There are plenty of attempts over the years to adapt DC’s various stables of characters into successful video games. Most of the time, success seems to come from only focusing on Batman. Every so often, a developer will take a crack at the larger Justice League. Sometimes, it doesn’t work. One time, the end result was a surprisingly great look at what happens when a broken found family tries to put itself back together. That’s when NeverRealm Studios released Injustice 2.
The sequel to 2013’s Injustice: Gods Among Us picks up from that game by pitting a roster of various DC heroes, villains, and those betwixt against each other, borrowing Mortal Kombat’s design philosophy. As its inspiration would suggest, both Injustice games push the line on the violence a little bit – not enough to get that M rating. This is buoyed by the game’s universe being one in which Superman suffers a tragedy that inspires him to break his code and become a totalitarian leader.
Refining the fighting game narrative
The Injustice series came about alongside NeverRealm’s change in perspective in regards to storytelling within its iconic fighting game model. They began moving away from the classic Mortal Kombat “tower” system, which saw players have to experience the story via a gauntlet of fights. Instead, they’d join the rest of the AAA industry and embrace more technically impressive and narratively driven cutscenes and stage fights around them.
By the time Injustice 2 hit shelves in 2017, the team had gotten a strong hand on how to best integrate it and had a bedrock of narrative foundation from the first game and a comic written by Tom Taylor and art from Jheremy Raapack, Axel Gimenez, and Mike Miller that was far better than you might expect from a video game tie in.
While plenty of ‘Elseworlds’ – the DC nomenclature for alternate universe stories – have featured an Evil Superman as a result of some deviation of origin or foundation for the universe, Injustice 2’s universe instead operates as a very recognizable classic Justice League scenario, with a very violent demarcation point.
It’s obvious from the returning voice actors from iconic animated projects: George Newbern as Superman, Susan Eisnberg as Wonder Woman, Tara Strong as Harley Quinn, and of course the incomparable Kevin Conroy as Batman. The games put these familiar faces all together, tear them apart, and Injustice 2 tries to heal those wounds to a tragic result.
No one is coming to save the heroes this time
In the first game, a group of “original” Justice League members step in to help Batman and his Insurgency take down Superman’s Regime. In this game, they’ve (mostly) left and this universe’s remaining heroes have to pick up the pieces. It’s into this period of reconstruction that NeverRealm’s writers Shawn Kittelsen, Dominic Cianciolo, Jon Greenberg, and John Vogel drop two very common Superman narratives into the mix: the arrivals of Supergirl Kara Zor-El (Laura Bailey) and Brainiac (Jeffery Combs).
These more familiar developments run up against the broken Injustice cast, forcing them to engage with who they’ve become. Thanks to this game being a fighting game, this means that the fraught emotions and vast amounts of powers can naturally overflow into punching each other square in the face. The trust between these characters is in so many pieces that fisticuffs are inevitable in order to move forward, both mechanically and narratively.
Picking up the pieces
Harley Quinn – who has become one of Batman’s few trusted allies – not only has to overcome yet another manifestation of her abuse at the hands of the Joker but combat Poison Ivy while filled with regret. In a recurring theme of the game, she offers Ivy the chance to just run off with her to the rebuilt Gotham, like “the old days.” Her offer falls on deaf ears.
On the flipside, The Flash (Taliesin Jaffe) is forced to put his suit back on when Brainiac invades. His decision to ally with Superman’s fascist takeover haunts him, even as he defected over the course of the previous game and has a pardon. That haunting comes full circle when villain Captain Cold (C. Thomas Howell), who throws that betrayal in his own face. Even when another former Regime member, Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Steve Blum) returns from rehabilitation to help, Flash projects his own guilt and won’t hear Hal out until after they fight it out and he can see Hal using Green powers again.
Eventually, the inevitability of the former Justice League needing to rally against Brainiac forces this former family together, including freeing Superman. For a brief moment it seems possible that the ex-Super Friends might be able to go back to how they once were. But, Wonder Woman won’t have any of that. More than anyone else, she’s embraced this Superman’s ideology and gives in to her most violent impulses as a result. This reveals to Kara, who was being protected and trained by Diana, the truth. Because she’s not like the others having only arrived after the first game, this breaks her potential chance at truly reuniting with Kal-El.
Sometimes you can’t get out of your own way
Despite these differences, the two warring League factions manage to overcome Brainiac through a collective effort. Once that threat is subdued, the egos immediately clash. Superman, true to his form at this stage, wants to execute the alien invader. Batman in turn stands his ground, insisting upon needing Brainiac to undo the damage done. Curiously, the game allows players to pick a side themselves at this point between the two.
After picking a side, all hell breaks loose at the family reunion. A series of escalating fights break out between the heroes and their former friends, with both leaders respectively punching their way through the others to finish this conflict. By this point, Batman has stabbed Aquaman in his leg with his own spear and Superman has nearly killed his own cousin.
It’s at this point that Injustice 2 slows a crawl for just a moment. The music quiets down and the shoulders of the two motion captured men slump just a bit. They reminisce on the last good memory they shared – the one right before their universe changed forever. There’s a lot of heft in that conversation: “I miss the people we were then.”
But it remains just a moment. Injustice 2 is a fighting game, the fight must commence.
An alternate universe with a point
Injustice 2 and its predecessor predates the more recent fascination media has with the concept of multiverses and the potential of infinite characters. Unlike some of these more recent attempts (cough cough The Flash) Injustice 2 enforces that these differences from the norm are not superficial but foundational.
Even the larger roster of characters not directly in the story get to show how this world has changed them. Starfire, added to the game later as DLC, comes into proceedings with her rage ablaze for the Regime. Every round with a character she has a relationship with starts off with a barb – and for Damien Wayne, who inadvertently killed Dick Grayson following his betrayal that Injustice 2 opens with, she only has pure contempt. However, these changes work because every character is still recognizable as who they once were. The events of this game’s universe have irrevocably changed them and even a cosmic threat cannot undo that. It’s a surprisingly human and simple excuse for a developer that usually loves using cosmic threats as the reason to do all the violence.
Injustice 2 deserves credit
We may never see an Injustice 2 follow up. NeverRealm can just put multiple evil subversions of Superman and The Joker into Mortal Kombat now, so it may not even be worthwhile to try another one of these. If that’s the case, this game actually holds up quite well on even modern hardware (for this piece I played on the PS5.) NeverRealm really did put out a game that manages to dig deep on DC’s super heroes while also giving that story some spectacle and it is absolutely worth a revisit.
Injustice 2 is available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC/Steam
Images captured from direct gameplay.
Travis Hymas is a freelance writer and self appointed Pokémon historian out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Known to be regularly obessive over pop culture topics, gaming discourse, and trading card games, he is a published critic featured on sites such as Uppercut and The Young Folks.
