Characters / Batman: Arkham Series – The Riddler

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Rogues Gallery: Arkham Asylum (The Joker • The Scarecrow • The Riddler) | Arkham City | Arkham Origins | Arkham Knight | Miscellaneous Foes
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The Riddler (Edward Nigma)

"Explore! Find my challenges! And when you fail to solve them and lie blubbering like an ignorant child on the floor, you will know that the Riddler is better than you!"

^{Riddler in Arkham City}

^{Riddler in Arkham Origins}

Voiced by: Wally Wingert (Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, Arkham Origins, Arkham Knight, Arkham Underworld, Arkham VR, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League), Matthew Gray Gubler (Assault on Arkham) ^{Other voice actors}Martial Le Minoux (Fr; games), Alexandre Gillet (Fr; Assault on Arkham), Daniele Demma (It), Marco Ribeiro (Br.Pt; Origins), Duda Ribeiro (Br.Pt; Knight)

"Yes, it is I, Edward Nigma, The Riddler and more importantly your intellectual superior."

Edward Nigma is a genius obsessed with proving his mental superiority to the rest of mankind. As The Riddler, he leaves clues to his crimes behind to challenge those who come after him. He is determined to prove his superior intellect to Batman, leaving numerous riddles scattered around Arkham Island when the Joker took over to stump him. When that failed and The Riddler was arrested by Batman, he swore revenge and plotted even more devious plots in Arkham City, putting the full force of his intellect behind riddles and traps designed to defeat and kill Batman. After being defeated and humiliated yet again, he returned during Arkham Knight, taking Catwoman hostage and forcing Batman to run through increasingly more dangerous and unfair trials scattered across Gotham to save her life.

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Provides examples of:

A-F

• Abusive Parents: In his patient interviews for Asylum, he comments on how his dad called him a "moron" over and over again. To prove him wrong, Edward entered a contest at school, where if he solves a nearly impossible logic problem, he gets twenty dollars. He won, but his dad demanded him to confess that he cheated. Edward denied it, only to get hit. And then it turns out that Eddie actually did cheat; he just refused to admit to his father that he was cheating.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: During his first physical appearance in Arkham City, he has sandy light brown hair. His character trophy in Arkham Origins shows him with dark chestnut colored hair, which is carried over to Arkham Knight. Furthermore, his character bio art in Asylum depicts him as a redhead.
• Adaptation Name Change: Minor, but in most continuities his last name is spelled with a y instead of an i
• Adaptational Jerkass: While most incarnations of the Riddler are fairly narcissistic, Riddler is usually humble enough to respect Batman as a Worthy Opponent, and is on good terms with the rest of Gotham's villains. This Riddler is a smug, egotistic, patronizing, arrogant, and thoroughly obnoxious Jerkass who is either ignored or outright belittled by Batman and some of the other villains.
• Always Second Best: To Batman. His attempts to prove himself the intellectual superior through his riddles and deathtraps only serve to disprove this notion when Batman constantly defeats him. In fact during one of his Death Trap scenarios when Edward attempts to cheat, in order to "outwit" the Dark Knight, it fails because Batman is also better at cheating.
• Affably Evil: During his time as Enigma, though he was still pretty snide even then.
• Arc Villain: Of his sidequests (which comprise of the majority of the sidequest content in Arkham City, Arkham Knight and Arkham Origins, and all of the sidequest content of Arkham Asylum).
• Attention Whore: His character bio mentions that he has a compulsive need for attention. He makes his plans the most grandiose and theatrical, frequently hacking into screens where Batman can't help but see him, along with making a big show out of everything he does. It's mentioned that part of Riddler's wounded pride ensures that he won't leave well enough alone, and just has to be the center of attention.
• Ax-Crazy: Despite his insistence to the contrary, he is most unstable. Batman even lampshades it.
• Bad Boss: In the second game, he replaces Joker as the commentator during the Predator and Combat side missions. He's just as abusive to the Mooks as Joker was in the first game. In the fourth game, he replaces his mooks with robot drones. As of Catwoman's DLC episode in Arkham Knight his henchmen have decided to abandon him once they get paid, having gotten fed up with his insults and the robot drones. Of course, with what Catwoman accomplished there, it's safe to say that Riddler's done as a supervillain.
• Barrier Warrior: His mech suit in Knight is outfitted with an electric barrier. Batman and Catwoman must destroy his robots to disable it.

• Big Bad Wannabe: Riddler keeps boasting to everyone how he's Batman's intellectual superior, and the biggest threat the Dark Knight has ever faced. At best, Riddler is an annoyance who is too self-deluded to solve a mystery as basic as finding out Batman's Secret Identity, something Bane, Hugo Strange and Scarecrow found out with Boring, but Practical means. Likewise, none of Riddler's death traps approach the plans of Joker and Scarecrow, who regularly threaten Gotham and beyond with their own gang. Riddler only captures a handful of people to put into deathtraps, and he has to rely on conscripts to do his dirty work. Both Batman and some of Gotham's other villains consider Riddler a nobody.
• Big "NO!": Yells out a rather satisfying one just before Batman crosses the finish line on the last lap of his final race challenge.
• Black Comedy: His version of the Riddle of the Sphinx involves this, as he talks about a mutilated baby.
• Blatant Lies: Boasts how his Riddlermobile is so much faster, and better looking than the Batmobile. It's also conveniently stuck in the shop so he can't show it off right now.
• Boisterous Weakling: Even in defeat, he's not easily cowed. He continues to insist he's smarter and better than everyone even after being defeated.
• Break Them by Talking: Tries this on Hugo Strange so that he can get equal billing on killing (but also humiliate) Batman. He tells him that he knows everything about Strange's true intentions behind Arkham City, and even manages to get Strange spooked by telling him to his face how he knows about Strange's insecurity on being "worthy" enough to his superior. It doesn't last long though as Strange tells him he knows who Batman is and will not tell Riddler who that is, and this trope ends up being slightly reversed.
• Break the Haughty: Gets hit by this in all of his appearances, to the point of it being a Running Gag.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • Batman could wipe this guy out effortlessly. This is shown in City, where Batman beats Riddler with a standard takedown after solving all of his riddles, needing no more physical effort to beat Riddler than he uses to beat a common thug. The only reason Batman doesn't wipe the floor with Riddler is because of his one rule and that he considers the Riddler beneath his notice once he has no hostages.
  • Sums up his conversation with Scarecrow in Knight. It takes guts to talk down to someone who specializes in showing you your worst nightmares. Fortunately for Riddler, Scarecrow is unfazed by his arrogant taunts.
  • He also kidnaps Catwoman and holds her hostage for most of Knight, the same woman who permanently scarred Two-Face and essentially has Batman wrapped around her finger. His own mooks note that this is a bad idea. In Catwoman's Revenge, Selina gains her revenge by robbing Riddler of every last cent he has and then destroying his robots, all the while Riddler wastes his "one phone call".
    Catwoman: Eddie, you're not going to need 2.73 million in jail, are you? They feed you for free.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Upon introducing himself in his phone call with Catwoman in Knight, he boasts about being "Gotham's premier supervillain."
• Characterization Marches On: In Asylum, the Riddler is insufferable for others to be around, but seems to be fairly intelligent, is able to pay compliments to others even if he's being snide while doing so, and generally is congenial as long as the topic doesn't swing around to Batman. By the time of City and Knight, he is absolutely incapable of having a conversation without self-aggrandizing himself or belittling whomever he's speaking to and becomes increasingly misanthropic to the point of self-destruction. Origins sticks with his characterization from Asylum but files off some of his rougher edges given he has yet to build up an enmity with the Dark Knight.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting:
  • It's likely unintentional, but in Arkham City, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Stephen Merchant. In Arkham Knight, he resembles Charlie Sheen.
  • He also sounds a lot like Neil Patrick Harris or Jim Parsons.
• Complexity Addiction: The chief reason why he's not such an effective supervillain. Riddler is incredibly smart, but his narcissism causes him to focus more on showmanship than strategy, thus his plans tend to be overly grandiose and theatrical. This provides many different ways for things to go wrong as a result, which Batman takes advantage of. A shining example would definitely be him trying to use a phone's keypad to manually write out lines of code for his "jailbreak protocol".
• Composite Character: As seen in Arkham City, he dressed similarly to the '60s show and early Batman: The Animated Series versions of the Riddler and Wally Wingert said in an interview that he based part of Riddler's laugh on Frank Gorshin's. In regular dialogue, Wally also seems to be doing a fair impression of Jim Carrey's enthusiastic Large Ham style in Batman Forever.
• Conspicuous Gloves: Wears fingerless gloves to go along with his rougher look in this incarnation.
• The Cracker: Playing the Alternate Reality Game for Asylum reveals that he's the one who compromised Arkham's security, paving the way for Joker's takeover, and he hacks into Batman's headset in all the games. He slides into Playful Hacker territory when he calls Hugo Strange just to talk, and even started out exclusively as one in Origins before he became obsessed with Batman.
• Daddy Issues: Admits that his relationship with his father was strained, and his father did beat him at least a few times. During his battle with Batman in Knight, he executes a rather-telling Freudian Slip.
  Riddler: Die, Father! ...I mean, Batman!
• Death Trap: In Arkham Asylum, it's noted in his interview tapes that his crimes in this universe are mainly composed of putting innocent people in deathtraps and challenging them to escape (he calls them "amusing diversions"). In Arkham City, he makes good on this and throws kidnapped people into these for Batman to attempt to rescue, by solving riddles and puzzles.
• Defiant to the End: Even after his final defeat in Knight, Riddler never stops bragging about his intelligence.
• Dual Boss: Inverted. The final battle with Riddler in Knight has him fighting against both Batman and Catwoman.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: From Arkham City onwards, whenever talking to anyone remotely, his transmissions are constantly distorting and stuttering, in a distinctly SHODAN-like manner.
• Energy Weapon: Used in a couple of puzzles in Knight, and his mech suit in the final confrontation is outfitted with these.
• #EngineeredHashtag: In-Universe, according to the Gotham City Stories in Knight, he tried to start a movement against Batman to discredit him called #CrusaderGate after the events of City. However, this didn't work as even trolls were against making the life of the local Vigilante Man waging a near one-man war against Gotham's criminals harder.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • At one point, he calls The Penguin a "vicious, inelegant, tacky bully" indicating he has some disdain for the latter. However, given who Nigma is, he really isn't one to talk.
  • Nygma also looks down on the likes of Azrael and Deacon Blackfire, finding their religious faith to be superstitious and outdated.
  • While it may be a hallucination of Batman's, Nygma is legitimately horrified when Joker elects to Shoot the Hostage he takes in a vain attempt to get the clown to back down.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: He's firmly convinced that Batman is a Villain with Good Publicity who steals from the crooks he captures to fund his gadget arsenal and bribes the GCPD to look the other way because, as he puts it, "no one's that selfless." When this notion is proven wrong at the end of Knight after Batman is unmasked to the world as independently wealthy billionaire Bruce Wayne, Ridder refuses to accept it.
• Evil Genius: Riddler isn't quite as smart as he thinks he is, but he's still highly intelligent. He's able to design complex death traps and puzzles quite effectively.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: While he is actually fairly witty when insulting others, he has an embarrassing tendency to giggle at his own most painfully corny, juvenile quips.
• Evil Is Petty: His rivalry with Batman in a nutshell. He is so galled by the fact that there is someone smarter than him that he sets up lethal death traps and endangers innocents just to prove he's smarter than Batman. His entire criminal career is based solely around avenging this insult upon his pride.
• Evil Teacher: Plays the role of one in Arkham Knight, condescendingly decorating the interiors of the abandoned Pinkney Orphanage with blocks and teddy bears at certain points to look like a giant schoolhouse. The four challenge rooms inside also have names like "Intro to Physics" and "Advanced Deathtraps".
• Face–Heel Turn: He used to work for the GCPD, but decided that blackmail was a more efficient way of stopping criminals and left the force.
• Fair-Play Villain: Subverted. He certainly thinks of himself this way, and he does abide by his own rules if Batman manages to beat him. That said, while the Riddler will never take victories away, he does make it as hard as possible by cheating and generally not playing fair. Probably because he has a very loose definition of "fair".
• Fatal Flaw: Pride. Riddler is certainly incredibly smart, but he's so boastful, arrogant, and prideful that he provides numerous ways that he can be beaten.
  • His Complexity Addiction stems from his pride. Riddler doesn't just want to win, he wants to win in the most grandiose, overly-complicated manner possible. As such, his riddles and traps tend to be increasingly elaborate, which provides more ways for something to go wrong.
  • Riddler can't even conceive of himself losing. So when he inevitably does, Riddler doesn't have much in the way of a backup plan or an escape route, letting him get taken out by Batman pretty easily.
• Faux Affably Evil: After he turns into the Riddler. He puts up an act of politeness, but it's heavily sarcastic as well as his poorly concealed resentment and belief that he's better than others shines through to the point that it's hard to miss it.
• First-Name Basis: He calls himself "The Riddler" almost exclusively, but any time someone wants to make fun of him or belittle him, they call him by his real name, either with his first name or his last. Strange, Scarecrow, and Batman all call him "Edward", though Batman and Penguin both occasionally refer to him as "Nigma", and Catwoman and the Joker call him "Eddie".
• Flat "What": When Hugo Strange reveals that he knows who Batman is, something which the Riddler still hasn't figured out.
• Flunky Boss: The final fight with Riddler in Knight has him aided by robots.
• A Fool for a Client: Proclaims he will represent himself in court after Batman brings him to GCPD Lockup in Arkham Knight. His boast obviously fell through by the time of Catwoman's Revenge as he's "talking to his lawyer" (i.e. trying to run his Jailbreak Protocol on his supercomputer) with his one phone call.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: He wears a pair of glasses, and the zero soul part is pretty self-explanatory.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In Arkham VR, he challenges the player directly and even invokes this trope by saying it wouldn't protect them.
• Freudian Slip: During his final fight with Batman and Catwoman in Arkham Knight.
  Riddler: DIE, FATHER! I mean, Batman!
• Friendless Background: Unlike most incarnations of the character, where he's humble enough to respect a few fellow villains and remain on decent terms with the rest of Gotham's rogues, Riddler here is such an emotionally stunted, patronizing narcissist that everyone either outright hates his guts or ignores him completely. He even boasts to Batman that he could become his own adversary, describing how he already plays chess against himself and conducts scintillating private conversations online using different usernames.
  Catwoman: Oh look. It's more of Eddie's homemade friends.
  Riddler: Hahaha, your mockery is pointless, Cat. I don't have any friends at all.
  • In Asylum he seemed to be on decent terms with Joker, being on his party list and apparently talking with him while Joker was roaming the city. Joker never acknowledges him in City so perhaps he was merely using him and afterwards Riddler fell below his radar.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Nigma's smug attitude and belief that he is better than them and everyone else garners him little respect from his fellow rogues, whom barely tolerate him at best and don't want to be in his presence at worst.

G-M

• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In-story, Riddler hired thugs (or built robots in Arkham Knight) to hide his trophies around the environment, and also gives Batman riddles that are solved by scanning them in the environment. In practice, this explanation does not work at all: Riddler trophies are very often hidden within complex contraptions, located deep in the lairs of Gotham's supervillains and megacorps, in areas not accessible to anyone but Batman with his specialized gadgets, and even all three at once. There's just no way that Nigma and his hired help could accomplish this even with weeks to prepare. This is especially pronounced with his riddles, where the answer may be objects or people that aren't even in proper position yet when the night begins, and in Arkham Knight one riddle answer is Barbara Gordon's Batgirl costume hidden in a secret display in her hideout, implying Riddler knows her secret identities and where she works; if it were true it'd be a big deal to both Riddler and the Bat family, but no one discusses it.
• Geek Physiques: Skinny variety. It gets more pronounced as the games progress and his obsession with Batman worsens; at the time of Origins he is at least at a healthy bodyweight, but by Knight he's positively gaunt.
• The Ghost:
  • Plays this role in Asylum, as despite having a presence on Arkham Island, he is never physically seen, relegated to a voice.
  • He's also this in Origins, with his sidequest ending with Batman preventing all his blackmail material from being published and collecting the very first Riddler Trophy from his lair.
• A God Am I: Played for Laughs. One of the lines he can have if you solve a riddle involving controlling his robots has him angrily ramble about how they should only obey him because he's their master and god... before clarifying that he's not kidding and he actually programmed a basic religion centered around him into them.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Most of his rants against Batman, particularly in Knight, show Eddie to be severely jealous of the adulation heaped on what he considers a thoroughly mediocre mind like the Dark Knight's, while he's repeatedly beaten and locked away whenever he tries to "prove" his own genius.
  "You're a cheat and a liar. A dressed-up strongman playing with expensive toys. 'World's greatest detective'?! Ha! And everyone from Gotham to Star City believes it! I cannot abide a fraud, detective — a dilettante masquerading among his intellectual betters, stealing every last scrap of appreciation, dignity and respect!"
  "And then you appear[ed] in Gotham, dressing up your cognitive capabilities — marginally superior, as they are, to that of the average hoodlum — in the guise of crusading hero. And oh, how the people swooned."
  "How dare you brutalize me. Me! Your intellectual superior, your better?! Me, Edward Nigma, the Riddler — and the world's greatest EVERYTHING?!"
• Hated by All: No one in the Arkhamverse likes him, not even the other supervillains or his henchmen. About the only person to show any sort of affection for him is Dirty Cop JT Wicker, and that's mostly out of pity.
• Hate Sink: The overall narrative goes out of its way to make the Riddler as unlikable and uncool as possible. He's so sarcastic, narcissistic and annoying that he manages to attract a level of hatred, both in-universe and out, that no other villain in the Arkhamverse has, and only gets more dickish with each passing game. It's intended to make the player want to complete his challenges, and also to feel satisfaction when he has a Villainous Breakdown.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Once Batman solves all the riddles in City, the Riddler puts bombs with motion detecters on his remaining hostages to serve as an especially cruel security system; they'll blow up if they stop moving at all, will also blow up if someone enters the detecters' field of view, and forces them to walk around the room endlessly. After saving those hostages and subduing the Riddler, Batman puts the bombs on the Riddler and force him to walk around the room instead. Even though Batman and the others know that the bombs are deactivated, they just let the Riddler suffer for a while.
  • Riddler kidnapping Catwoman in Knight to get at Batman is ultimately the catalyst for his final defeat, as she helps Batman fight him. For added irony, a random Mook even lampshades this. The Catwoman's Revenge DLC is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, as Catwoman destroys what's left of Riddler's hideout and steals all of his money, leaving him in jail and with nothing.
    Mook: Riddler's gonna regret going after Catwoman. She's more into the vengeance thing than the Bat.
• Hollywood Atheist: He can be heard in the GCPD lockup in Knight mocking the Christian beliefs of Blackfire and Azrael. It’s clearly part of his superiority complex, as he cannot comprehend the belief that someone or something smarter than himself exists, and pretty much views any worldview beyond his own as stupid and ignorant.
• Humiliation Conga: Not only does every single game lead him down one of these, the series as a whole constitutes a gigantic one for his character in the decade or so since Origins — at first a rather smug, self-assured blackmailer with a natty wardrobe and enough connections to bring down a corrupt city government single-handedly, his growing obsession with Batman turns him into a gaudily dressed, narcissist super-criminal hung up on a one-sided rivalry and only barely tolerated by his fellow villains; by Knight, he's finally become an unkempt, psychopathic loser, hamstrung by his own solipsist ego, belittled or dismissed by everyone he meets, and forced to spend countless hours building a task force of robots because even his disgruntled, traitorous henchmen can't stand him anymore. He gets particularly bad after the Catwoman DLC: While he was in prison, Catwoman snuck into his robot factory, stole all his money, and blew it up to boot as revenge. To top it off, he was listening to it the whole time, since he was attempting to access his computer to stage a breakout. Since he wasn't able to keep up the facade of just talking to his lawyer, Officer Cash got suspicious and tasered him. So by the end not only is he still in jail, but his money is now gone and his robot factory destroyed.
• Hypocrite:
  • As Batman gets close to stopping his scheme in Origins, Enigma tries to make him back off by arguing that compared to the assassins and other villains running around, his extortion scheme is pretty harmless since it doesn't physically hurt people. This is ignoring that 1) Nigma's plan will end with him revealing the extorted information to the public, causing widespread chaos and destruction, and 2) Nigma's own belief that brain is more powerful and dangerous than brawn.
  • He'll accuse Batman of cheating even when he himself cheats. He frames one of his kidnapped hostage puzzles as a straight-forward Shell Game. In actuality, the hostage is moved completely independently of the containers via an underground rail system, making the test actually impossible without Detective Mode.
  • Conveniently ignoring all his underestimation of Batman's brainpower, he plays dirty with rigged challenges that would be impossible for even a high intellect to beat normally, yet he tends to accuse Batman of cheating (e.g., not dying) whenever he wins.
    Riddler: No, no, no! You cheated! Catwoman cheated! She stole my victory from me!
    Batman: A fight I couldn't win? That doesn't even fit your definition of "playing fair".
    Riddler: It WAS fair! If you weren't able to bypass the robots' multilayer encryption, decipher their unique operating system, and reprogram them mid-battle, that doesn't mean you get to call in assistance!
    Batman: (Flatly) You need help, Nigma.
    Riddler: I NEVER NEED "HELP" WITH ANYTHING!!
  • He repeatedly sneers at Batman for his reliance on his physical prowess, makes insults based on his physique, and generally champions a "brains over brawn" perspective. But many of his challenges are tests of physicality — running an obstacle course, reaching an objective in a certain time, making quick and precise Batarang throws, etc. — with only a very minor element of riddles or puzzles to them. He tries to justify this by claiming that Batman's failure to complete his challenges is proof of Riddler's intellectual superiority since he's the one who designed them, which is Insane Troll Logic at its finest.
  • When Hugo Strange smugly points out that he actually solved Batman's secret identity without the latter's Complexity Addiction, Riddler, who detests offering any easy clues or help that might give away the solutions of his puzzles, outright begs Strange to tell him the answer.
  • Also in Knight, solving his puzzle rooms will see him ambushing Batman and Catwoman on their way out of the Orphanage with a fighting robot equipped with a force-field, and even then Riddler rants about how both of them cheated at his puzzles.
  • When imprisoned in the GCPD headquarters, Riddler badgers Deacon Blackfire and Azrael for believing in something as superstitious as religion. This is despite the fact that Edward programmed his own religion into his robots so that they would obey them.
• Hypocritical Humor: He demeans Batman as a self-obsessed narcissist who is desperate for attention, constantly tries to prove how amazing he is, and plasters his personal logo on everything he owns as a mark of his vanity and ego. Self-awareness is clearly not one of Eddie's strong suits.
• I Meant to Do That:
  • In each game, when Batman starts solving his riddles and finding his trophies, his initial reaction is usually some kind of smug gloating about how Batman was obviously meant to solve or find that, it was one of the easy ones, and in fact he expected you to solve it much quicker, like he would. Then, when you start finding more of them, he gets more incredulous, uptight, and eventually furious, thus exposing the obvious lie.
  • In Knight, Riddler will give Batman a code to toggle between his traps after going over a list of self-aggrandizing rules. However, Batman just deciphers the code early. Should you open the door before Riddler is done talking, he'll then claim that figuring out the code was actually the first riddle of the evening.
• I Reject Your Reality: His delusion about Batman being a Villain with Good Publicity actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in Knight; when Scarecrow finally reveals Batman before the world as Bruce Wayne, Riddler has become so monomaniacally obsessed with his perception of Batman as a "cheater" that Riddler convinces himself it's a trick of some kind, and one he's not going to fall for — in other words, the events of the night were just an impossibly large ruse, with Scarecrow, Batman, and every criminal in Gotham all working together to try and fool him. The fact that everyone else sees it as the truth is just further proof to him, since he also "knows" that none of them are as intelligent as he is.
• I Shall Taunt You: Increasingly so as the games progress. In City he'll spend every minute the player is in one of his rooms mocking the Dark Knight's alleged lack of intelligence, and in Knight practically every word out of his mouth that isn't a Motive Rant is a mockery directed at either Batman or Catwoman. He'll even hijack the giant screens in Gotham to throw more taunts at you.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Most people, in his humble opinion. He is, in everyone else's objective opinion.
  Hugo Strange: How is the Riddler like a blank dictionary? You are both at a loss for words.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: His most driving motive in his rivalry with Batman, particularly as he feels the compulsive need to prove himself superior to everybody else. Virtually every time he talks to Batman or his henchmen, he often likes to take a moment to remind them that he is, in fact, intellectually superior.
  • This also stops him from getting the answer to the "Who is the Batman?" question from Strange, as Riddler realizes he can't ask an "inferior" mind for an apparently obvious answer. The realization leaves him at a loss for words.
• Insane Troll Logic: Riddler will find any excuse to dismiss Batman's accomplishments and reassert his superiority to him, no matter how much he has to torture logic to do it.
  • He repeatedly insists that Batman must be cheating as he overcomes the Riddler's trials, because he just can't accept that Batman is actually accomplishing the task. But if Batman is "cheating" by whatever definition of the word the Riddler wants to use, that still means Batman is outsmarting him.
  • He claims that some of his riddles are impossible to solve; if there was no solution for them at all, by the word's definition it wouldn't be a riddle. But even if he did design them to be impossible, it's once again Batman proving his intellect by figuring out a solution that Riddler didn't foresee. Besides, if Eddie really wanted to make Unwinnable by Design scenarios, he could — in the final battle in Knight, he traps Batman in a fight he literally can't win, and only Catwoman coming back saves him.
  • Many of his Riddler trophies are impossible to collect with just the gadgets Batman has at the start of each game, so one way or the other, Riddler must be expecting him to upgrade his arsenal. But then he goes and complains when Batman uses gadgets the Riddler didn't know about, or uses them in ways Riddler didn't anticipate.
    • In Knight, he's furious when Batman first uses the voice synthesizer to give orders to his robots and calls him a cheater, but several of his trophies are contained within puzzles that can only be solved by using the voice synthesizer in this manner. To make it even more absurd, in his boss fight he pits Batman against an army of his robots that are designed so only Catwoman can damage them, and when defeated he claims that the "intended" way he was supposed to beat him was to hack and reprogram the robots mid-battle. In other words, Riddler is trying to argue that Batman was supposed to win by doing the thing he earlier said was cheating.
  • In Arkham Knight, he rants that the only way Batman solved his riddles is because the people he hired to set them up didn't do so properly — yet Riddler himself claims he fired all his goons and has built robots to make his riddles, that he himself programmed. He also decides that Batman isn't fooled by a color-word puzzle trick because he can't read, that the only reason Batman wins is because he's so incompetent he can't fail properly, and explicitly forbids him from using any gadget specifically designed to counter Riddler's devices.
  • He demands that Batman follow the rules of his tracks when attempting them, but the last rule is that Riddler can add more rules whenever he wants.
  • In the post-game of Arkham Knight after Batman's secret identity is revealed to the public, Riddler cannot accept this fact and decides it is all an elaborate conspiracy between Batman, the media, and the other villains, to trick him.
• Insistent Terminology: He keeps calling his death traps and physical challenges "riddles" even though they require the most minimal of brainpower to complete. Lampshaded by Catwoman and the Joker hallucination in Arkham Knight.
• Insufferable Genius: With the emphasis on "insufferable." His constant insults, Smug Snake tendencies with his puzzles, and inability to comprehend his own flaws are intentionally grating. In Batman: Arkham Asylum, even Dr. Young — who expressed a hopelessly naive belief that she could cure the Joker — confesses that she finds him nearly intolerable to be around.
  Dr. Young: I have yet to make up my mind whether he is a genius or just deluded. Whichever one he is, just being in his company is both irritating and exhausting.
• Intercom Villainy: The Riddler hacks into Batman's radio channels in every game to call him stupid and challenge him to collect the trophies he's hid throughout Batman's surroundings. This is the only way Riddler interacts with Batman in Asylum and Origins.
• Irony: Way back in Origins, Edward had actually tried to piece together Batman's identity by himself, and one of his two main guesses was Bruce Wayne. When Batman's identity is finally exposed to the world in Knight though, the Riddler has been obsessing over the Caped Crusader for so long that he flat-out refuses to accept that Bruce Wayne could possibly be Batman.
• It's All About Me: Calling him egotistical would be putting it lightly. The Riddler constantly boasts about his intellectual superiority over everyone (especially Batman), and believes that the events of Arkham Knight are entirely an elaborate ploy to trick him.
• Jerkass: He's a smug, condescending, patronizing and thoroughly unpleasant asshole who boasts about his intelligence non-stop when he isn't insuting others for being "stupid".
• Karma Houdini: In Arkham Origins. He completely escapes Batman's grasp and suffers no retribution for his crimes. He even manages to reveal his biggest secret and plunge the city into chaos in the "Cold Cold Heart" DLC.
• Kick the Dog: He does this to the remaining medical team hostages in Arkham City. (The ones he doesn't put in Riddle rooms.) Strapping explosives to your hostages to make sure they behave is one thing, but forcing them to walk non-stop under the threat of their heads blowing up is just plain cruel.
• Laughably Evil: Interesting in that the comedy is very much directed at him and not by him. He's cartoonishly petty, whiny and short-tempered to the point he becomes hilarious, even if he is genuinely dangerous and sociopathic.
• Last Villain Stand: In Knight. After solving all his riddles, Riddler fights Batman himself in a mech suit.
• Lawman Gone Bad: An optional conversation with Alfred in Origins reveals that he used to work for the GCPD's cyber crime division.
• Lean and Mean: He gets skinnier and douchier with each passing game.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the first and second games, as you get near to collecting all his riddles, he will accuse you of looking the answers up on the internet.
• Madness Makeover: His repeated failures have clearly taken a toll on on◊ his◊ appearance.
• Mini-Mecha: Uses one in Knight to fight Batman and Catwoman.
• Mood-Swinger: Dr. Young claims that his "tantrums" have compromised numerous therapy sessions, and based on what we can hear, she's right.
• Motive Rant: Way too many to count in Knight, usually when Batman is riding the elevator leading to his various trials. He'll go on about how he was always persecuted for his intelligence, how Batman is a fraud who needs to be exposed for what he really is, how unfair it is that Batman gets away with brutalizing him despite the fact that he's his intellectual superior, and much more.
• Moving the Goalposts: Done several times in Knight. First he has Batman run through his various deadly racetracks and booby-trapped riddle rooms to collect the nine keys required to remove Catwoman's Explosive Leash. When Batman survives his final racetrack he reveals a secret tenth trial, and Catwoman is quick to point out his blatant cheating. Then after Batman and Catwoman solve that trial he ambushes them while piloting his Mini-Mecha and it looks like the player will finally be able to take him down... Except not really, as he flees underground and refuses to come out until the player has solved all 243 of his riddles.

N-Y

• Narcissist: He's got a very high opinion of himself.
  Riddler: I know what you're doing, Crane... talking to me away from Cobblepot and the others! You're trying to appeal to my ego.
  Scarecrow: (Deadpan) Is it working?
  Riddler: HA! I don't have an ego, Crane -- I'm far too brilliant! Especially for the likes of you!
• Never My Fault: As a direct result of his Insane Troll Logic, he holds Batman as the sole, true culprit for all his crimes. He's trying to do Gotham a favor by exposing Batman for the fraud he is, but Batman keeps refusing to admit it (i.e, refusing to die in his elaborate death traps) so he has no choice but to carry on hurting and killing people, and it's all Batman's fault. The first hostage Batman rescues in City mentions that Riddler was blaming Batman the entire time he was with him.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: In Batman: Arkham Origins, his desire to bring about the fall of Gotham City during the night of the Blackgate Riots indirectly causes peace when he exposes the corruption under the police department and brings down the city's corrupt mayor.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: After Batman beats him in Arkham Asylum, he kicks off his side mission in Arkham City by kidnapping numerous security and medical personnel and placing them in increasingly deadly Death Traps, all to "prove" that he's better than Batman. Taken even further in Knight, where after three games of being a Non-Action Guy, Riddler finally fights Batman himself, armed with a mech suit.
• Oblivious to His Own Description: When you get down to the last two Riddles in Knight, Eddie will Freak Out and say that it's like he's in some kind of Parallel Universe where Batman is the genius and he's just a self-absorbed madman.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: When not outright insulting others, he'll often engage in this as a form of criticism.
• Photographic Memory: He claims to have this, along with perfect recall. He can perfectly remember every time Batman has humiliated him, as well as every injury he's ever inflicted on him.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain: While he pops up in all four games with his Collection Sidequest, his contribution to the actual plots are often negligible and self-contained. He has nothing to do with Joker's plans in Asylum or City, nor with those of Hugo Strange and Ra's al Ghul, and in Origins his plot is in no way connected to Black Mask (though Black Mask apparently hired him to impede Batman's progress by hacking the comm towers, Riddler is not part of Sionis' operations), his assassins, Joker, Bane or Blackgate. The only time you could argue he affects the main story in any meaningful way is in Knight, and even then it's a very loose connection that even he barely acknowledges (Scarecrow wants him to distract Batman, not that Eddie sees it that way). In Origins he's just some hacker, and in the Rocksteady games his role consists solely of trying to best Batman in a one-sided petty rivalry that puts innocents in danger. Amusingly, in Asylum in particular, he is so irrelevant that Batman never even vocally acknowledges him, with the only actual interaction being sending his location to the GCPD to arrest him. The only time the player actually needs to deal with him to continue the main story is to unlock the Golden Ending of Knight.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He's such a Smug Snake thinking he's smarter than everyone else and doesn't miss a beat to insult others on their intellect. He is prone to using slurs against the disabled in challenge maps.
  Riddler: You ignorant buffoons should consider yourself nearly as intelligent as a retarded monkey.
• Precision F-Strike: Riddler never cursed in the first three games (though he does say "crap" in Origins) yet during his final confrontation with Batman and Catwoman, you can hear him shouting "Get up, you damn machines!" to his fallen robots in frustration.
• Pride: His Fatal Flaw. Riddler fails in the end because he can't shut off his "I'm your intellectual superior" routine for even a minute, and he refuses to learn from his mistakes since he believes that the only way he can lose is if Batman cheats. The attitude sees him alone and without any manpower or alliances with other villains, and that he continues to throw himself at Batman even when it costs him everything.
• Psychological Projection: He has the gall to accuse Batman of being an egotistical attention seeking narcissist. Look in any mirrors lately Nigma?
• Psychopathic Manchild: At the end of the day, Riddler is this. For all his supposed intelligence, he's nothing but a petty, egotistic brat with a massive superiority complex who just cannot stand the idea of anyone besting him intellectually. It also seems to get worse as the games go on, being less childish and even fairly friendly, albeit amoral, in Origins. By the time of City and Knight, he's completely devolved into this.
  Catwoman: [after he asks for her services] Sorry Eddie, it's just that I have all these clients who aren't insecure little power-mad man children.
• Riddle Me This: His Catchphrase, no doubt.
• Riddle of the Sphinx: Referenced in a gruesome fashion in Asylum: he claims the answer is "a baby", because it walks around on four limbs, but it walks on only two if you cut off its legs and three if you give it a crutch. When asked how he could make such a sick joke, the Riddler calmly responds "It's not my baby."
• Rhymes on a Dime: His riddles take the form of rhyming couplets in Knight.
• Robot Master: In Knight, he's taken to using robotic drones, claiming them to be superior to human goons. (They're not, and in fact he has them because nobody else wants to deal with him anymore.)
• Room Full of Crazy: One of the most defining traits about his handiwork — from his original cell at the asylum, to his lair and death traps throughout Arkham City, to all the challenge rooms hidden deep beneath Gotham, almost everything he builds or takes over is covered with green scribbles of schematics, formulae, cryptic taunts, and morbid child-like doodling. It even inspires a Batmobile skin in Knight.
• Sanity Slippage: Over the course of the series, his repeated defeats to Batman begin to take a toll on his sanity, causing his games to become bigger and more lethal, often by kidnapping innocent people.
• Self-Deprecation: Subverted. He proclaims to Catwoman taunting him about his friends with "I don't have any friends!", but his narcissism regards it as a good thing and a badge of honor that he hasn't found anyone to consider an equal.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Nigma peppers his speech with five dollar words to show off how smart he is. This ends up backfiring on him in the Catwoman DLC in Knight since his security AI does not recognize most of his bigger words, forcing him to stop and explain them.
• Signature Headgear: He wears his signature green bowler hat in City.
• Skewed Priorities: Spent more time programming his computer to praise him than giving it a basic vocabulary program to the point where it doesn't even know the word "run".
• Small Name, Big Ego: Downplayed. He is a genuine threat, but most of the time, Batman has more important things to do than deal with him. The other rogues find him annoying at best, the GCPD considers him something of a laughingstock, and unless he has a deliberate reason, Batman barely even acknowledges him, almost completely ignoring him in Asylum in particular. These factors, coupled with his Attention Whore attitude, contribute heavily to his Sanity Slippage over the years.
• Smart People Wear Glasses: He wears glasses in Origins and City, and is an excellent hacker and puzzle solver.
• Smug Smiler: It's almost his default expression.
• Smug Snake: He's very arrogant, but he's not quite as clever as he thinks and is quick to anger whenever Batman starts winning. This is also shown in his above interaction with the Scarecrow, who he considers beneath him. In reality, Scarecrow is far more dangerous. In Origins, Batman even flat-out spells this out to him:
  Batman: Did you ever consider that maybe you're not as clever as you think?
• The Social Darwinist: So he claims. Although it's more of "Survival of the Smartest," than the usual "Survival of the Fittest."
• The Sociopath: While not as pronounced as the likes of Joker or Scarecrow, Riddler's dialogue makes it clear he thinks nothing of anyone but himself; "normal" people are just braindead peons marginally more intelligent than apes and are only useful as thugs and muscle to fight Batman and set up his puzzles for him. And eventually in Arkham Knight he decides they're not even good for that and he boasts that he uses robots now because they're much more intelligent and competent than humans.
• Sore Loser: When Batman's on a winning streak, Riddler is quick to accuse him of cheating.
• Talkative Loon: The guy just can't shut up. Usually with some disparaging comment about Batman's intelligence, his own intellectual superiority, or most of the time, both.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: After he is being defeated in Arkham City, he is strapped to his own explosive helmet that he placed his victims with and forced to walk around his hideout under the threat of it exploding, not realizing that the explosives inside the helmet had already been removed.
• This Cannot Be!: Anytime Batman solves a puzzle, Nigma has a moment to declare something to this effect and then states that Batman must have cheated.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the first three games, Riddler stayed behind the scenes and never fought Batman directly. That changes in Knight where he fights both Batman and Catwoman in a mech suit.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: As shown in Origins, he was rather Affably Evil if somewhat snide as Enigma, and complimented Batman for his achievements and saying he would actually help him if he just asked at some points. By the time he adopts his Riddler persona, he's gone completely over the deep end and refuses to acknowledge any achievements other than his own.
• Unknown Rival: To Scarecrow in Knight. He resents how Scarecrow has become the primary threat Batman must face and often states that he's Batman's true nemesis. Of course, Scarecrow couldn't care less about him if he tried. In fact, if Scarecrow is defeated before him, he will gloat about it, saying that it proves his claim that he's the greatest villain in Gotham.
• Unseen No More: In Arkham Asylum, he is only heard over Batman's comms and never seen. He appears in the flesh in Arkham City.
• Unwinnable by Design: As his Mech Suit can change the colors of his robots from red to blue or vice versa, his Boss Battle in Knight would have been this if not for Catwoman's intervention.
• Villain Decay: Inverted in gameplay, as his challenges get more numerous and difficult with every new game in the series, but very much an acknowledged thing in dialogue and overall presentation. To summarise:
  • In Origins, "Enigma" is a sinister, shadowy figure working on an ambitious and well-crafted plan that has some claims to being a way of doing good by evil means. The plan is relatively mundane to his later schemes (collect blackmail on corrupt Gotham officials, then release all of it through public channels), but likely to cause Gotham's government and society to collapse in the ensuing scandals. He even escapes capture in the end, and manages to carry out at least a part of his plan. In the tie-in comics predating Origins, he even manages to hack the Batcomputer and observe Batman in a civilian disguise.
  • In Asylum, he's still a dangerously clever and menacing character, but has given up on political manipulation in favour of planting death traps around the city to weed out of the gene pool anyone too stupid to avoid them. He tries to prove himself smarter than Batman, but gets captured (by the normal police, that the Batman sent to his apartment after tracing his signal back there) for his troubles.
  • In City, he is now focused on Batman at the exclusion of all else, and is starting to show signs of strain at his repeated defeats - when Batman manages to save all the hostages from his death traps, he has to ask Batman to stand by while he builds some more death traps. Batman, of course, does no such thing and instead tracks him down to his base and takes him down personally. He also tries to taunt Hugo Strange over the phone about Strange's inability to capture him, even hinting at some of Strange's secrets that even Batman doesn't know at that point, but in the end Strange gets the last word by revealing that he's worked out Batman's secret identity and then gleefully refusing to tell the Riddler what it is, which reduces the Riddler to sputtering helplessly as Strange hangs up on him.
  • In Knight, he seems to have finally snapped and is throwing everything at Batman in the hopes that something will work, cheating blatantly and giving off incoherent rants that hint at all sorts of hangups and delusions. Everyone treats him with weary contempt, even Catwoman, who he's keeping hostage and could kill with the press of a button. It's also revealed that his mole at the GCPD started working for him out of pity, because he was just so pathetic that the mole started seeing Batman as a bully for breaking his spirit. He tries to replace his henchmen with robotic goons that turn out to be far inferior to regular ones in a fight, not to mention being easily hacked by Batman, which has also made his remaining human minions resentful of him. In the end, he's defeated once again, and the last we see of him in the series is him sobbing helplessly and begging Catwoman for mercy - which she shows none of, instead destroying the last of his resources on the outside, ensuring that he no longer has a means of escaping jail.
    JT Wicker: It used to be funny, you know, you'd haul Eddie in and he'd sit in his cell lecturing anyone who'd listen about how stupid you were. And then, one day, it just wasn't funny anymore. It was pathetic. He stopped taking care of himself, got that crazy look in his eyes. I swear, man, he's broken. You broke him.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the first game, he gets more and more unhinged as Batman slowly solves all of his riddles. In the second game, it happens as Batman locates and rescues more hostages. Origins also shows that he suffered one early on as well, which prompts his transformation into The Riddler. Happens again in Knight, especially as you finish the final death race he has planned, as well as collect all of his riddles. In the Catwoman DLC, he's forced to resort to begging as Catwoman robs him of all his money and blows up his robot factory just before Cash tazes him for getting too mouthy.
• Villain Has a Point: His stated goal in Origins is to blackmail the powers-that-be into either resigning or being forced out of office. Given that said powers are probably uniformly corrupt in a city where rule of law is a sick joke, one could almost compare him to Batman's reliance on vigilante justice... except he probably doesn't care if his actions actually make things better, and is definitely doing it primarily out of self-aggrandizement.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: In Asylum and Origins (though in the latter he can be seen in certain Game Over screens and does have an in-game character model); he makes a physical appearance in City and Knight.
• Why Won't You Die?: He screams something like this during the final race.
  "STOP! NOT! DYING!"
• Your Little Dismissive Diminutive: Sometimes does several times in the same sentence.
  "Do you know of anyone else in your twisted little penitentiary who is ingenious enough to arrange this little chat?"
• You Keep Using That Word: He keeps calling his various challenges "riddles", but very few of them qualify, even by a very generous definition of the word. While he does ask actual riddles in each game, the majority of the challenges he sets to Batman are tests of physicality, puzzle-solving, death traps, and scavenger hunts to find Riddler trophies. This is treated as in-universe Motive Decay in Arkham Knight, where his challenges are car races; while a few of them do have a small element of puzzle-solving and quick-thinking, they're certainly not riddles, and it's unclear how Batman's inability to complete them would prove the Riddler is intellectually superior to him. Even his final boss battle is a pure physical task, where Batman fights waves of robots and the Riddler in a mech suit. He claims that the fact he built and programmed these devices to kill Batman would make it an "intellectual victory above all else", but that isn't a riddle either. Catwoman calls him out on it in the last of her challenges, after avoiding sweeping sawblades:
  Catwoman: Damn him! How is that a riddle, Eddie? Seriously!?!
  Batman: You get used to it.
  [a little later]
  Catwoman: It's still not a riddle, Eddie!
  • Batman's Joker hallucination lampshades it as well.
    "You know, Riddler's trials are fun, Bats, but I really want to be there when he finds out what a riddle actually is."

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Can you defeat a mind such as mine?