Saturday Morning Gaming: The Problem of Remembering Things in Sequels

At the beginning of Arkham Asylum, Batman is taking Joker to the titular institution. He parks the car, takes Joker inside, and, wouldn’t you know it, things get rather complicated rather quickly. As the game progresses, you get back to the Batmobile and pick up the explosive gel that you didn’t bother to bring with you. Later on, you have Alfred do an airdrop of your line launcher. It makes sense that you wouldn’t have these things on you.

You also do stuff like learn new moves and techniques such as those that allow you to throw two or three batarangs at once or have your combos kick in after a multiplier hits x5 instead of x8.

Hey, it makes sense that you get better at this Batman thing as you go along.

At the beginning of Arkham City, Bruce Wayne is having a press conference and gets arrested in the middle of it and tossed smack dab into the titular municipality. He has to get to a place where he can get an airdrop of his Batsuit and Utility Belt. So, sure, I guess it makes sense that he’d have to scramble a bit to get new equipment. Hey, it’s not like Alfred had the opportunity to throw everything in the airdrop. He saw Master Bruce get arrested and then sighed and threw everything together straightaway. It’s not surprising that he’d forget this or that item. And it makes sense that it’d take an interaction with Mister Freeze to get a Freeze Grenade.

But it seems odd that I have to earn throwing multiple batarangs at once again or re-learn the combo multiplier upgrade.

And then, when Arkham Origins came out, you learn that Batman had Glue Grenades! Those would have really come in handy in Arkham City!

AND THEN WHEN YOU START ARKHAM KNIGHT, YOU HAVE TO DO ALL OF THAT ALL OVER AGAIN.

I mean, I don’t particularly care. These are some of my favorite games, after all. Going up levels and upgrading your dude is one of the finer moments in video games and the opportunity to do it is something that I enjoy, even as I find it to be a thing that doesn’t really make sense.

I mean, in the Lord of the Rings: Shadow of Mordor/War games, they introduce a really interesting reason why all of your skills get drained at the beginning of the 2nd game. It makes sense that you have to grow in power once more.

Which brings me to Spider-Man: Miles Morales. They figured out the *PERFECT* way to have a sequel where the player doesn’t have access to any of the skills from the first game: Have the player be someone else entirely.

The game kicks off where Peter Parker is beginning the training of our titular protagonist and, of course, something goes wrong with a transfer of Rhino between this prison and that one and Miles and Peter have to save the day. At the end of the encounter, it turns out that Peter is going overseas with Mary Jane and, welp, adios! Don’t worry that we didn’t get that far into the training. You’ll do great.

And you go up your first level and the game begins in earnest.

And I didn’t feel like I should be able to do more stuff. Like, not even for a second.

Gotham Knights comes out on October 21st and I am really, really looking forward to it. I just also know that I’m going to think “shouldn’t Nightwing have known how to do that already?” at least once.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is The Persistence of Memory by Salvator Dali. It’s in the public domain.)