One of the boldest moves Rocksteady made when this it revealed Suicide Squad drama after years of rumors is its subtitle: it will be a game about you, as players, who fight and are forced to kill the best heroes of DC, before Braniac can make them become his own deadly force at work. THEN Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League actually came out, and almost no one was happy. Now, weeks before its first anniversary, the game’s live-service is going out with… well, not really a bang, and barely a whimper.

The base version of the Kill the Justice League climaxed with the death of Superman and Wonder Woman, while the titular team prepares themselves for Brainiac’s defeat and the realization that there are dozens of alternate realities with their own Brainiacs under threat to save them, setting up in the live-service of the game. structure in the coming months. But then Kill the Justice League faced with a critical drubbing and terrible sales, leaving Rocksteady scrambling to offer fixes along with the planned rollout of future content that ended this week with the eighth and final major game update, just two weeks before the game celebrates its first anniversary. Which would not be good if Kill the Justice League stuck in any kind of landing, but instead, the last story inside it reveals that the whole thing is a kind of a useless hoodwink.

The story content of this week’s eighth episode ends with the defeat of the last variant of Braniac in the multiverse at the hands of Taskforce X… game. Rather, those deaths—which caused a sea of ​​controversy at the time, when it was believed that Kevin Conroy’s portrayal of Batman on Kill the Justice League was his last posthumously released performance as the Dark Knight—that of the clones.

On the one hand, players who actually stayed shouldn’t be surprised — previous updates have seen Harley, Captain Boomerang, King Shark, and Deadshot free Green Lantern and Flash from Braniac’s clutches after of their own apparent demise, traveling to different worlds and putting them in stasis, so the revelation that Batman and Superman are also clones isn’t all that surprising. And yet, it means the players who stand out Kill the Justice League at the lowest points is rewarded with the realization that they never got to, well, kill the Justice League. The only casualty at the end of it all was Wonder Woman, who evaded Braniac’s mind control in the initial game, only to be killed by (the newly revealed as a clone of) Superman.

And so, Suicide Squad ends with Taskforce X and the Justice League going their separate ways: the League stays behind to atone for “their” crimes by monitoring the multiverse to end any lingering threat to Braniac, and the Suicide Squad, freed from Amanda Waller’s embedded explosives, found their own little pocket of the multiverse to go celebrate and hang out. But to end it all this way—an animated slideshow cutscene and a casual, nonsensical explanation from Harley Quinn via voice over that contains the clone revealed in the middle of a line—says a miserable conclusion that all this has been done, because of what is meant to be the long-awaited future of Batman Arkham universe.

At least there are some heroes alive now that they can all carry on, when that future comes?

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