Items

Every collectible guide for this game sorts by district, and our own eight district pages already do that better than a hub can. So this page sorts the whole collection by the thing that is stopping you: the gadget you do not own yet, the story beat you have not reached, the character you are not playing, or the DLC you have not started.

It is built for the moment when you are standing in front of a trophy you can see and cannot reach, which is the one question a location list never answers.

The real count, and why every guide gives a different one

You will see 243, 282, 400 and 440 quoted for this game, and they are not all wrong. They count different things. Here is the arithmetic from our own pages: the eight district guides list 37 in Amusement Mile, 39 in the Bowery, 37 in the Industrial District, 23 in the Museum, 36 in Park Row, 24 in the Steel Mill, 26 in the Subway and 25 in Wonder City. That is 247 Batman trophies. Add Catwoman's 35 pink ones and you get 282 question marks in total.

The larger figures in circulation fold in the breakables and the riddles, which are separate Riddler Challenge categories rather than trophies. This is worth stating because our own older pages carried the confusion too, and one of them quoted 400 as the trophy total.

Gate 1: what you can take on your first walk through

Sixty-seven trophy entries across the eight district pages are tagged as needing nothing at all. That is more than a quarter of the collection, and it is the portion worth picking up in passing during the campaign rather than saving for a cleanup lap.

Most of the breakables belong here too. A plain Batarang handles the Joker Teeth, the Joker Balloons and the TYGER Cameras, and the Penguin Statues in the Museum need no particular gadget either. If you are early in the game and want progress that sticks, these are the four to work on.

Gate 2: the gadget ladder

This is the useful table. It aggregates the requirement tag on every trophy entry across all eight district pages, so it tells you what a single gadget is actually worth to your completion percentage. Where an entry lists two or three gadgets, it is counted against each of them.

The three gadgets that gate the most

The Batclaw, Explosive Gel and Freeze Blast between them stand in front of roughly ninety trophy entries. If you are planning a cleanup lap and want to know when to start it, the honest answer is after you have all three, because a sweep made before that will send you back to the same rooftops twice.

The upgrade traps

Two rows in that table lie to you slightly, and this is the paragraph that will save you a wasted trip.

One Subway trophy does not just want the Cryptographic Sequencer, it wants the Range Amplifier upgrade for it, which is a separate WayneTech purchase our best upgrades guide also recommends on its own merits. And three trophies, one in the Museum and two in Park Row, want the Disruptor's firearm jammer rather than the base gadget. In all four cases you will arrive holding the right tool, see no prompt, and assume the entry is wrong.

Movement gadgets gate placement, not access

The Line Launcher and the Remote Control Batarang sit lower in the table but they feel worse, because they gate trophies you can already see. Between them they cover 34 entries, and those are the ones where the trophy is visibly sitting on a ledge across a gap or behind a grille you can look through.

Gate 3: the story

Wonder City and the Wonder Tower area are late-game locations, and that single fact gates two whole categories: all 25 Wonder City trophies and all 12 Demon Seals, which exist nowhere else.

Each of our eight district pages independently tells you to finish the campaign before going after the collection, and this is the reason why. It is not that trophies disappear, it is that gadget acquisition and area access both run on story progress, so a serious collecting run before the credits will always be partial.

Gate 4: the character

Catwoman's 35 trophies are pink rather than green, and they show up in every district except Wonder City. The rule people get wrong runs one way only: Catwoman can collect Batman's green trophies, but Batman cannot touch her pink ones. So a Batman-only run tops out at 247 no matter how thorough you are.

What you get for them is experience and the Sphinx' Riddle achievement, which is worth knowing before you commit to a second sweep of seven districts. Our Catwoman trophies guide maps all 35, and our Catwoman choice guide covers the story decision she is built around.

Her other collection is separate and later. The loot she steals from Hugo Strange's vault has to be abandoned to save Batman, and by the time she comes back for it Two-Face has taken it, scattering it across the Bowery and Park Row. That only opens up after the main story, and our Catwoman loot guide has the recovery route.

Gate 5: the DLC

Harley Quinn's Revenge adds 30 balloons, split between the Steel Mill, the Shipyard and the Industrial District, and the awkward part is not finding them. It is that the DLC alternates between playing as Robin and playing as Batman, so the collection splits across those segments and some balloons are only reachable in one of them. Our Harley balloons guide is broken up the same way for that reason, and all 30 unlock Party's Over.

The same DLC ends with three bombs on a five-minute timer, which is the Bomb Squad achievement. That one is a route problem rather than a search problem, and our Harley bombs guide lays out the order.

The one genuinely missable thing

No Riddler trophy in this game can be permanently missed. Exactly one collectible-adjacent item can, and it catches people at the very end of a completion run.

Hot and Cold is skippable, and most people skip it without noticing, because Harley mentions the stolen tech in passing while you are in the Steel Mill and nothing forces you back for it. The upgrade itself is required for the Predator Challenges and the Fully Loaded achievement, so missing it means a New Game Plus run for a hundred percent. Our Freeze Cluster Grenade guide has the Boiler Room route.

Breakables, grouped by the tool that works

The thing nobody says clearly about breakables is that the tool is not interchangeable. Three of the six categories accept anything you can throw, and three do not.

Demon Seals are demon heads with rings in their mouths, and the ring is the point: they have to be pulled down with the Batclaw, so a Batarang does nothing at all. Harley Heads need a Remote Electrical Charge delivered to the head, and again nothing else registers. Both categories also happen to be confined to a single area each, Wonder City and the Sionis Steel Mill, so they are quick once you have the right gadget and impossible before.

The permissive ones are more forgiving than they look. Joker Balloons always come in bunches of four tied together, so gliding through a cluster clears the whole set. Joker Teeth announce themselves with a wind-up sound if you stop moving and listen. And the TYGER Cameras exist because Hugo Strange is using the prison's own surveillance to watch Batman, which is why they are spread 12 apiece across four districts with a relay hub in each.

One shared rule ties them together: every three breakables you destroy clears one riddle from the Riddler's list. The Museum's 12 Penguin Statues also pay out concept art, which is the only breakable set in the game with a reward of its own.

The district ledger

Geography appears here once, deliberately at the bottom, because sorting by district is what the eight child pages are for.

Two rows are worth noticing. The Bowery is the single biggest district for trophies and has no unique breakables at all, so it is pure trophy work. Wonder City is the smallest of the top half and the only one Catwoman never visits, which makes it the one district a Batman-only player can actually finish completely.

What you actually unlock

Collecting pays three named achievements across this bucket: Sphinx' Riddle for Catwoman's 35, Party's Over for the 30 Harley balloons, and Bomb Squad for the three bombs. The Museum penguins pay concept art. For what completing the Riddler's full challenge list gets you, our Riddler Challenges guide covers the side mission itself, and the riddles that pair with these trophies live in the mechanics bucket.

The bucket's one non-Riddler payoff is cosmetic. Arkham City ships a set of alternate Batsuits, several of them drawn from other versions of the character, and our best suits guide picks the ones worth unlocking and says what each one takes.