Since even before Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launched, there’s been a lot of drama surrounding a pivotal scene featuring Batman. Rocksteady’s loot shooter is the continuation of the Batman: Arkham storyline, so fans were naturally interested in how the game uses the caped crusader. Well, a newly discovered easter egg may give fans unhappy with his involvement some hope, or it may turn out to be just a really elaborate way of teasing Calendar Man as a future playable character.
As the game’s title suggests, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is all about taking out DC Comics’ biggest heroes after they’re enslaved by the mind-controlling alien Brainiac. Batman is among them, and while his appearance has some great nods to the Arkham games, his death at the hands of Harley Quinn has been a big problem for some fans. Killing a comic book character is often impermanent because there’s always a hero-reviving Lazarus Pit around the corner, but this death felt different to some.
Part of this was because the game is one of prolific voice actor Kevin Conroy’s final performances as Batman prior to his death in November of 2022, but broadly, some felt this was an anticlimactic end for the Arkham iteration of Bruce Wayne. This was a character players had spent a lot of time in the shoes of, and now they were forced to kill him. It’s giving similar vibes to how some players reacted to The Last of Us Part II, and scrolling through the responses to the scene on YouTube paints an ugly picture.
The merits of that reaction are a conversation for another day, but a newly discovered set of calendars hidden around Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’s world may hint that Batman will come back into the fold somehow. YouTube channel Batman Arkham Videos has posted a video (thanks, IGN) showing 12 calendars plastered on random walls throughout the game’s open world, each corresponding to a different month and with one date circled on them. December is the one exception, as it doesn’t have a date circled; It has a date marked with Batman’s symbol.
If you put each of these calendars in chronological order and use the date number to correspond to a different letter of the alphabet (with 1 being A, 2 being B, and so on), you get a cryptic message:
- January 8 – H
- February 5 – E
- March 23 – W
- April 9 – I
- May 12 – L
- June 12 – L
- July 18 – R
- August 5 – E
- September 20 – T
- October 21 – U
- November 18 – R
- December 14 – N
The question is who will return. The use of calendars seems like an homage to Calendar Man, a Batman villain who commits crimes on specific holidays as a bit. The serial killer appeared in previous Arkham games and could, theoretically, be a playable character “returning.” But the use of the Batman symbol on the December calendar seems to be hinting that Bruce might find his way back from the abyss.
But if it is Batman returning, will this hypothetical resurrection be in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League or a future Rocksteady project? That’s unclear at this point, but the studio does have plans to release new characters for the loot shooter. Given that the game is all about shooting and upgrading guns, it seems unlikely that Batman will end up as a playable character because part of his whole schtick is objecting to the use of firearms.
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