real complaint about it.

So Detective Mode, appropriately, covers the detective side of Batman. The other two aspects I mentioned are covered in your encounters with enemies which are divided into stealth sections and straight-up melees. The stealth sections will vaguely remind you of Metal Gear Solid gameplay, though the AI isn't as smart and its usually easier to escape if you get caught (that, and there's no exclamation points over people's heads). The stealth sections will generally pit you against a half-dozen or so armed guards--enough such that if you tried to just fight them head on you'd have no chance. Gunfire actually hurts a lot in this game. Usually, it'll be in a generously sized room lined with gargoyles that you can grapple to (you can grapple onto just about anything that will support you in the game by just hitting R1 as you're facing it) and perch on top of. From there, you have a few different options of how best to engage the enemies below you. You can throw batarangs to stun them and knock them down, drop down below them as they're facing away from you and silently KO them (by pressing triangle, if you're behind them and undetected), or, once you unlock the skill for it, by swooping them up as they walk below your perch (which looks particularly badass). However you want to do it, really the biggest key is to try and isolate guards from the rest of the group, which sometimes they'll do for you, but you can otherwise do by causing distractions. If you get caught, you usually have a split second to get back up to the top of the room and hop between a few different gargoyles to lose the guards before you get gunned down in a hail of bullets. When you're on the ground, you can do things like duck around corners and take out guards as they walk past, or catch guards in remotely detonated explosions (they never die though since, you know, you're Batman). Again, it has a lot of similarities to MGS, but its a bit more simplified and harder to muck up. A lot of what I just described can be done with one button, so long as its in the right context.

At other times, you find yourself fighting in closer quarters with random thugs armed with just their fists or the occasional bat, knife, or stun baton. Fighting them in hand-to-hand combat is done through an easy to use system whereby you hit one of the four face buttons while pointing towards an enemy to do one of the following: square just hits them, triangle will counter if they're about to attack (a little indicator will appear for this), X will have you tumble to try and get behind them, and circle will execute a cape stun move. So long as you keep stringing together these moves without getting hit, you'll accrue combo points, and once you get up to x8 (or x5 once you get an upgrade), you can execute special throw and knockdown moves. You can also tap L1 for a quick batarang stun. There are a ton of varied, fluid-looking animations for Batman's combat moves, and even though the button scheme is pretty simple, it ends up looking complex and exciting.

As you're playing through the main story, you can take time to look for special "Riddler challenges" as a sidequest. Doing so also gets you experience points, which you cash in to improve your combat movies, items, and armor. Basically, early on the game, The Riddler hacks into your communication system that you're using to speak to Oracle and heckles you about not being able to solve his riddles. In some rooms, when you enter them, you'll get a clue in the form of a riddle, and you'll have to find something that matches up with it in the room. Often times, these will unlock character bios, and are sort of a hat-tip to characters not involved in the main story. As an example, in one hallway you can find Catwoman's goggles in a display case. There are also a bunch of "Riddler trophies" to find hidden around Arkham. A few of them are genuinely difficult, although often times finding them is pretty rudimentary, and they'll just be behind a not too discreetly hidden vent cover or something. You can also find patient interview tapes to get more of a backstory on some of the villains, and find "chronicles of Arkham", supposedly written by the spirit of Amadeus Arkham, telling the history of his life and the island. Looking for these hidden items lets you appreciate the detail work put into the game, which is tremendous. They did a great job making Arkham exude a creepy, gothic style, and cut no corners working on every area. Floors will oft times be littered with papers, and you can zoom in on individual documents and individual photos, which will all move independently of one another if you disturb the file. And that's just random bits of what-have-you in the environment. The characters look tremendous as well. The Joker, especially of all, looks great, and his big, wide grin looks downright sinister.

Arkham Aslyum isn't a perfect game. Its a bit short and a bit easy (I played on Normal, not sure what Hard is like), but damn is it a lot of fun. I hope the same developer has plans for, or would be willing to discuss, a sequel. This game takes place entirely on one island. Seeing this kind of detail put into a game played out in Gotham City proper would be that much more amazing. I don't know if it'll happen, but I'm hoping it does now. Even if Arkham ends up being a singular entity though, on its own merits, its a great achievement.

9

9 (***)

Animation is expensive, and certainly a minute's worth of sophisticated CGI is going to cost more in money and manpower than the average minute from a live action movie. As such, its understandable why 9 is a scant 79 minutes long, a length roughly comparable to the beloved stop-motion animated movie A Nightmare Before Christmas. However, unlike Nightmare--produced by Tim Burton, as was 9--79 minutes simply isn't enough time for 9 to really effectively tell its story. Its a movie trying to be a big, sprawling, epic crammed into the package of a tiny, barely feature-film length movie. Granted it does tell a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end, but all of it feels rushed, developing at break-neck speed, not in an "I'm on the edge of my seat with excitement!" sort of way, but a "Holy crap, give me a second to stop and catch by breath!" sort of way. The world that director Shane Acker and the animation team have created is intriguing and darkly beautiful, but we barely get a chance to really walk through more than a tiny fraction of it. The movie isn't unenjoyable, but certainly left me thinking about what it could have been as much as what it actually is after its done.

The movie draws you in immediately with a great hook: In the opening shots we see a little human-shaped doll figure made of cloth being stitched up. The scene fades, and when it fades back in, we see the humanoid figure hanging by one arm to the top of some sort of a circular tube. Suddenly, it springs to life, jumps down, and studies its surroundings with its two big, metal, cylindrical eyes, lined with curved white flaps that rotate in and out--the way circular doors close on spaceships in sci-fi movies--to simulate a pupil expanding and contracting. On his back is a big black number: "9". Peering over the table the construct finds himself on, he sees a dead body sprawled out on the floor, various papers scattered all around him. We suppose its his creator, but who was he exactly? There's a circular shaped object adorned with strange symbols on the ground that 9 seems compelled to pick up. Carrying it within himself via the zipper that traverses down his front side, 9 makes his way to the window, and gets a view of the bombed out city that he finds himself in. He tries to call for help, but finds he's unable to speak.

Eventually, 9 makes his way out of the building and onto the ground, where he meets 2, another construct like him, although apparently with some vision problems, as he has one giant (relative to him) eyeglass lens pulled over his face. 2 seems to know a bit about how each of them was created. He rummages through a trash heap and finds a voice box suitable for 9, and after some quick tweaking, 9 is speaking in the voice of Elijah Wood. While marveling the craftsmanship of 9's design, seemingly an upgrade on his own, he's ensnared by the "The Beast", a big robotic monster which is built in the shape of, and acts like, a wolf or a big-ass dog. 9, however, is barely able to escape and finds himself in the company of a few more numbered companions. There's 5 (John C. Reilley), who had part of his "face" blown off back when the world was still in the process of being bombed to smithereens and has a big sewn-on patch and a missing eye, 8, the tank of the party if you will, who's big and slow-witted and at one point seems to get high off of a magnet, 6, who is seemingly crazy and draws the same strange images over and over again and posts them everywhere, and 1 (Christopher Plummer) the old, wise (or maybe not so wise?) leader. Later on, we meet 7, who, seemingly just because, is a "woman," represented by the fact that she's voiced by Jennifer Connolly and is made of a slightly different shade of leather. She also wears a bird skull as a helmet. Whatever. 9 wants to go out and save 2, however 1 strictly forbids it, telling 9 that basically you're as good as dead when The Beast gets you, and that those that are still alive are alive because they've remained in hiding. 9, apparently capable of making complex life decisions a couple of hours after springing to life, decides he's going after 2 anyway, and 5 decides to come with out of a sense of duty to 2, who saved him back in the day. The most intriguing characters (or are they one character?) come later as well, the 3s: a set of twins who endlessly catalog any objects they come across, which they do by flashing morse code-like messages between them by flickering the lights in their eyes. I'm not sure what it says that the characters I found the most compelling are the ones who never speak. I don't have anything against what any of the voice actors did with their roles, I just think that more often than not, their characters don't get a whole lot to say that's interesting.

Eventually, our heroes force a final showdown with The Beast, actually not that far into the movie, and later on there are final showdowns with other, still more fearsome, mechanical creatures. Some of these action sequences have some fun moments, and one of the villanous robots--a spider-like shape that has half of a baby doll with glowing red eyes inside of it--is genuinely terrifying. There's also a clear resolution to the story, and most of the questions posed at its outset are answered, but the emotional climax isn't really all that stirring. There's only so much we can get attached to these bits of metal gears and leather sacks in 79 minutes, especially when a big chunk of those 79 minutes is them running away from various giant mechanical terrors. I wanted the movie to stop a breathe for a minute, and explore more of the post-apocalyptic world created for us, the way Wall-E stopped to show us a day in Wall-E's life alone on earth before getting on with the main plot that had him and Eve roaming around the mothership of the humans. The movie isn't unenjoyable, and the animation is excellent, I just feel as though better use could've been made of the imaginative world that the animation produced.

Sephiroth is Alive?

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 04:28-06:00

"Where's its fucking head? The whole thing's stupid."
"I'll talk as much as you want later, miss."
"Speak with the planet? What does the planet say?"
"Who you callin' Mr. Barret? That don't sound right!"

FF7's overworld theme is the best in the series. Felt the need to get that out of the way.

One of things that I think is pretty brilliant about the way the first act of FF7 is set up is the misdirection that's put into it. If you're someone who played the NES/SNES games and figured that eventually, in spite of the fancy new futuristic setting, FF7 would eventually start conforming to previous conventions, then maybe eventually getting out of Midgar and roaming around the overworld wasn't that much of a surprise. Its easy to imagine, though, someone going into the game completely blind finding it completely plausible that the game takes place entirely within the city of Midgar. The city would certainly be big enough. Similarly, even though every once in a while you get vague mentions of some guy named Sephiroth, the beginning of the game seemingly makes it perfectly clear that the object of the game is to thwart the schemes of the Shinra corporation within their own reactors and their own headquarters, and that the game's main antagonist is President Shinra and his gawdy red suit. All of this gets turned on its head, when, surprise, President Shinra gets killed, not by anyone in your party, but by Sephiroth. Rufus, the President's son, and the rest of Shinra certainly hang around for the rest of the game, but the main focus of the story shifts tremendously after you get out of Midgar. In some ways, Final Fantasy VII is a pretty simplistic "good saves the world from evil" story, but on another level, its pretty unique in the way it keeps the player guessing in where its going.

Right now I'm saved on the world map right outside of Kalm. Going to save the big long exposition setting up all of Sephiroth's backstory until next time. I ran into a little bit of an issue fighting whatever the hell the boss is that chases you down after the motorcycle pursuit minigame. Not thinking, I had an Elemental-Poison materia combination on Cloud's weapon (with no other attack magic), thus making him unable to hit the (non-living) tank type of thing. So he was completely useless for the entire battle. Still managed to win though. Crisis averted. Elemental-Poision isn't even that good of a combination, I realize now. I was confusing Elemental with Added Effect, which you get much later in the game. With Elemental, the enemy has to have a vulnerability to the Poison element in order for it to do anything, something that I don't believe applies to a lot of enemies in the game. With Added Effect, on the other hand, anything that isn't specifically immune to the Poison status effect (where their HP drains every turn) has a chance to have Poison inflicted on it every hit.

Oh yeah, and this section of the game has my absolute favorite line from Barrett. Cloud realizes that Jenova is being stored in the Shinra building, which pretty much induces a seizure in him. We the player can only imagine what the hell is going on with this grotesque creature and what Cloud's connection is to it. Meanwhile, Barrett just looks in and says, "Where's its @#&@# head? The whole thing's stupid!"

A Golden Shiny Wire of Hope

Final Fantasy VII Playthrough
Playtime: 03:05-04:28

"In my veins courses the blood of the Ancients. I am one of the rightful heirs to this planet!"

I played through the pillar section, climbed the wire, and worked my way up to floor 64 of the Shinra building. Ran into another addition to the bizarre enemies list for this game (see the previous post) in the form of the enemy called "Sword Dance", which roams the halls of the Shinra building and appears to be a giant floating fish type creature. I believe they're the first enemy of the game to put my characters in Fury status--the status effect that there's no reason to ever get rid of. Fury increases the rate that your limit bar fills up, supposedly at the cost of weapon accuracy, but any sort of decline that actually exists really isn't noticeable at all. Throughout the game you get Tranquilizer items that take you out of fury, but there's no really why anyone would ever want to. I really don't think they tested that thoroughly enough if it was supposed to have any sort of real determent to your characters such that it would possibly outweigh the benefit of more limit breaks.

On the 62nd floor you meet the mayor, a very minor character, but an amusing one. I love the idea that Shinra has so completely taken over Midgar that they've literally stuffed the mayor into a tiny room in the library and he spends all day making up odd little riddles. They really go to great lengths establishing Shinra as being completely, cartoonishly evil throughout the game. I guessed The Mayor's password right on the first try in the little minigame where you have to find the misplaced books in the library and get a letter for the password from their titles. That got me an Elemental materia. Not all that useful to me right now, but I can start leveling it up. I also picked up all three item coupons on floor 63, although I screwed it up a couple of times to begin with. That got me a Star Pendant (immunity to poison), Four Slots (armor), and an All materia. You can never have too much All materia.

Up next I fight to the top of Shinra tower, meet Red XIII--the favorite of furries "anthros" everywhere, and get the first glimpse of Jenova as the game's plot starts to shift from an anti-giant corporation, death to tyrants sort of thing, towards something much more operatic and heavy on fantasy. That, and the bizarre Road Rash-like driving minigame.