Disaster Report: Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis (GameCube)

I’ve gone to bat for the character of Aquaman quite often in the past. The aquatic superhero Arthur Curry had a bad reputation for decades of being the most useless and goofiest superhero of them all, although this was certainly a case of the balance between popularity and perceived uselessness rather than actually being the worst of them all. After all, comics are teeming with goofy characters, and if people cared to learn about them, we’d probably instead be hearing about ridiculous characters like Marvel’s Almighty Dollar whose ability was to shoot pennies from his fists or DC’s The Red Bee who fought Nazis by way of trained bees he released from his belt.

 

Aquaman’s problem wasn’t that he was useless or weak though, simply that he had a PR problem. In his intended context, that being plenty of leagues beneath the sea, Aquaman is perfectly fit for the stories told about him. He is an undersea hero who fights foes in a unique setting. Giant squids, sharks, and orcas are both allies and enemies to him, and other undersea characters used submarines, water powers, and more to fight against him as the fate of Atlantis is repeatedly at stake. Few would ever say the heroes fighting space battles are weak for fighting where their weapons, powers, and ships worked, but Aquaman was unfortunately made a fish out of water in an almost literal sense thanks to the preponderance of comic book crossovers. Aquaman was too popular for his own good as funny as that sounds, and as superheroes entered each others’ books to drive up sales, DC had to pull him out of the ocean and plop him into the Justice League of America, and unfortunately for him, the kinds of villains fit for a super team to fight often weren’t kindly waiting by a coastline.

The rise of shows like the Super Friends as well only tarnished his reputation further, as the need to give him something to do lead to the writers cramming in random bodies of water or ridiculous uses for fish into the fight of the day. At some point, the years of placing him in the wrong contexts stuck in the public conscious, the jokes made at his expense so hackneyed that even Wikipedia pretty much calls people out on overusing the Aquaman is Useless premise under its Reception and legacy header. However, the character seems to be in a pretty god spot these days. By 2019, we have seen more modern portrayals recover that image, whether it be through video games like Injustice: Gods Among Us where his strength and flashy super moves make him a popular pick, cartoons like Batman: The Brave and the Bold where he was an outrageously over the top paragon of heroism voiced by John DiMaggio, or movies like Aquaman where Jason Momoa’s charisma and sex appeal coupled with a CGI explosion of an undersea setting make for a visually spectacular popcorn flick.

 

However, shaking off that stigma had taken quite a bit of time, and there had been many desperate attempts to reinvent him to make him cool. Since some of this was around the 90s and early 2000s when comics in general though cool meant being dark and gritty, Aquaman would start being much more serious, swapping out his backstory and powers again and again as they were hoping something would stick. Was the beard cool? What about a hand made of water? What if he WAS water, as in the Elemental who represented it? And what about his supporting cast? Maybe that goofy old octopus Topo he hung out with could now be an enormous sea monster! Or how about Aquaman summons sea monsters all the time! And technically H.P. Lovecraft invented many eldritch horrors who liked to sleep underwater, putting them under the umbrella of his “control undersea life” power…

During this period of stumbling through ideas on trying to make him hip and respected, around 2003 to be exact, Aquaman was given the title role in a video game he would be headlining. He had been part of the cast of other DC Comics games before, sometimes trying too hard over in those as well, but in Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis, a name the box cover doesn’t get right but the manual does, he and his supporting cast would have to carry the entire experience on their own. Released around the same time as a new comic book reinvention of the character, it could have been the push he needed to start his PR recovery… but instead, if anything, this game pushed Arthur Curry further into the depths of humiliation, as it is now reviled as one of the worst games ever made.

 

AQUAMAN’S UNDERSEA ABOMINATION

Perhaps to undermine my claim that Aquaman works well when he’s submerged and able to take advantage of his native setting, Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis concocts a plot that will make a player’s eyes glaze over. A game doesn’t need a good plot or even much of a plot at all to be enjoyable though. In fact, even a bad plot is easily overlooked if the game works well, but if you choose to emphasize story elements through long and wordy scenes like Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis does, it becomes a little harder to ignore the negatives in its storytelling.

At its simplest level, it’s a story of a war for Atlantis between many different powers, and to be fair to the game in that regard, many wars in real life aren’t exactly deep or complex in their motivations. Many can be summed up as one force wanting the land or possessions of the other, and Atlantis is pretty much our prize to be won here. However, even in games that adapt a war, they don’t pull you aside and slowly tell you a dull summary of what’s going on. Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis begins with a shadowy figure immediately mentioning he’s Aquaman’s brother so the mystery that he’s the Ocean Master is tossed out right away as he claims he soon shall be King of Atlantis. Then, Black Manta attacks Atlantis instead! Aquaman and his court talk at length about Black Manta sure is attacking Atlantis. Now he is attacking this specific building in Atlantis, which is a bad thing of course, just like how attacking most any building should be a bad thing that should be stopped. After playing the run around with Black Manta’s forces at interchangeable locations, Aquaman’s suspicions that Black Manta was working for someone are reiterated repeatedly as is his wondering on how certain weapons and creatures appeared. Aquaman spends a lot of time brooding in any direction but suspecting his brother the Ocean Master might be responsible, and we see later that he does know his brother exists in the game’s context and has conflicted with Aquaman in the past, so why he wasn’t brought up sooner is the game’s greatest mystery. Characters with no context given to their existence like Dolphin show up and start talking too, and soon, once Black Manta is defeated… Fire Trolls appear! They do exist in the comics canon admittedly despite being ridiculous, but these beings made of molten rock live underwater and sort of divert the plot for a while because stolen Atlantis subs fired on them to pad out the game’s length. Finally, after the trolls are defeated, Aquaman puts things together in time for Ocean Master to reveal himself.

 

Were this just a framework for action, it’s just a procession of villains to up the enemy variety and wouldn’t be too much to fault, but the game spends so much time yammering on about a mystery that doesn’t really exist, repeating info and repeating the lack of information as characters keep chiming in to say they have no idea why something is happening. The need to start all of the 21 game chapters with a cutscene means characters are often saying things of little interest, ones that could be done in a single screen and moved on from if that much is necessary, but Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis decides to present its story by way of… comic book panels. Or at least, four squares in a black void it tries to pass off as comic panels.

Once upon a time, comic book panel scenes might have seemed interesting or clever. For characters associated with comics, it was almost sort of authentic to present them that way, and some games like 300: March to Glory, despite the flaws that game has, make excellent use of it with gorgeous art evoking their inspiration. However, it quickly became a lazy and cheap way to present the plot of a game, some titles like Legend of Kay using it because it’s simpler or cheaper than voice acted cutscenes that rely on in-game models. Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis, oddly enough, decides to use both comic book panels and in-game graphics for its cutscenes for the worst of both worlds. It has the sometimes sloppy story telling of the panel format where a screen must be filled out with more talking and images than is sometimes necessary just because the panel segmentation means you must not leave any empty space, and the game is oddly reliant on a flat four square arrangement for almost every cutscene. Perhaps worse though is how the game looks naturally. Angular, flat faced models with odd textures make up the visual design of the game’s main cast, Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis not even hiding how terrible these characters look in close-up.

While in battle you often aren’t close enough to the models to notice their poor fidelity, but in the story scenes a large splash image of Aquaman’s face is used shamelessly, and even characters who only appear in cutscenes like his adviser Vulko somehow look worse, although this might be partly because Vulko’s design inherently looks like one of the Seven Dwarves took up wizardry. The Fire Trolls, who are basically just lava in human shapes, look like orange colored action figures here but with inexplicable fire auras, and the environments are not better off. Atlantis itself is made up of a lot of boxy buildings that look more like someone submerged Superman’s Metropolis rather than built a city underwater, and the only times buildings break from this generic template are when they have some importance to the story, where they then might have a slight dome.

There are other locations such as generic ruins and interior spaces like a boilerplate technological control room, but if characters weren’t “swimming” around, almost all of the spaces could pass for above water locations if not for the deep blue tints and actions punctuated by bubbles and constant underwater noises. The swimming is really just typical superhero flight with more leg kicking too, especially when you enter the game’s awful moments of combat.

 

YOU FIGHT LIKE A FISH

No matter how strong you are, fighting while completely submerged in real life is a hassle. The force of pushing through all that water dulls the force of your blows, and an underwater boxing match would certainly be too slow for a good knockout to ever take place, unless we consider that one fight would drown first and lose that way. Aquaman’s got under his belt the physics defying power to move pretty freely underwater, as do most of his enemies and allies, so fighting underwater should just feel like fighting in a regular game here, save with the added dimensions of being able to swim up and down as well. However, you wouldn’t really be able to tell Aquaman isn’t hindered by his aquatic domain, his punch combos feeling incredibly dull and rigid when executed.

 

We have gotten this far without saying what genre Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis is, and I think it does any a disservice to be fully slotted into one genre exclusively. It’s an action-adventure in that you have to move through locations to perform goals, which are sometimes taking bombs off buildings to prevent them from exploding… although you can throw the bomb right back at the building to dispose of it with no repercussions. Bomb disposal is a less common  chapter goal compared to the most common one: swimming from enemy group to enemy group, needing to defeat either all of them or enough of them to satisfy the level’s conditions. When you enter a fight, you’re locked into something that’s like the half-breed child of a beat ’em up and fighting game, and while early journalists and reviewers conflated these two genres, there are differences and the combination featured here shows why you should keep them apart.

 

Like a fighting game, enemies and hero alike will be locked into an almost 2D lane of combat when their battle starts. Once you reach their detection range, you and the opponent kindly agree to mostly ignore the water physics and move towards each other slowly, and while you can circle around each other or dodge to the side, they’ll just keep facing you so its purposes in fighting that foe are limited. The goal is to whale on each other until someone dies, your health bar initially being higher than most enemies but soon they start getting doubled up and even triple health bars to help with the fight. The fighting itself is more of the simple, often mindless fighting of the brawler genre, Aquaman packing two punches that are functionally similar, a kick that can’t be spammed as easily but reaches a tiny bit further, and a grab that can deal guaranteed damage, but enemies will often try to trigger their grab the same time as you and will win out if you’re in range. You can get medals to summon fish friends for an instant regular enemy kill, but the medals sometimes don’t appear at all and won’t carry over chapters, meaning it can speed up a fight but not many of the fights you would want to speed up.

 

The mindless whaling on each other tries to be something more but falls short. While you and the enemy can both block, it mostly draws out the fight since it means either you didn’t strike an enemy while they weren’t blocking or they were blocking meaning your attacks did nothing and now you have to wait and repeat the attempted simple strings of repeated button presses. Pressing buttons is often a commitment so you can’t back out of a string of hits in time to shift tactics, but perhaps worse is the game’s attempts to implement combos. Often just pressing different buttons in a specific sequence, these don’t really break guards or offer different attack angles, and they don’t even provide additional damage beyond what executing more actions in a row inherently does. The detection for combos is very sloppy though, seeming to require precise timing in the same way your worthless special moves do. Aquaman technically has abilities like hooking his foes in with his hook hand that is also a grappling hook. While I could execute it rarely, it was often after a few failed attempts. What, might you wonder, is the input for this move that I got to work maybe 4 times deliberately after tens of tries? Forward Forward X. Some special moves are even more complex or involve holding buttons for a period of time the game can get picky about, and they draw on a power meter so they’re limited in use even if you figure one out that can be used consistently enough. Most of the special attacks I saw by accident while mixing up button inputs just to try and find some reprieve from the incredible tedium of the fighting system, the highlight perhaps being Aquaman’s ridiculous underwater corkscrew attack.

There is no real strategy to fighting though besides hammering buttons when it looks like an enemy isn’t blocking and grabbing if you think they might block. Since almost every chapter is about moving through areas to fight three to seven and sometimes even nine guys per skirmish, these grow incredibly old, especially when you have a timer ticking that tries to speed up a process that will always be slow and determined by how defensive and durable your foes are more than anything.

 

DOWN WHERE IT’S WETTER, DOWN WHERE IT’S BADDER

The beat ’em up aspect really comes in though when the game tosses in multiple enemies at once. Despite being locked to looking at only one foe at a time and having your movement based solely on their position in the water, other foes can swim by and join in the fight. Firing long ranged shots at you, grabbing you from behind to hold you in place, or just throwing their own punches to be a nuisance, you can only target one guy while being ganged up by a whole group of them. You can switch targets, but this doesn’t make up for the fact your movement is awkwardly restricted while anyone you aren’t looking at will swim around and harass you. The ganging up and awful fight style makes Normal mode excruciating, the main difference between Easy and Normal being health bar size and fights mostly just being longer and harder to survive because of it. Usually a cluster of enemies will have a random one drop a health refill on death to make these fights technically survivable, but it’s not enough to make the tedious battles any better, it just means you can conceivably make it through them.

Not helping things is a camera that is borderline drunk at times. Since the camera locks to the 2D plane for your fights even as 3D movement is technically allowed but restricted, the camera has a lot of problems in keeping up. Sometimes when switching from one enemy or another, the camera might realize it would have to pass through a solid object to pull it off, and whether or not that’s deemed kosher varies. Sometimes you get a view from within the wall, other times the camera freaks out for a bit and ends up settling on a perspective of the battle that is so zoomed out that Aquaman and his foe are only about an inch tall, the zoom in after slow. Luckily visual information isn’t too important to the battles since attack windows are a guessing game most of all.

 

The back of the box brags about a hilariously low 11 enemy types, and these are mostly just reskins based on whatever villain is the main baddy of the time. Whether they’re Black Manta’s troops, Fire Trolls, or the monsters Ocean Master recruits for his go as final villain, they all come in regular, a more skilled guy who looks like the regular guy, and burly forms. These are further segmented though into ranks: unranked, Novice, Elite, and Veteran. The difference? Health bar size. Another small difference between the two doable difficulties (since you can unlock a masochistic hard difficulty if you want to do the same things but even longer) is the abundance of higher ranking enemies. Any game that equates difficulty to things just taking longer to do is already making a big mistake, but having even regular enemies take so long drags the game out and makes the boss fights seem paltry by comparison.

 

The fights with Black Manta, the Fire Troll leader whose name is the unimaginative but alliterative Lava Lord, and Ocean Master are all just punch ups with a foe who deals more damage and has a bigger health bar than the things you encountered so far. Lava Lord is actually fought with two assistants who exist mostly as health refill containers since otherwise the Lava Lord deals too much damage to really handle, but Black Manta and Ocean Master are on their own and pretty easy. Ocean Master in particular was absolutely pathetic, because if you get him in the right position, you can back away, force him to swim forward, and hit him while he’s closing the gap to deal quick damage, repeating this until you either need to move around to get some space to repeat it or win. This tactic seems occasionally possible with Black Manta as well, the only concern being the still fairly easy managing of spacing so neither of these bosses resorts to projectile attacks. Everything that applies to regular enemy combat applies to them, from the grab problems to the camera struggles, so the battles meant to be the culmination of the weak plot arcs are just as bland and boring as the plot itself… or they will just break you over their knee and force you to repeat a chapter that often has many bland battles with strong baddies along the way to the boss fight.

 

A GLIMMER IN THE DEEP

For a brief, blissful period, Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis sometimes breaks away from the constant stream of punching bags to bring you four levels that are billed as submarine battles but are really just space fights but space is blue instead of black. The submarines themselves all look like space fighters or the kind of craft you’d see in Star Wars, right down to turrets firing generic plasma and lasers instead of something appropriate to the underwater world like torpedoes. No propellers in sight or other clues that this fight should be submerged, although one does involve you fighting a sea monster (one with regular legs instead of fins though so it looks more like a dragon) so that mean at least you can’t say they would all be interchangeable with the look of a Star Wars fight taking place on a planet’s surface.

 

The submarine battles aren’t good, but they are much better than the rapidly repetitive and variety barren fist fights. You fly your little craft around and need to destroy a certain quantity of things with your laser and lock-on torpedoes. The lock-on isn’t very reliable on moving enemies since they zip around wildly, and your lasers often don’t track their thin frames well no matter if you lead them or try to fire on them directly, but you can eventually take them out, usually by flying directly towards them and firing then. The mission with the giant… well I can’t technically say its a spaceship but it has a bridge and looks like a downgraded Star Destroyer, involves you firing on different parts to destroy them, and these at least let the torpedoes and shots find their targets since things aren’t moving. Conversely, the sea monster moves around constantly during the fight and it can only be damaged by your limited supply of torpedoes. Whether a shot will work or not doesn’t seem tied to what your eyes can see since legs will move out of the way but still take damage on occasion, but you will need weapon refills regardless of accuracy by taking out the many little ships flying around.

 

There’s a first person mode for the sub combat!

 

Moving on to things that even slightly matter and impact the gameplay though, the submarine levels pose a more fair challenge and have more movement and approach freedom than anything else in the game despite still having numerous imperfections. Perhaps the biggest issue is that you can seemingly have your sub’s entire health bar evaporated by blasts from off-screen. Dodging is an odd affair since the visual feedback is bad on the defensive too, meaning you can suddenly be blasted by what looks like a regular beam or shot and suddenly find your armor dissolving to nothing. The difficult of these chapters is basically trying to survive whenever you get blindsided by a blast, since usually if you’re looking at a turret or enemy its attacks are dodged easily enough but not if it’s free to act how it pleases when outside your view.

These submarine sections aren’t very good even within their own context, especially the first one where the mission goal in unclear and you just sort of fly around shooting things until you realize who is a bad guy and who is an ally and that you need to kill enough baddies to satisfy the unknown condition. However, any respite from the main game is appreciated, and the submarine levels, at least on their own, would be bad but not worthy of the revulsion this game inspires in gamers’ hearts. Being Discount Star Wars Starfighter definitely has a lot to do with that, but being derivative would be much better than what we got when it comes to the true meat of this awful adventure.

 

CONCLUSION

Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis further humiliates a hero who was already fighting a public image problem. Placed in a game with ugly comic cutscenes that waste time reiterating boring information, he fights through tedious button-mashing battles that unfairly allow enemy gang-ups against him to get to boss battles that are either jokes or can force a full level restart to add in more repetitious gameplay. The submarine battles, despite being flawed and prone to unseen but immediate eliminations, seem much more enjoyable just by the merit of breaking away from the regular play, the game’s combat growing stale in the first chapter and only getting more frustrating as health bars increase and the battles never change in meaningful ways.

 

I can understand the design choice to make the underwater world’s aquatic element essentially irrelevant. He might as well be flying around like Superman, and that would offer a freedom of combat and movement that could potentially enhance play. Instead, Aquaman’s fights are restricted to whoever he has his sight line trained on, to the point he ignores all the guys who close in around him just so he can punch this one fixation with the same generic combos. There is no room for creativity, but considering the game’s already uncreative in its level design, this isn’t too surprising. You are able to swim around the ocean, but your destination is demanded by a radar and the goal always seems to be to move from one cluster of bad guys swimming in place to the next, none of them bringing anything new to the fights except the ability to hit you more times and take more hits themselves.

 

Developer Lucky Chicken Games, with a pedigree that consists of Tyco RC games and a Casper the Friendly Ghost adaptation, are certainly an inexplicable pick for an Aquaman game, but perhaps it was fate the floundering hero would be thrown to a company of little renown. Why would a better company want to handle a then maligned comic character? However, the weakly conceived and awfully executed game Aquaman did get would only help cement the public perception this character had nothing worthwhile to him. His enemies are weak and generic in this game, the plot is so monumentally generic that it makes the Table of Contents of some books look more nuanced, and even if that’s an exaggeration at least those know to keep their information concise instead of spilling over themselves to fill the page with pointless reiteration.

 

Admittedly, DC heroes weren’t adapting to the digital realm well at all at the time, Aquaman’s awfulness rubbing shoulders with similarly atrocious games starring Superman and Batman, but they could survive the hits. Even a mediocre game starring Aquaman could at least be dismissed, and maybe if the game had just been the submarine missions it would have just been lost to time. Instead, Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis was more fuel on an already healthily burning fire, and if anything, it made Aquaman look awful even in his own domain. For a man who can command all sea life, he is found instead summoning them as limited super moves on mooks and talking to random passing whales or the same expository fish instead. For a many who is meant to have incredible strength under water, he must whale on men and fish people repeatedly to even leave a mark. The only time he even feels effectual is when in a submarine that would work in any one else’s hands, and even that can get devastated by a random blast. On top of all of this, the game has the gall to ask you to play the game through on multiple difficulties to unlock the marginal rewards of new costumes for Aquaman and the ability to play as Tempest or Black Manta, so you can instead see a different awfully textured pointy character model in the hypothetical alternate universe where you’d ever want to play the game again.

 

For a man meant to the pinnacle of aquatic prowess, he’s all but washed up in Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis. For a hero who needed redemption in public eyes, he had only sunken to new lows. Before I would defend this hero almost as a personal mission. I didn’t rely on the “he could control Cthulhu” arguments or anything, I just recognized he was being judged unfairly, in the same way that judging X-Men villain Magneto in a setting devoid of anything metallic would be unfair. However, Aquaman’s portrayal and performance here are indefensible, so instead, the defender is now the aggressor as I must wage my own war on Atlantis. But where others fought it to claim its power or placement under the sea, my battle is to ensure that even the most morbidly curious gamer won’t go in unaware when it comes to Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis, a positively draining experience that even the worst DC character wouldn’t deserve to be associated with.