Joker is the main villain of Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham Origins, and it’s debatable that he’s the main villain of both Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight. This has easily been one of the most divisive narrative choices in the Arkhamverse due to Joker’s exhaustive ubiquitousness, regardless of how marvelous Mark Hamill and Troy Baker’s performances are. Moreover, while Knight’s Joker implementation is brilliant and innovative, Joker himself doesn’t necessarily make for a Batman villain who is exciting to defeat in toe-to-toe combat, at least compared to the likes of Origins’ Deathstroke or Bane.
This is proven in City and Origins when Joker becomes a punching bag with little resistance, though in City it’s actually Clayface who players are striking at the steel mill and in Origins he’s wailed on in a non-immersive series of beatdowns before credits roll. However, Joker does offer one phenomenal boss fight in the Arkhamverse as the final boss fight of Batman: Arkham Asylum, where Joker shoots himself with a Titan dart and mutates into a massive, hulking monster who retains sentience and gains a punk aesthetic. Still, it’s the three-game-long throughline this boss fight catalyzes in the Arkhamverse that truly makes Titan Joker special.
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Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s story has ended and with it Batman’s Arkhamverse future has a fairly blank canvas to work with.
Arkham Asylum’s Titan Joker Boss Fight is a Great Culmination of the Titan Plot
Batman: Arkham Asylum’s Titan Joker boss fight may be ridiculous and whimsical, but Joker injecting himself with Titan is smack dab in his wheelhouse of psychotic ideas. Titan Joker is far bigger than ordinary Titan brutes, nudging him out of the bracket for a normal brute-type encounter—which would’ve clashed with Bane’s boss fight earlier in Batman: Arkham Asylum—and making him more so a villain who players evade and subdue in crafty ways.
Most of the ‘boss fight’ is actually just players defeating mobs of shirtless thugs who were transferred from Blackgate to Arkham for Joker’s scheme while also being mindful of explosive devices that Joker tosses into the enclosed arena. Then, as Joker is repeatedly preoccupied with a news helicopter’s attention and literal spotlight, Batman grabs and yanks him down with Asylum’s Ultra Batclaw gadget and lands strikes on Joker while his elongated fingers are embedded into the stage.
It’s certainly better than simply tackling yet another mob of inmates and a couple of brutes like in the encounter that occurs prior, and whose brute duo simply take an egregiously long time to fell between slow-motion dodges and mounted brute brawling. Joker becoming a Titan monstrosity is a necessity, though, as it’s this seemingly cartoonish and silly boss fight that allows the crucial events of Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Knight to unfold.
Arkham Asylum’s Titan Joker Boss Fight is a Cannonball Ripple in a Bird Bath
Joker injecting himself with Titan could’ve easily been a flash-in-the-pan story beat that was glossed over in a sequel, especially since players see that Joker is missing teeth and bruised but apparently recovering in Batman: Arkham Asylum’s closing cutscene. Instead, Batman: Arkham City doubles down on the Titan storyline and reveals that Joker is dying as a result.
This leads to the primary source of City’s progression being Batman’s pursuit of a cure once he and an unknowable number of individuals in Gotham City have been infected by Joker’s tainted blood via transfusion. This puts the threat of Professor Hugo Strange and Ra’s al Ghul’s Protocol 10 on the back burner and, when both antagonists are abruptly slain, the player’s attention is instantly drawn to a reveal that the healthy-looking Joker was actually Clayface, as evidenced by Batman’s Detective Mode not perceiving a skeleton within his body.
Joker truly does die at the end of City, and in Batman: Arkham Knight he returns to haunt Batman as Joker-infected individuals are beginning to show symptoms of the Clown Prince of Crime subsuming them.
Then, amid Arkham Knight and Scarecrow’s occupation of Gotham City, Bruce Wayne struggles with Joker’s incorporeal manifestations and eventually locks him away in the recesses of his subconscious in a battle for his mind and body. None of this would’ve been possible if Joker had not taken Titan in an effort to push Batman to do the same. Therefore, the Titan Joker boss fight’s significance cannot be overstated.
- Released
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August 25, 2009
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Alcohol and Tobacco Reference, Blood, Mild Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 3