Batman: Return To Arkham - 8 Ways It Proves Remasters Are Totally Ridiculous

6. It Actually Looks Worse Than The Originals

batman arkham joker remaster
Rocksteady

Just how does a studio make a remaster look worse than an old-gen title?

Well, look no further than Return to Arkham, folks, as the gritty and gothic veneer of Arkham Asylum and City is no more. Though the idea to homogenise the visuals of Rocksteady’s original creations to bring them more in line with Arkham Knight may have made sense in development, the reality has robbed Asylum and City of their unique qualities. Gone is the greenish lens of Asylum, substituted for a brighter pallet that makes Joker look less like a maniacal serial murderer, and more like a cheap imitation of Cesar Romero’s wonderfully zany yet ill-fitting Clown Prince.

Batman too looks derivative of a plastic PoundLand action figure, and he’s shining for all the wrong reasons. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any redeeming visual qualities to be seen here (at least in promo shots). Some screengrabs do genuinely make it look like Virtuos have offered a stark improvement over the two title’s original visuals, and I’m sure some environments will have retained the magic that made them so captivating to begin with. It’s just a shame that the characters just look so completely wrong.

By all means look towards the many graphic comparison videos currently floating around the web to judge for yourself, but so far I must say community frustrations with this release don’t seem at all misplaced by any stretch of the imagination.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.