Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
While obviously Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is about…killing the Justice League, there is one potential death that has had everyone unsettled or angry, the idea this is how Arkham Batman, whom we’ve played as over the course of three games, will meet his end in this universe. And that it’s also Kevin Conroy’s final performance, as the famed Batman voice actor sadly passed away in late 2022 (there is actually one more animated onscreen performance coming, it turns out).
Now that I’ve played through the game, including all the Batman stuff, I think I can comment on whether or not this feels “disrespectful” to Conroy or Arkham Batman in general. Obviously spoilers are going to follow, but if you’re curious how this plays out, or want to discuss what you’ve played in early access, you can follow along.
From the start, Batman is positioned as the leader of Brainiac's corrupted Justice League, and you will hear comms from him all throughout the game as he laments the Suicide Squad becoming more and more of an annoyance.
There is a decently cool sequence near the beginning of the game where Batman hunts down the Suicide Squad one by one, like you’re the Arkham goon being stalked this time (which I guess, technically, you are). Then later, the Batman “boss fight” as it were is…less well-executed, I’d argue, wandering around a room full of fear gas as each character, fighting nightmares through essentially quicktime events. This culminates in what I can only describe as a Borderlands bullet sponge boss fight where a giant nightmare bat-torso shoots laser eyes and throws fire waves at you as you unload no less than 50,000 rounds into him. This part isn’t “disrespectful” as the way you beat Batman, it’s just…not very good. I’d say it’s probably the game’s worst boss fight.
The infamous part in question is that at the end of that fight, Batman is left injured enough to barely be alive. Then, he’s hauled down to the center of town as bait for Superman to come out and play. But he doesn’t need to be live bait.
This sequence has Harley making a speech that I’d say is less about disrespecting Batman and more about elevating herself, that after all the villain’s he’s faced over the years, it’s her that beat him in the end. I sort of love this moment for her.
Suicide Squad
What happens next has been widely misreported through leaks or hearsay. I saw people saying she says something like “It’s our time now!” before shooting him. Instead she says “You always gotta end on your best joke,” before shooting him, which I’d argue is a better line.
After he’s dead, there was a leak that claimed Harley carves a bat symbol into his chest which…does not happen. That’s not a thing. She simply shoots him and Superman comes in and the boss fight begins. This is not Boomerang about to piss on Flash’s corpse before he’s stopped (which does happen).
I don’t think you can be mad at Rocksteady for the idea that Conroy’s last major performance is here, where Batman is evil and is shot to death. Obviously no one knew that would be his last performance, so that’s not fair. The game does have a tribute to him at the end of the credits, a eulogy of sorts about Bruce/Batman that also applies to Conroy. It’s nice, though if I was a player who knew nothing about that whole situation, I would be somewhat confused about why they were eulogizing just Batman and not the other JLA members. But if you know, you get it. And it’s nice.
As for the “this is how Arkham Batman dies after three games??” problem…eh. It’s hard to take anything that happens in this game seriously, as this is comic book land, and while there are no firm answers by the end of the game, if the Arkhamverse is meant to continue, we can rewind time, jump into a parallel universe, throw everyone in a Lazarus Pit. There are a million ways to “get out” of this dead JLA situation. But the problem now is that if Arkham Batman was meant to come back, it will be without Conroy, unless he already recorded lines for some future seasonal content.
Arkham Knight
If anything is disrespectful about Suicide Squad it’s how the game and ending in particular were gutted on a dramatic level to push its live service ambitions, but that’s a conversation for another day. If we are doing a whole “evil Batman” storyline, I think the game actually did set him up pretty well as a mastermind who would be formidable if he was on the other side, and if they did have to kill him as part of a plot like this, honestly, the Harley scene is not bad.
But yes, it will be enormously sad if this is truly the last we see of Conroy’s Batman. That may not be Rocksteady’s fault, but here we are.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
