The Hilarity & Humanity of Henchmen in Arkham Knight

The video games Arkham Asylum and Arkham City are two of my absolute favourites but I didn’t get round to playing Arkham Knight, the third in the series (we do not count Origins), until recently. When I did, I enjoyed my time with the Dark Knight back in Gotham but it paled in comparison to the vastly superior City which is the the jewel in the crown of that series, inspiring many games and their mechanics that came after it as it did. Though Knight wasn’t as good as its predecessor overall, it was actually better in some places. The one area Knight excelled in was its ancillary dialogue.

You see, as Batman swoops around the city of Gotham, on his mission to physically assault and incapacitate as many people as possible, his cowl picks up on the radio chatter, or merely amplifies random conversations, between the many cannon-fodder enemies that populate the streets below. This dialogue is non-essential and can be missed or skipped without any detriment to the story or gameplay, they are purely there to bolster plot elements, develop world-building and occasionally offer hints to a stuck player looking for a path to an objective. For instance, in Arkham City you can overhear a ‘street thug’ explaining how he saw a corpse without a face down an alley nearby and if you investigate you’ll find the body and an entire side quest, or if you are already on that…