Gamasutra.com's Leigh Alexander discussed the sophisticated story of Batman: Arkham Asylum, and how the game "is a case study in the way that the commercial demands on a triple-A game work against storytelling."

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The story would also have been substantially stronger if the game were shorter. There are a lot of well-designed fights, but the majority of them are not thematically or narratively interesting in themselves. The game would accomplish the same set of story goals, for instance, if it had incorporated fewer of the supervillains at once, and this might also have spared us some boss battles with less-than-inspired play. I liked the transformations that Poison Ivy brought in the landscape, but defeating her was one of the most tedious and aggravating parts of the game, and from a story point of view, I didn't feel there was a lot of need for it.

One might argue that Ivy's ecoterrorist impulses show what it looks like when vigilantism goes wrong, but there's not much in the game that effectively draws a comparison between Ivy and Batman. And Killer Croc brings even less to the development of the narrative line. He really is there only to make certain tasks more demanding. The confrontation with Croc is foreshadowed well in the earlier parts of the game, but that still doesn't make his contribution to the plot especially meaningful.

Miss Razz via gamasutra.com »