Who would win in a fight? Comics writers know this is what fans argue about, endlessly, and feed those arguments with crossovers and stories like Batman vs. Superman. Usually it’s naff stuff where characters just biff each other for a bit and then abruptly form a getalong gang as if they weren’t battering each others’ faces in just five minutes ago.
WHY I LOVE
In Why I Love, PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it’s brilliant. This week, Jody appreciates Injustice 2’s super cast.
All that stuff is only relevant in story mode, of course, and story modes aren’t normally the reason people play fighting games—excepting Tekken’s agreeably insane one, with people throwing their family members off cliffs or into volcanos, hurling motorbikes at helicopters, and fighting bears. Usually though, fighting games struggle to tell a coherent story because they’ve got so many characters to work with. But comic books have been dealing with that problem for decades, and Injustice 2 simply steals the format. In the DC Universe, everyone already has a reason to fight everyone.
Weirdly, the plot’s a lot like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Superman’s a villain, Harley Quinn’s a hero, and Brainiac’s the final boss. Only in this version of events, Kevin Conroy’s Batman is also on the side of the angels—well, if Harley and Catwoman count as angels—and you only have to defeat Brainiac once instead of over and over again until Warner Bros runs out of seasonal content to sell you.
The performances are much better than they need to be, thanks to facial animation that was well ahead of its time and voice acting by the likes of Jeffrey Combs from Re-Animator as Brainiac, Robert Englund from Nightmare on Elm Street as Scarecrow, Alan Tudyk from Firefly as Green Arrow, and Laura Bailey from Critical Role and basically 50% of all videogames as Supergirl.
Moments that could be ridiculous are embraced and handled straight, like Harley getting a double dose of fear toxin (one isn’t enough because, she says, “I used to huff this stuff for kicks”), and hallucinating her greatest fear, which is the Joker coming back and convincing her to revert to the villainous sidekick she used to be. The same goes for Superman and Batman’s final confrontation, where they reminisce about the old times (“I miss the people we used to be”) before punching each other about the head and face for several minutes.
Where it gets properly over-the-top is in the fights, where suddenly characters can hurl each other into orbiting satellites or through the Earth’s crust without anyone dying. The Flash has a super move where he runs so fast he travels back in time, dragging his opponent to distant epochs so he can throw them first at the sphinx then a tyrannosaurus rex, before returning to the moment before he left so he can throw them at themselves.
You go from that to fairly subdued scenes where Green Lantern regrets the fact he initially sided with The Regime and struggles with his anger issues. Then his rage manifests in the form of a Red Lantern whose sidekick is a cat that vomits blood, and also you’re in Atlantis at the time. The dial swings between the sublime and the absolutely bugfuck as quickly as it does in superhero comic books, with as much cheerful disdain for tonal consistency as professional wrestling or French movies.
The one downside of Injustice 2 is that if you were depressed about Wonder Woman getting screwed out of a solo game after Warner Bros closed Monolith, unfortunately she doesn’t get her due here, being reduced to Superman’s second banana. But apart from her and Superman becoming fascists it’s full of bang-on portrayals of its huge roster, including the first version of Harley Quinn to not annoy me.
Anyway, the answer to “who would win in a fight” is Swamp Thing.
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