In the last post, I not-so-humbly bragged about beating every Ys Origin boss on the first try.  That did not hold up – even excluding the boss you’re SUPPOSED to lose to, I took a few dirt naps before the end credits rolled.  Most of them were resolved by following the time-honored method of backing off and grinding up a couple of levels, fortunately, so I never had to git gud.

I really can’t recommend this game enough if you’re a fan of action RPGs.  It pretty much requires you to have played the first Ys game, of course, just so you get all of the cool things that they slip in, so that’s not a small time commitment.  Figure probably 25 hours?  What were you going to do with those heartbeats, anyway, watch TV?

…

Anyway, after finishing Ys Origin, my plan was to work on the bits of my backlog that require me to hold on to very specific bits of hardware.  For example, I have, like, one Dreamcast game, and a couple of GBA games, and a Wonderswan game, and I’m holding on to all of the necessary consoles and accessories for these when I could really use the closet space back.  Instead, I played through a quite good bullet-hell shooter called Crimzon Clover: WORLD IGNITION, tried a couple of indie Japanese shooters from the eXceed series that didn’t manage to grab me, and then was reading older blog posts (and finding an embarrassing number of typos) when I hit this one and realized that I had been all happy about being able to BUY the Batman: Arkham Origins DLC but had not actually, you know, played it yet.

I was not, for the record, looking for games with “Origin” in the name.

So, with Arkham Origins being all about Bruce starting out in the Bat-Business and meeting many of his Bat-Villains for the first Bat-Time, first Bat-Channel, it’s probably no shock to anyone that an expansion called Cold, Cold Heart is all about Mr. Freeze, the most sympathetic member of the Bat-Rogue’s-Gallery.

I say that based almost entirely upon the character’s portrayal in the 90s animated series, but since the 90s animated series was the best version of Batman ever created I’ve never felt the need to explore if there is an alternate version of the Bat-Mythos in which Mr. Freeze is a total jerk.

I guess there could be.

Anyway, I played through Arkham Origins last February and was quite giddy about “getting” the signature Arkham combat at the time.

Going back to it, eleven months later, all of that muscle memory was gone and the giddiness faded rather quickly.  The DLC assumes that you are playing it immediately after finishing the main game and that you have all of your gadgets, upgrades, etc, so it’s not shy about throwing some very nasty fights at you pretty much from the get-go.  I was very grateful that I could use the practice arena in the Batcave to remember a little bit about how the combat system works, which sorts of enemies could just be punched into submission and which needed to be countered or stunned first, etc.  This makes it very hard to recommend in a vacuum, so the question becomes “have you played Arkham Origins and want more of it, do you not mind another retelling of how Victor Fries became a super villain, and do you have a few bucks?”