Kill the Justice League Undid the Part About Killing the Justice League

One of the boldest moves Rocksteady made when it unveiled its Suicide Squad game after years of rumors was its subtitle: this was going to be a game about you, as players, fighting and being forced to slaughter DC’s finest heroes, before Braniac could puppet them into being his own deadly occupation force. Then Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League actually came out, and pretty much no one was happy. Now, weeks before its first anniversary, the live-service game is going out with… well, not really a bang, and barely even a whimper.

The base version of Kill the Justice League climaxed with the death of Superman and Wonder Woman alike, as the titular team braced themselves for Brainiac’s defeat and the realization that there were dozens upon dozens of alternate realities with their own Braniacs under threat for them to save, setting up the game’s live-service structure for months to come. But then Kill the Justice League faced a critical drubbing and dire sales, leaving Rocksteady scrambling to offer fixes alongside its planned rollout of future content—content that came to an end this week with the game’s eighth and final major update, just two weeks before the game would celebrate its first anniversary. That would already be not-great if Kill the Justice League stuck any kind of landing, but instead, its final story content revealed that the whole thing had been kind of a pointless hoodwink.

The story content of this week’s eighth episode ends with the defeat of the final Braniac variant in the multiverse at Taskforce X’s hands… with a little extra help from Superman and Batman, who it turned out hadn’t been killed during the events of the main game. Instead, those deaths—which sparked a sea of controversy at the time, when it was believed that Kevin Conroy’s portrayal of Batman in Kill the Justice League would be his final posthumously released performance as the Dark Knight—were that of clones.

On the one hand, players who actually stuck around shouldn’t be surprised—previous updates had seen Harley, Captain Boomerang, King Shark, and Deadshot already liberate Green Lantern and Flash from Braniac’s clutches after their own apparent deaths, traveling to alternate worlds and putting them in stasis, so the revelation that Batman and Superman were also clones is not that surprising. And yet, it means that players who’ve stood by Kill the Justice League at its lowest points have been rewarded with the realization that they never actually got to, well, kill the Justice League. The only casualty by the end of all this is actually Wonder Woman, who had avoided Braniac’s mind control in the initial game, only to be killed by (the newly revealed as a clone) Superman.

And so, Suicide Squad ends with Taskforce X and the Justice League going their separate ways: the League staying behind to atone for “their” crimes by monitoring the multiverse to finish off any lingering Braniac threats, and the Suicide Squad, freed from Amanda Waller’s embedded explosives, finding their own tiny pocket of the multiverse to go celebrate and hang out in. But to end it all this way—an animated slideshow cutscene and a casual, flippant explanation from Harley Quinn via voice over that covers the clone reveal in half a line—speaks to just what a miserable conclusion this all turned out to be, for what was meant to be the long-awaited future of the Batman Arkham universe.

At least there’s some heroes alive now that they can all carry on with, if that future ever arrives?

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