Arkham Incoming

The Batman Arkham series is one of the greatest superhero games ever. As more information has been coming out about the upcoming Arkham knight fan theories have been rampant as to the plot, the gadgets, and-most of all-the identity of the "Arkham Knight" (my money's on Hush).

The games themselves have great graphics with a diverse colour palette and detail put into every one of the characters. One would think that choosing a character to base a pattern on would be very difficult, but it actually wasn't. For me, the choice was obvious.

Take a guess before you scroll down.

IT WAS NOT JOKER!

I'm going to estimate that at least half of everybody thought it would be the "clown prince of crime." Ask a person to think of a batman villain, and they will say Joker. He's iconic. The antithesis to Batman, and played brilliantly by Mark Hamill. But Joker's been in everything! He's the main villain in Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and ultimately (spoiler alert) Arkham Origins.

Asylum

City Suffering from the aftereffects of the Titan formula

Origins (Voiced by Troy Baker)

I don't know about you, but I've had enough of Joker (if he's the Arkham Knight I will do something drastic). It would seem that the developer has as well, as the Arkham Knight trailer seemed to indicate that Scarecrow would be the central villain.

YES! YES! YES!

It's actually difficult to express in intelligible words how awesome this is. Scarecrow is actually one of my favorite comic book villains period (and not because he was played by Cillian Murphy in Batman Begins). 

But can we all admit that the man is brilliant?

His whole MO of playing on peoples' fear was taken to another level in Asylum when the game seemed to crash as a result of his fear toxin in a crazy psycho-mantis-esque mind bending bit of brilliance by Rocksteady. Then there was the entire crazy part following that including the literally larger than life villain. It's one of the screwiest sequences, and on top of that is just plain cool.

Batman's that tiny figure by the wall on the left.

Scarecrow is an underappreciated villain. Sure, Joker's unpredictable, but this guy uses people's own minds against them. This opens up so many options, especially in an interactive medium like video games. The aforementioned Psychomantis became iconic because he seemed to be able to reach out of the screen and mess with the player directly rather than through a character. If the trailer is anything to go by, he's going to be terrorizing the whole of Gotham city, creating more obstacles (avoiding fear-toxin, dealing with civillians losing it). Arkham Knight is going to be the final part of the Arkham series, and after changing the face of freeflow combat games by mixing in both stealth and horror, it's definitely a series that has to go out with a bang, and Scarecrow is the right villain to use. So bravo and thank you Rocksteady.