Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is explicitly set within the Arkhamverse created by Rocksteady, that means it is a quasi-sequel to 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight. Given how that recreation ends and the way this one begins, there are some questions that want answering for followers of the continuing storyline, and Rocksteady fortunately takes a second to set the document straight in an early scene within the recreation.
Please bear in mind that this text accommodates spoilers for Suicide Squad and Batman: Arkham Knight.
In one of many first missions in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, the foursome of anti-heroes discover themselves in a museum devoted to Batman. In-universe, it’s because, properly, Batman guidelines and that is sufficient purpose, proper? However it additionally serves as a method for Rocksteady to name again to its previous efforts and even reply some lingering questions alongside the best way.
For many who completed Batman: Arkham Knight, you realize the sport ends with Batman faking the demise of Bruce Wayne, his id underneath the masks. Within the recreation’s true ending, you may even see somebody taking on the cape and cowl as they descend on some street-level villains in Gotham, although exactly when this takes place is rarely defined. It is assumed, although not explicitly acknowledged, that this was nonetheless the identical Batman gamers have managed all through the sequence. So the query of how that Batman ties into the Batman seen in Suicide Squad was a lingering one. If it is the identical one, what’s he been as much as?
Rocksteady clarifies this in Suicide Squad, albeit succinctly. Within the Batman museum exhibit, the ultimate show acts as a strategy to clarify what Batman was as much as within the 5 years that unfold between the occasions of Arkham Knight and Suicide Squad. According to a show within the museum, Batman returned to the world after years out of the image, admitting he’s the one and solely Bruce Wayne and thereby acknowledging that he faked his demise as Wayne.
He then takes up a job as a member of the Justice League, per the group’s request, and is claimed to now serve a a lot bigger space than simply his stomping grounds of Gotham. If you would like to learn the reason verbatim, here is how the in-game voiceover from Jack Ryder places it:
A number of years after faking his demise, Bruce Wayne lastly returned, drawn again to the sunshine by the meta-human “super-heroes.” They requested Batman to affix the Justice League. He accepted. And so the story of Bruce Wayne–the Batman–continues, removed from the imply streets of the town that made him.
That also leaves rather a lot to surprise about–namely whether or not he went on hiatus, throughout which era others might have protected Gotham, or if he by no means relented and easily allowed the citizenry to imagine another person was underneath the masks. Nonetheless, it does present some quantity of closure for these nonetheless questioning almost a decade later how the ending of Arkham Knight is to be interpreted.
For extra on what Suicide Squad tells us of the Arkhamverse, here is what it has to say (or not say) about Arkham Origins.