“It’s da Bat!” “It’s da Bat!” “It’s da Bat!”
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Arkham Asylum. Has better pacing and a more focused plot since everything takes places on Arkham Island which isn’t fully explorable from the start. It’s easier to loose focus on the main missions when playing the sequels but that’s just me 
Also Asylum has one of the most epic scene in the series, spoilers if you haven’t played it (go play it!)
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This is a difficult question because each entry has their own strengths over another.
Asylum and City are probably the most favourite story-wise.
Origins has the best boss fights.
And Knight perfects the gameplay to be silky-smooth.
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Gotta go with Arkham Knight. I love the entire Arkham series, every entry is top tier (yes, even Origins), but Knight just kept surprising at every turn (except for the reveal of who the actual Arkham Knight was, everyone saw that coming). It’s the scariest game in the series and one of the scariest games of all time, in both atmosphere and jump scares, like a melding of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Scarecrow’s never been more frightening, characters like Man-Bat and Killer Croc are terrifying, the plot line of the infected people Turing into Joker was certainly not expected, and the reveal that The Joker, who was sworn to have been dead for real, was actually part of the whole damn game as an infection in Batman’s mind slowly taking him over was a twist nobody expected. They pulled out all the stops for the last entry, and they nailed it.
I always felt that a better reveal for the identity of the Arkham Knight would have been Barbara Gordon. Her kidnapping and paralysis at the hands of The Joker was only a cover to Joker’s true intentions, which was to implant in her mind the notion that Batman is actually her enemy who caused all her suffering, and she has actually been able to walk all along, having built up the Arkham Knight persona, built a combat suit that deceptively looks like a man’s physique to throw off suspicion, joined forces with Scarecrow, and faked her own kidnapping and death in the game to drive Batman insane with guilt. I guarantee you, no one would have seen that coming.
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Origins also had a great story. I remember how people were pissed because the plot was again focused on the Joker even though Black Mask was the most featured in trailers. Arkham series is Joker’s story.
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That’s what was great about it. It really leaned into the fact that all of Batman’s mythology is a fight between him and The Joker, and all the others are just filler, brief breaks between their battles. The Arkham series really gets that across, how despite the threat posed by all these other dangerous villains attacking, Joker’s actions are connected to, responsible for, or have influenced, every action taken by all the other super criminals in the games.
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I am constantly impressed by the way Batman writers are able to wedge the Joker in to anything even remotely Batman related not even him dying in City stopped him from being in Knight and multiplying into five Jonklers.
Knight has a fantastic plot in which Scarecrow takes twelve hours to completely dismantle the Batman by allowing Batman to simply Batman himself into a corner which is marred by The Joker appearing so we can get yet another repeat on how Batman can’t possibly function with out Mr Society because they are opposites attracting and all that crap.
Oh and then there is the actual Knight himself, I have no clue why he wasn’t simply just the Red Hood from the start the whole other persona is so ill-defined from the casual Red Hood character it feels like a pointless mystery. You could have spent the time the in-game characters use trying to figure out who he is and instead use that time to better deconstruct Batman’s relationship with Todd then and in the game’s time.
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Oh fucking God, no! I can see you typing Walter, put your keyboard away Walter!
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The only reason Scarecrow’s assault was working at all was because the exposure to his toxin was making The Joker stronger. If that hadn’t been happening, Batman would have ended the whole thing in half the time at least, including the other villains. Not to mention he only pulled off his assault because of the Arkham Knight’s army, and AK only exists in the first place because of The Joker. Hell, the whole damn Arkham series storyline only happens as it does because of him (with a little oomph from Ra’s Al Ghul’s chemicals slowly driving Gotham crazy over the centuries to culminate in The Joker as it’s final state, but that’s another issue entirely).
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I am liking this only because you work so hard on it and because I don’t want to debate the finer points of Batmobile: Arkham Knight.
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Fair enough. Good name for, too. 
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i kinda liked the joker as virus thingy in ak. it’s just about on the right side of outrageously ridiculous for me. kinda in the same ballpark as snyder’s death of the family run. like, it has all kinds of problems but it’s too goofy for me to really hate on, you know? not like geoff john’s go nowhere three jokers schtick.
i can’t really see any hamil performance as a ‘mr society’ take on joker either; way too much glee and not enough cod-sociology. that rhymes, so it has to be true.
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Yeah, I prefer the Joker who’s gleeful and giggly and doing horrible things because he thinks it’s funny, to the one who’s trying to prove some sociopolitical point to people while playing up a clown image. As great as Ledger’s Joker was, I really don’t like how much they’ve tried to make most subsequent Jokers like him, focusing on him being scary-looking and philosophical and crazy just for the sake of crazy. They don’t seem to quite get the fact that Ledger’s Joker made sense for Nolan’s universe, and Phoenix’s Joker makes sense for that universe (and he’s kinda in-between the classic and Ledger Jokers, mentally), but those are outliers. Hamill and Nicholson show more true versions of what the Joker is supposed to represent; that he’s not scary and violent and insane because of some philosophical view of society. He’s scary and violent and insane because he thinks it’s funny. That’s all, it’s that simple. All the death and destruction is a joke, an actual, literal joke that he’s trying to tell to an audience, and he sees death and pain and misery as a legitimate punchline. He’s not trying to change people’s minds about the meaning of life, he does what he does because it’s hilarious and makes him laugh. Hamill’s version always makes that work.
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One could argue that Nicholson’s Joker was a bit too materialistic (and certainly too much just Jack Nicholson in clown makeup) to truly be in on his own jokes.
I think we can all agree, though, that Jared Leto’s Joker is the worst Joker.
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Indeed, Leto’s Joker was just… damaged.
Joker in comics is also a mixed bag. I haven’t read 'em myself but when I see this every now and then, I’m not sure I want to know what’s going on 
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From the perspective of someone who has literally never read a superhero comic, Jared Leto’s version of Joker was fine. Not good, not bad, but “fine”. It wasn’t any more or less offensive than most of the other versions of the character I’ve had to sit through (and I am VERY tired of the Joker, to be honest…I didn’t even bother to see the last one and likely won’t bother to see its sequel). Leto was a bit of a departure from previous versions, sure, but not having the comic book background to draw on, I saw nothing wrong with it.
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Agree with the comments about Leto. I don’t think his was the worst, but certainly the worst of those listed there. Brent Spiner’s on Young Justice was probably the worst. I feel like Leto didn’t really get a chance to shine, because that movie wasn’t so much edited as it was hacked up with a chainsaw. I saw a potential behind what was shown, and a little more in the extended cut that confirmed that suspicion, and he got to do a little more in the Snyder Cut. But, I think his just ended up being worst by default due to being so cut from the film.
I dabble in comics but, with superheroes in particular, it’s too hard to keep up a lot of the time. It’s so hard, even the writers can’t do it after about 5-10 years. That’s what all those multiverse shattering events are for; blowing everything up and starting over (only to muck it all up again eventually), making a ton of money in the process.
As for “Joe” there? IIRC, he had his own face cut off (for some reason) and he was going around forcing everyone to do the same? 
Maybe it was an anti-drug PSA…?
That’s probably true, and more than a little fair, but a lot of Leto’s Joker feels forced and/or unsure of its direction. All the others come across not only far more naturally and smoothly but all of them set out only to be the best versions of themselves in their universes. Leto, at least partially, seems to make it a point to emulate and, more importantly, surpass those that came before him.
Arguably no Joker will fit in so well in anything other than their film/time/era, whether or not their movie was hacked to bits in post, but Leto never really seemed to decide what he wanted his to be. I couldn’t imagine Nicholson versus Bale, for example, I’m not confident Arthur Fleck would survive a confrontation with any on screen Batman (even Adam West) and I’m sure “Unseen Arkham Prisoner” will be at his best opposite Battinson. Though, of course, the fact that Leto’s initial appearance was so mutilated by production certainly and definitely didn’t help his case.
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Who is the baddest “bad bitch” in WoA? (Main campaign only)
- Dalia Margolis
- Maya Parvati
- Alma Reynard
- Sierra Knox
- Vanya Shah
- Akka
- The Washingtons
- Athena Savalas
- Alexa Carlisle
- Tamara Vidal
0 voters
Francesca De Santia, Penelope Graves, Yuki Yamazaki, Andrea Martinez, Ljudmila Vetrova, and Imogen Royce don’t make the cut because their presentations in the game don’t really come across as dangerous and ruthless as their bios imply they can be. These other ladies fit their descriptions perfectly, however. So, who’s the baddest of them, by any definition of that word that you want?