Arkham Knight's First Ending Is Great, Its Second Is Bad, And Its Third Is Insane

I recently just beat Arkham Knight, and by “beat,” I really do mean beat. That’s at least my definition of doing everything in an Arkham game except finding 200+ Riddler trophies, and in this case that’s taking down every watchtower, blowing up every mine, and catching every one of Gotham’s rogues in and out of the main storyline. I ended the game with ~95% completion, and that’s more than enough to set off the game’s chain reaction of endings.

Obviously we’re going to start veering into heavy spoiler territory soon here, but before we begin I want to clarify something. My title may suggest the game has an A/B/C ending made famous by Mass Effect 3, and to a less controversial extent, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But it is not a multiple choice ending like those games, which launches you into an expository cutscene about what may or may not have happened to the Batman after the events of the game depending on one final choice you make. Rather, it’s a three stage ending, meaning everyone has the same one, but you’ll only unlock different pieces of it if you complete enough of the game.

But if you haven’t finished, stop reading now, and come back and see me once you’ve beaten it, by whatever definition you want to use.

(ENDING SPOILERS FOLLOW)

The first and most obvious ending of Arkham Knight, the story ending, is bound to be controversial in its own right. The entire game is focused on a pair of villains, the familiar Scarecrow and the unfamiliar Arkham Knight, an armored Batman clone who has no problem using firearms and commands a drone/merc army that swarms Gotham as Scarecrow devises his plan to drown everyone in fear gas for the millionth time

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For the duration of the game, the Arkham Knight’s identity is a big mystery to everyone, Batman included, and no amount of Alfred’s research turns up anything even resembling a clue as to who he may be. Ahead of launch, Rocksteady promised the Arkham Knight was a wholly original creation they cooked up in collaboration DC, so that had fans excited about the potential of the reveal.

As it turns out, they weren’t being entirely truthful. During a main mission about two-thirds of the way through the story, the in-my-head Joker taunted Batman by showing him an elaborate flashback about when he executed Jason Todd, Batman’s second Robin. At that point, I knew where things were headed, and I wasn’t wrong.

Joker’s hallucination would have been a big enough clue on its own, but I, like many Batman fans, am familiar with Under the Red Hood, a Batman story that has Jason Todd killed by the Joker (as occurred in a previous story, Death in the Family) and return from the grave to wreak havoc on both Batman and the Gotham underworld. There too, his identity is a mystery until it’s revealed that Ra’s al Ghul resurrected Todd in a Lazarus Pit, but it didn’t take and he went insane. He tries to kill Joker who murdered him the first time, and also has it in for Batman for leaving him to die. There’s also a variant of this tale told in the more recent Hush story, where Todd is a fake-out for another masked villain (who weirdly also shows up in Arkham Knight).

The Arkham Knight is a twisted variant of the Red Hood. Joker reveals that he simply brainwashed Todd and didn’t kill him, and in the game, Todd wants quite literally nothing but to see Batman suffer and eventually die. In their climactic battle, Batman rips off his faux-bat mask to reveal a sub-helmet that looks quite a bit like the Red Hood mask, and obvious nod from Rocksteady. Batman convinces Todd he can be redeemed, and he intervenes to help later in the game after Scarecrow unmasks Batman as Bruce Wayne for the world to see.

As a self-contained story, infusing Under the Red Hood with Rocksteady’s universe works really well. The entire game is about Batman pushing away his friends when they try to help him because he deems it too dangerous. At one point he literally locks the current Robin (Tim Drake) in a cell to prevent him from trying to take on Scarecrow, and so his rival turning out to be the Robin he let die is more than a little appropriate. Honestly, I might even like this telling of the Red Hood tale more than the original.

With that said, I understand why many avid Batman fans may consider it a letdown, given that they were promised a new character, and this is essentially a renamed and recostumed version of a character that has already existed for years, and most will spot the twist from a mile away as a result. It works within the game, but it was more than a little deceptive for Rocksteady to insist his identity would shock and amaze us all. I almost wish they made the Arkham Knight Talia al Ghul, which was a theory I had early on.

So that’s the first ending. Todd switches sides and disappears, Scarecrow is injected with his own toxin because that always has to happen, and Batman is outed as Bruce Wayne. There’s also a fun little sequence where you play as the Joker inside Batman’s toxin-addled head, where you lock him away to be forgotten, his worst fear now that he’s dead.

The story concludes there, and Batman returns to Gotham to finish cleaning up the streets even if the main villains have been put down. It’s here you’re told about something called the “Knightfall Protocol,” where after you put away enough of Gotham’s Most Wanted (read: complete side-quest chains), you can activate it and it does…something, the specifics of which are never made clear until you press the button.
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I ended up doing everything I could except finding all the Riddler trophies after I freed Catwoman. That meant taking down Harvey Dent, Penguin, Firefly, Man-Bat and a host of others, including Deathstroke who is brought in to replace Todd’s Arkham Knight once he goes AWOL, which was actually one of my favorite parts about the end of the game (though I hated that the final battle against the assassin is yet another tank war).

So what is the “Knightfall Protocol?” Now that the world knows Batman is Bruce Wayne, he says he has to give up being Batman for reasons that don’t really make much sense to me. It’s not as if everyone he knew wasn’t in danger already, and I’m having a hard time understanding why he has to hang up the cowl as it really doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. If Tony Stark can do it, why can’t he?

But he doesn’t just “hang up the cowl,” he lands on his mansion’s lawn in the Batwing, walks inside where he’s greeted by Alfred, and the entire place explodes, leaving the crowds gathered outside gasping in horror. “And this is how the Batman died,” says the Jim Gordon voiceover you heard in the beginning of the game, and the credits roll.

The game tries to act like one of Gotham’s villains blew up the mansion or Bruce Wayne committed suicide, but it’s pretty obvious he faked his own death and didn’t actually self-destruct himself and his butler, but what then? If Batman comes back, everyone’s going to think “well Bruce Wayne faked his death,” not “well I guess someone else is Batman now.” This is kind of the ending we saw in Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, and it didn’t make much sense there either, as we see Bruce strutting around overseas where anyone can recognize one of the world’s richest men when he’s supposedly dead.

I really hate this ending, and wish I’d just hung out on a rooftop and turned my game off instead of firing up the Knightfall Protocol. Yes, this isn’t the first time a hero’s faked his death, but in the context of the game we just finished, it makes no sense. He just…really, really likes his privacy? I get that all the criminals are now locked up, but they always escape, so why do this? It would have made at least a little more sense for him to jet to some island somewhere and have Nightwing, Robin and Oracle policing the city, as he’s finally confident enough in his team to leave Gotham entirely in their hands. That would have been in keeping with the theme of the storyline.

So naturally, when the game informed me about a “true” Knightfall ending after I’d finished finding all Riddler’s goodies and got that magical 100%, I figured the existing ending would be rectified. Instead, (as I discovered via YouTube), it just gets stranger, and is probably the biggest enduring mystery of the game.

The “real” ending features a lengthy cutscene of Gordon musing about Gotham without Batman, and eventually we see two robbers attacking a man and a woman in an alley, who are stand-ins for Thomas and Martha Wayne, obviously. The robbers see a shadow on a building, and yell that Batman’s dead and they’re not afraid any more.

Rather than swoop down and prove them wrong, the shadow elongates, then explodes into a fiery bat demon shape, and the robbers scream in terror. It’s something straight out a Scarecrow toxin-dream.

It’s a purposefully ambiguous ending, which is somewhat expected as Rocksteady doesn’t seem like they’ll come back to this series any time soon. Either Wayne returned as Batman and the robbers were simply seeing manifestations of their own fears of the caped crusader, or someone, either Wayne or a new player, is actually using Scarecrow fear toxin to control the criminal population. A worrying thought.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a game end quite so elaborately. I think many players will likely push the button to activate “Knightfall,” as it just hangs in front of you like a mystery, but I don’t think most will be satisfied by the clearly fake Wayne death ending. And if they do get to 100%, I don’t think they’ll know what to think.

Honestly, the final two stages of the ending aren’t really necessary, and could have been handled better if they did need to exist. The Dark Knight Rising’s ending was a bit nonsensical, but the torch passing to Thomas Blake was a little more satisfying of a conclusion than…whatever it is we see here. But up until that point, I think the Arkham Knight/Red Hood storyline was told quite well, even if it wasn’t the mind-blowing surprise that was promised.

What did you make of the ending, whichever one you’ve gotten to?