“The characters are powerful—the stories are powerful—because of the emotional connection that comes with those stories and with the character…The iconography that comes with it—the bat, the cowl, the bat signal—really hits home.” This is what Jonathan Smith, Strategic Director & Head of Development Team at TT Games, tells me when I ask about the emotional element of Batman stories. I had just finished an hours-long preview of the new Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight , and while I had a great time, I came away unsure of how this quality might come through. Smith tells me it’s there, but that it’s leveraged through the presence of characters, vehicles, suits and other things that Batman fans already have an attachment to. At that moment, I doubted him. I couldn’t see how references would satisfy my desire for the narrative to have some kind of emotional core. I was worried that mere recognition of familiar things from across Batman’s history wouldn’t be enough to draw me into Lego Batman’ s story.…