Batman: Dark Tomorrow

Batman: Dark Tomorrow
This game has no tomorrow.
Genre(s): Action-adventure Platform(s): Xbox Nintendo GameCube Release: Xbox NA: March 18, 2003 JP: March 20, 2003 EU: April 11, 2003 Nintendo GameCube JP: March 21, 2003 NA: March 25, 2003 EU: April 11, 2003 Engine: Alchemy Developer(s): Kemco HotGen Studios (Xbox) Publisher(s): Kemco Country: Japan United Kingdom Series: Batman Predecessor: Batman: Vengeance Successor: Batman: Toxic Chill

Batman: Dark Tomorrow is a 2003 action-adventure game developed and published by Kemco for the Xbox and Nintendo GameCube, directed by Kenji Terada, a writer of the NES trilogy of Final Fantasy games. It is based on DC Comics' character Batman and his iteration from the DC Universe source material. This game received extremely negative reviews, and it is considered one of the worst video games of all time. A PlayStation 2 version was planned, but was cancelled due to the game's negative reception.

Plot

While Batman is trying to stop a gang war between Scarface & the Ventriloquist and Black Mask being waged on Gotham City's streets, Commissioner James Gordon has been kidnapped, and is being held hostage at an overrun Arkham Asylum. Racing through the city's sewers in order to enter the Asylum undetected, Batman has to fight through a gauntlet of enemies ranging from Poison Ivy to Mr. Freeze before finally encountering the man holding Gordon: the Joker.

Batman soon discovers that Gordon's kidnapping was in fact orchestrated by Ra's al Ghul as a distraction from his latest plan to take over the world by planting bombs in the ice capes that, when detonate, will flood the whole world. Batman travels to the villain's stronghold in the Himalayas in order to stop him. The game's ending features a branching storyline: in order to get the most complete ending, Batman must disarm a signal device before facing off against Ra's and succeeding in defeat Ra's. However, the player has never given any indication that the device even exists, making the small objective easily missable, after facing off agents Ubu (Ra's Right-Hand Man), Batman will face off agents Ra's in a sword duel.

Batman: Dark Tomorrow's ending can go in four different ways, depending if the Player has either failed or succeeding in disarming the devise and/or depending if the Player(s) (as Batman) losses or wins agents the final boss fight agents Ra's:

• Failing to disarm the device and be beaten by Ra's will result in Ra's impaling Batman with the sword as Talia runs up to Batman on the floor defeated, Ra's will then start the devise as Batman watches as the world gets flooded.
• Failing to disarm the device and defeating Ra's will result in Ra's still succeeding in taking over the world as he start the devise and Batman watches as the world gets flooded, then Batman goes on his knees and screams "NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!".
• Succeeding in disarming the bomb but be beaten by Ra's will result in Ra's impaling Batman with the sword as Talia runs up to Batman on the floor defeated, however Ra's' minions will call out to Ra's saying that the device has been sabotage as Ra's attempt to use the device, but failed as Batman gloats about his "victory" saying "Surprise!", tho Ra's shrugs it off as that "it is a momentary victory" and that the devise can be fix in 17 hours.
• Succeeding in disarming the bomb and defeating Ra's will resulting in Ra's attempt to use the devise, but failed, and Ubu attempts to sly Batman with the sword, only for the latter to dodge it as the sword impales Ra's, in his last breath Ra's has his castle set to self-destruct as to take out Batman, but Batman is able to escape as Talia and Ubu uses the Lazarus Pit to recover Ra's.

Why It's Dark and Sad Today

1. Development Hell: For starters, this game was meant to be an Open World game with vehicles to drive, almost like the Arkham Series, but for some reason, the final game became an badly action-adventure game.
2. Terrible and outdated graphics, even for 2003 standards, despite using the Alchemy engine, the graphics for Batman: Dark Tomorrow look more on par with an PlayStation 1, Nintendo 64 or a Sega Saturn game. Other games that use the same engine such as Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Spider-Man 3 (Vicarious Visions version) and X-Men Legends series look miles better.
3. Horrible controls, the bat-grapple grappling hook has terrible controls which will make Batman fall and die repeatedly at the beginning of the game while he is trying to travel across rooftops.
   • On that topic, sometimes if you use the bat-grapple grappling hook in a random area of Arkham Asylum, you can potentially jump out of the stage and into an incomplete area that has no way to get back to were you can from without restarting the game.
   • The hang glider also has bad controls; it is difficult to tell if you are going too high, and some obstacles are not shown until it is too late to react, causing repeated deaths later in the game.
   • Punching and Action are mapped to the same button, which can cause even the progress of opening doors a chore.
4. Awful camera angles that are fixed and you can't control on your own. This sometimes make it impossible to see the enemy that you are supposed to defeat forcing you to guess where the enemy is.
   • On top of that, the camera will sometimes randomly change and will change the direction of the controls, which can cause cheap deaths.
5. The game is filled to the brim with Bugs & Glitches.
6. Stiff animations, especially Batman's animation when moving:
   • When Batman's running, his running animation looks very scam-pry, which makes Batman look like he's holding a giant poop for the toilet.
   • When Batman's walking, his walking animation has him look all angered and annoyed, almost like a pouting kid.
   • When Batman's crouching, his crouching animation looks very laughable and makes it look like he's a crab.
7. Poor Stealth Sections: Trying to be stealthy in this game is a gamble, as sometimes the enemies will hear you even when not making a sound or sometimes they are too dumb to spot you, and even when you get close to the said enemies behind, it's a gamble whether or not you can knock him out because of the poor hit detection.
8. The levels are extremely linear.
9. Very poor Prologue level in which the Player as Batman has to traverse the rooftops while swinging from tower to tower with the bat-grapple grappling hook, due to the terrible controls of bat-grapple grappling hook and poor fixed camera, its very easy for the Player to accidental run off the tower and/or drop from the bat-grapple grappling hook and drop to the bottomless pit below.
10. Batman: Dark Tomorrow includes a Combo Meter that, should Batman hit a foe and/or boss will gains points that in terms will allow Batman to deal more damage to foes and/or bosses, and will restart the Combo Meter if Batman gets hit. While a neat game-play mechanic, its poorly implemented as enemies don't have health and some of the bosses can easily be beaten without utilizing the Combo Meter as they have too little health, the only time that its helpful is agents Ivy's Plant Monster and the penultimate boss fight agents Ubu, due to them having the most HP.
11. While the voice acting is great. For some buzzard and unexplained reason, Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill do not provide voices of Batman and the Joker respectively. Even Batman: Vengeance, which was made one-and-a-half years before this game, had the actors reprise their roles.
12. The story is very arbitrarily and confusing: there are times when the villains pop right out-of-nowhere with no rhyme-or-reason, Batgirl (Cassandra Cain) and Robin appear in the first part of the game and are suddenly absent for the rest of the game (Robin is still seen in another cutscene), and Ra's (the true main villain) is only an off-screen audio at the beginning of the game and does not appear anywhere until near the end of the game at the final level, from the moment when you defeat the Joker.
    • Speaking of which, Batgirl looks extremely ugly in this game and looks nothing like her original self.
13. Despite the decent roster of boss battles, with a total of nine bosses, almost all of them (with the exception of Poison Ivy's Plant Monster and Ra's al Ghul) have the exact same strategies and can literally be beaten by spamming the attack button without any need to move, which hints that the developers had ran out of time to give the bosses' uneck strategies and attacks.
    • Adding in to that, the Joker, one of the most popular characters in the entire Batman series, is not fought as a boss; instead, he's an enemy rush boss, which makes Joker's inclusion to the game pointless, and makes it feel more like filler, Scarface and Poison Ivy also don't get to fight either (with Scarface being reduce to a cut-scene-on appearance after Batman avoids his gunshots and approaches Scarface, and Poison Ivy's Plant Monster doing the fighting).
    • Sometimes you'll encounter bosses minutes after defeating the previous one, specie mention goes to Croc, Poison Ivy's Plant Monster, Freeze, and Zsasz, all four of which are fought in a row in less then a minute during the level Arkham Asylum were the Player(s) "fights" Joker, hinting that the developers were meant to create long decent levels before Croc, Poison Ivy's Plant Monster, Freeze, and Zsasz in that order, but ran out of time for that as well and instead decided to have them be fought at the Joker's hide-out.
14. Artificial Difficulty: Some of the boss battles are incredibly unfair, like Poison Ivy's Plant Monster unforgivably spamming attacks all over the game area and Ra's Al Ghul becoming invulnerable while he performs a certain attack.
    • Whenever you or a boss get knocked out and fall, the game cuts away to show an animation of them falling on his/her back, which is not only an odd design choice, but also gets very annoying. Sometimes, the game also adds to it a short cutscene of a boss taunting you, and makes the fights more monotnous.
15. Laughably bad game over screens.
16. Batman gets knocked down a lot, due to the awkward controls and overpowered enemy attacks. Even worse, instead of actual incapacitating the enemies you have to handcuff after you knock them out and if you don't they will get back up again, it's even worse when you have to fight all of them at the same time (sometimes, up to six enemies), so you will most likely ignore fighting them and run from Point A to Point B.
17. Batman: Dark Tomorrow is ridiculously short in terms of length, and can be beaten in less then 2 hours.
18. The Arkham Asylum level has generic gray brick graphics throughout the rooms, making it difficult to remember where you were.
19. You have to do certain tasks in order to get the good ending, but you wouldn't know unless you've ether read the comics or look up a guide, because the game never even so much as hints that these tasks exist in the game at all, nor that there are multiple endings.
    • If you save your game during the final bosses without having disarmed the signal device, it is impossible to get the good ending on that save file and a such, you're forced to replay the entire game all over again, because there is no level selector.
20. The game never gives you instructions when necessary. For example, the game never mentions the fact that a required item that opens a door is in a different inventory than the gadgets that you use or that you must rotate the left thumbstick to free yourself from enemy grabs. It doesn't even tell you how to get the good ending, during the ending. You also wouldn't even know how to even get the best ending unless you either read the comic that's including with Batman: Dark Tomorrow or looked it up.
21. The final level is extremely impossible because it removes the radar map you previously had which makes navigation a chore, the level takes place in snow and there are chasms you need to jump, but because everything is white and foggy, you wouldn't notice you have to jump in the first place unless you looked up a guide.
    • After that you have to get inside the building, and because of no radar avaliable, it's impossible to tell where to enter, there is a door that leads you to a trap where the enemies will instantly shoot you and knock you down, towers that climbing up the enemies will shoot you again, exploring to find a way for too long results in the enemies spawning in, in order to get inside you have to shoot a grappling hook in the air randomly until you find the right spot to grapple inside, which you wouldn't be able to know unless you look it up.
22. Because of the amount of bugs, unfinished areas and how confusing the story is, there is a high possibility that Batman: Dark Tomorrow was rushed.

Redeeming Qualities

1. While the game graphics look dated, the pre-rendered cutscenes look amazingly animated for their time and faithfully reflect the look and design of the comics. This aspect of the game was praised by critics and gamers in their otherwise unfavorable reviews.
2. Amazing soundtrack score provided by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London.
3. While very arbitrarily and confusing, the idea behind the story to Batman: Dark Tomorrow is interesting.
4. The voice acting is pretty good, for example, Julian Fletcher does an excellent job voicing Batman.
5. The game includes a comic book, which is cool and this along with the cutscenes are the only only good aspects that are better than the whole game.
6. The radar map was a very helpful tool before it was removed in the last level.

Reception

Both versions of the game have received extremely negative reviews. IGN gave it a score of 2.2 out of 10 for the Xbox version and 3.5 out of 10 for the GameCube version, while GameRankings gave it a score of 24.06% for the Xbox version and 27.83% for the GameCube version and Metacritic gave it a score of 25 out of 100 for the Xbox version and 29 out of 100 for the GameCube version. The GameCube version had a rating of 15 out of 100 on NGC Magazine UK and even topped Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure (which had a rating of 24 out 100) as the lowest rated GameCube game in the magazine's history. Game Informer gave the game a rating of 0.75 out of 10, whilst EGM gave it a 1.5 out of 10. The GameCube version has a rating of 1.93 on GameFAQs and a rating of 1.63 for the Xbox version.

Trivia

• Scott Peterson the same writer as the infamous Superman: The Man of Steel game is also the writer for this game.
• Originally, Batman: Dark Tomorrow was going to be released on PlayStation 2, but got cancelled because of poor reception.
• Batman: Dark Tomorrow was going to be an open world game in similar vein to Batman and Robin.
• The game over screen to Batman: Dark Tomorrow became a meme in recent years, due to how laughable it is.

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