Page 4 of 155
When Bowser finally gets his wedding scene, the tuxedo he's wearing is lifted straight from Super Mario Odyssey, where players could dress him up in his own wedding outfit during the Bowser's Kingdom segment. Fitting, really, considering how obsessed the guy is with marrying Peach across the games.
Inside Odin's Hidden Chamber, Mimir points out symbols that don't belong to Norse tradition at all, he specifically flags ones linked to Egyptian, Celtic, and Japanese culture. It's a small line, but it quietly suggests this universe has a lot more pantheons than just Greek and Norse.
Game director Sefton Hill has talked about an idea where the end credits would've turned into an interactive fight scene against Rocksteady's own staff, with each knocked-out developer's name and job title flashing up in slow motion as you beat them. It sounds like an absolute blast, but it never made it past the planning stage.
Building a world this size took some serious engineering. The finished game runs on more than a million lines of code, and a staggering 30,000 of those lines exist purely to handle dialogue.
The weekend exotic vendor Xur, hooded coat, backpack, and unsettling stare, bears a strong visual resemblance to the mysterious Merchant from Resident Evil 4. His tentacled face has also been noted by fans as a nod to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
After assassinating Carlo Grimaldi, heading to the Venice dock area lets players find Da Vinci's flying machine still lying wrecked where it crashed earlier in the story.
Johnny Depp's other favourite director popped up in an unexpected way here. Tim Burton, busy with his own projects at the time, still carved out time to help design the look of Davy Jones' grotesque crew.
Keep an eye out around Arkham City and you'll spot a green neon sign for something called the Black Canary in a few different spots. It's a nod to the character existing somewhere in this universe well before she actually shows up properly in Arkham Knight, tucked away for eagle-eyed players to notice years early.
Die at the wrong moment and one of the Game Over screens shows Bane snapping Batman over his knee. It's a direct lift from the iconic 'broken bat' scene in the Knightfall comics, and a genuinely nasty little punishment for messing up the fight.
