Rocksteady Studios maintains ambitious expansion plans for their embattled live-service game, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (or SSKTJL, if you’re into the whole brevity thing). The creators of the standard-setting Batman: Arkham Asylum games plan to release at least 12 “seasons” featuring new playable characters, redesigned environs (“Elseworlds”) and alternate Brainiac bosses in the coming months. Recently they unveiled Season 1, featuring that evergreen Batman nemesis, the Joker.

Worth noting, a trailer for the musical sequel to the Joker movie dropped just a few days ago, so it’s been a Joker-ful couple of weeks. At the risk of being so serious. the discourse around the Joker film, Harley Quinn’s ascendance, and the Batman/Joker sections of SSKTJL, all reflect parts of the larger conversation about DC fandom that has adversely affected the game’s reception (that is, it’s not selling a lot and the Steam player count is on the low side) by an audience that obviously has a voracious appetite for DC Comics-related content. It’s a weird beef, and since the game’s launch I’ve been struggling to articulate why I love this game so much when all sorts of people are just not into it.

I won’t pretend that any new ground in DLC expansions of live-service games gets broken here. Modified missions, more gear, new skins, new playable character. It’s grindy just to unlock the playable Joker, and the gameplay to get there is not very different from the stuff you did before. And that is true of so many live-service games. The question of the game’s future, for me, was not whether Rocksteady would reinvent the live-service format in some earth-shattering way. The question has to do with whether the DC-intensive story stuff can sustain the game over 10+ expansions. Because if nothing else, SSKTJL is formed of faithful, nerdy DC Comics lore, and will live or die based on how compelling they can make that lore to a player who’s, well, already blown up several thousand aliens in the main game.

I’d say the most interesting question sparked by Suicide Squad: The One Where They Kill The Justice League is not whether you’re “a DC Comics person” (who’d be presumed to be the target market for this game) but what kind of DC Comics person are you?

Are you James Gunn, who adored the Suicide Squad comics by John Ostrander and Luke McDonnell (here, I got an audio clip of him saying so, from my set visit to The Suicide Squad), and hence might give the game all the leeway in the world because the source material is exceptionally full of potential?

Or are you Batman and Batman with a side of Batman? And no offense meant, it’s totally reasonable that there are comics fans who just read Batman comics — there are always like 17 of them running concurrently — and one’s DC Comics cred can’t require that you’re all nerds like me and James Gunn and have read everything from Blue Devil to Zatanna and the House of Secrets. There’s just… too many of them!

But the negativity against SSKTJL that seems centered around Batman’s death scene really baffles me. For one thing, it’s a “death scene,” Batman is not dead. Batman is as dead as Joker, who died in Arkham City and is now bouncing around Metropolis in SSKTJL S1! That is, he’s comic book dead, which lasts as long as it takes to choose which costume you’re wearing to your resurrection. I happen to think the Dark Knight’s death scene was wry and affecting and an epochal moment for Harley, but okay, people can differ. (A few folks at The Gamer are with me on this point.) Oddly, there was relatively little All Caps-ing about the death scenes of every other Justice League member, including Wonder Woman (heart-wrenching), Green Lantern (chilling, raw), and Superman and Flash (those just kinda zoomed by). For some reason it’s the scene with the queer clown lady killing the apex tough guy billionaire that some fans and critics are taking very personally…which is fine, except don’t use that as justification for writing hateful-insulting spooj on social media directed at anyone who dared praise the Suicide Squad game. We didn’t kill Batman, dudes, and also, not really dead.

I don’t intend to poke bears for its own sake, but then there’s also Rocksteady’s brash move of rolling out the Joker as the game’s first new playable character. The Joker is inarguably one of the top 10 villains in all pop culture. Playing the Joker in a movie nearly guarantees you an Oscar nomination. The genius thing about the Joker is that he’s both horrifying and extremely possible: he’s really just a guy with a twisted mind and no superpowers. He could be anybody.

So you couldn’t exactly have this Arkham-adjacent game without him. But he’s not Joker with Mark Hamill’s iconic voice interpretation. This Joker is voiced by JP Karliak, who also voices Morph in X-Men ’97.

And okay, I did not love the 35 levels of grinding up to unlock the character. But having finally achieved him, I quite enjoy this iteration of Joker. He gives an Alan Cumming-esque vibe. He’s got that Cesar Romero thing. I’m nowhere close to maxing out the character, but I’d love if down the road we’d get skins resembling Nicholson, Phoenix or, uh, whomever else is tasteful.

I enjoyed this game in its first week of existence for its epic, Avengers: Endgame-esque story and its snarky punk-rock aesthetic. I’d love more of the cannily-written story, but being realistic, am not expecting a whole new campaign. And still, I’m happy to keep playing and to grind Joker up to level 667 or whatever’s possible, which may sound sad, but through my lens, it’s fun.

Video game replayability is a strange concept; we don’t have to pretend it’s anything but doing the same thing over and over again, in different clothes. In this day and age it’s unusual to watch a movie more than twice. And yet studios spend many millions of dollars on live-service games with perpetual calendars, so there must exist at least a model for how the games are intended to, y’know, serve fans.

I’d reckon that music, and music appreciation, is the most relevant model. Why does one listen to a song over and over again? You know how the song goes, you know what happens in the end. Like a crafted pop song, a video game can touch a node in your brain which happily engages the familiar rhythm, the pattern of colors and images, and the literal music which make it fun to keep immersing oneself in the game over and over again.

So Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is that song for me, and it’s no one’s fault if it’s not your kind of song. Some songs you just get sick of after 20 listens. Then there are Prince songs which are somehow always fun to hear because they’re both familiar and Prince is doing little things in his voice that you’ve never noticed. Tara Strong’s voice performance as Harley Quinn has that kind of depth, for me — for whatever reason, it’s fun to hear her talk, even the lines I’ve heard hundreds of times at this point.

Like a song that always makes you dance, your body enjoys the rhythm in repetition. You may like to dance to different kinds of music than your peers. That’s how it goes. Of course this is stretching the analogy because none of the button-mashing is as physically healthy as actual dancing, until they release a SSKTJL/DDR expansion. Which I would also play, because commitment.

At this point, do I betray some personal bias towards Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League? YES. I’m also one of those weirdos who loved the Birds of Prey movie beyond all reason. I like the Suicide Squad game so much I may have co-written an original song about it. Here’s a demo snippet of that song, which hopefully will be completed by the time SSKTJL Season 2 comes around.

All this is not to say that the Joker season is great in its own right, but it’s still part of a great premise. It’s worth considering three obvious comps to SSKTJL, also superhero-focused video games: Spider-Man 2, Marvel’s Avengers, and Gotham Knights. Spider-Man 2 recently got a New Game+ patch, but I’ve been playing SSKTJL more because I prefer its writing and its musical intangibles; however, it bears mentioning that the DLC stories for Insomniac’s first Spider-Man game were exceptional expansions that truly expanded the game, and the future content for Spider-Man 2 looks similarly exciting, so I’d hope SSKTJL would reach for competitive levels of coolness.

The Avengers game did one ambitious thing, which was to give each playable character their actual unique power set. And Gotham Knights, for its clunkiness, had some fun melee options. We definitely wouldn’t mind if such robust options eventually were added to SSKTJL, ’cause after a while, guns are just guns. And unless they add new melee/non-gun-weapons options, it seems SSKTJL’s great premise is slightly constricted to playable characters who use some sort of projectile weapon. Which isn’t, like, a short list in the DC Universe, but it may disqualify a few Squad stalwarts like Bronze Tiger or Black Orchid. Even so, I wouldn’t mind a future season focusing on, say, Deathstroke fighting a brainwashed Black Canary? Or Deathstroke’s daughter Ravager against an evil Atom? Or if we’re really embracing all Elseworlds, hell, Rorschach versus Dr. Manhattan.

Okay, I could think of a better closer, but I wanna go back to playing Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Those cargonauts ain’t gonna explode themselves.