An Interesting Era that WB won’t Return to
I have made clear that I am no villain of emulation/piracy when it comes to defunct games and their developers. Of those defunct studios, the folks at Midway Games and the entire 3D era of Mortal Kombat games. Well, not as of writing anyway; I’ve only got Deadly Alliance, Deception, and Shaolin Monks at current. When I free up some space on my computer, I’ll add Armageddon to the lineup.
Personally, Mortal Kombat: Deception was the one to introduce me to the rest of the series back when it was new in 2004. I’m not sure if this was fandom-wide or if it was just me, but I didn’t realize there was a story going on at the time. Then I watched further videos and discussions from the creators themselves and unaffiliated content creators on YouTube who explained that it seemed to be the case that folks didn’t realize or pay attention to the story going on until at least 1995 when fan favorites, most notably Scorpion, was absent until the Mortal Kombat 3 re-release titled Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
As you can see, Scorpion, Johnny Cage, and Raiden are absent. Along with some new characters and returning characters, rather than keep up the palette swap of Scorpion and Sub-Zero (the latter of which is shown unmasked there with the scar over his eye), there’s the two ninja cyborgs in Sektor (shown in red) and Cyrax (shown in yellow).
Nevertheless, Mortal Kombat trudged through the nineties with a dip in the latter half of the decade following the subpar 3D and cinematics within 1997’s Mortal Kombat 4. The opinions on the games in the 3D era seems to be that on the one hand, 2002’s Deadly Alliance perfected the errors of the previous game graphically, but on the other hand was one of the first signs that the money and idea trough at Midway Games was running dry. If that’s true, then it could explain why the new owners of Mortal Kombat, Warner Bros., are welcome to re-release and highlight Mortal Kombat 1, 2, and 3, while ignoring or keeping the co-creators, Ed Boon and John Tobias, from attempting to re-release/remaster the 3D era games.
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t seem to be the fairest deal all things considered. The biggest tell that there’s a preference for the first three games is that the plots of all three are the reimagined plots of Mortal Kombat 2011, henceforth referred to as MK9.
Brief summary for MK9, the events of Armageddon are rewritten when Dark Raiden sends a premonition of the MK Tournament to his past self. An amulet on Raiden’s person cracks as time progresses to show that each and every move they make further welcomes doom in the story. The first third of the game focuses on the tournament as an A plot with other characters’ motivations as a B plot. The middle part focuses on a revamped tournament in Outworld with different rules that are meant to favor the home team instead of the challengers in the Earthrealmers, and the final act focuses on the technically illegal invasion of earth by Shao Kahn’s horde.
MK 9 does what it can to tie a neat little bow on the story as it goes on, even rewriting events from the old games which is something I admire. As much as I like the old 3D games, there’s not a lot of consistency lore wise. Character endings do factor into the overall plot at large but differentiating canon from non-canon would require a flowchart. For example, Deadly Alliance and Deception flow into each other fairly well. The opening cinematic of DA shows the ambitions of the sorcerers Quan Chi and Shang Tsung, their murdering of Shao Kahn in a false show of allegiance and Shang Tsung finally getting one over on Liu Kang at the Wu Shi Academy itself.
Not only did these two villainous characters achieve something that rarely happens in media (the death of the protagonist/hero), they used his soul to revive the legendarily undefeatable army of the dragon king. A character we learn more about in Deception. While Raiden is narrating the story, it’s interpreted as a sign of things to come. Death and destruction are on the horizon and if Earthrealm doesn’t act fast they could succumb to the same fate that befell Kitana’s home world of Edenia. The purpose of the MK tournament was to give Earthrealm a defense mechanism. With other worlds falling to Shao Kahn’s Outworld forces, the elder gods of Mortal Kombat granted earth this fighting chance, but refuse to intervene further. This forced Raiden to come down to earth to organize Earthrealm’s heroes into a fighting force that can stand a chance against the Deadly Alliance.
While this is happening, Deception is a bit of a prequel. Before there was Liu Kang and Kung Lao, there was Shujinko. An aspiring warrior who looked up to Kung Lao’s ancestor and namesake, the Great Kung Lao, with dreams of defeating Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat himself. However, as the name suggests, there’s more to this than even he would know.
Both Deadly Alliance and Deception have a story mode known as Konquest, though the story aspect is further explored in Deception. Whereas the DA version is a tutorial showing the player how to control the roster, Deception focuses on a central protagonist in Shujinko. It starts with him in a village in Earthrealm and learning fighting from Bo’ Rai Cho himself. His dreams are put on hold until he can demonstrate his fighting abilities. Seeing the opportunity before him, an entity known as Damashi appears before the young man and grants him the power to imitate the fighting abilities of any warrior he encounters. The purpose of this gift of absorption/copying is so that Shujinko can defend himself while taking on a quest set forth by the Elder Gods.
Damashi explains that they need a representative born within the realms to gather and send them tools known as the Kamidogu so that no one with evil aforethought can disturb reality to their own whim. There are six realms, each with a corresponding Kamidogu. There are four that get the main focus across the franchise, but there’s two more that are explored in this game. In order the realms are Earthrealm, the Netherrealm, Chaosrealm, Outworld, Seido, and Edenia. All realms are accessible when attaining that realm’s Kamidogu, and all are accessible through the Nexus that connects them all to each other. Only a Kamidogu can activate the portals between the realms, though there’s other methods accessible to gods and sorcerers.
Over the course of the story, Shujinko uses this ability to learn nearly every move from every warrior he comes across, to include many big names and newcomers within Deception, not all of them corresponding to the story. You do meet characters like Havik, Dairou, and Raiden in the story, but the latter two don’t teach you their moves until Konquest mode is finished. After that, the Konquest mode is fully explorable though the village you start in can’t be explored so you’d better do everything you can in there or you’d have to risk starting over.
The story of Shujinko begins to converge with that of Deadly Alliance before it when he ventures to the Netherrealm the second time. Getting sidetracked a bit back in Earthrealm to qualify for the tournament puts him in the path of Nightwolf who helps him to limit an evil stain on his soul. The consequence of this is limited travel to more dangerous realms and so to reignite this evil or at least strengthen it, he needs to return to the Netherrealm and absorb more dark energy from one of the best candidates: Scorpion.
In exchange, Scorpion tasks him with finding Quan Chi while in the Netherrealm where the undead ninja beats him silly and chases him through hell. Elsewhere, a pair of demons, Moloch and Drahmin, overhear the commotion with a personal wager to feast on the loser. The pair intervene and hold Scorpion up which gives Quan Chi a chance to escape into a portal that takes him to the Dragon King’s Lost Tomb, ergo the beginning of the Deadly Alliance opening cinematic. Shujinko’s time ends in the Netherrealm and just as he’s returning to Earthrealm, Raiden updates him on the death of Liu Kang, and the urgency they face. Shujinko tries to call a favor from Outworld, but gets held up by the Deadly Alliance. Out of that pickle, he comes across a new one by a frivolous arrest and twenty years in a holding cell in Seido, the realm of Order.
He eventually gets back on track and finds the final Kamidogu only to learn from the real Damashi, Dragon King Onaga, that there’s a final piece that will send the Kamidogu to the elder gods. This blunder forces him to act and self-correct and explains Deception’s opening cinematic as narrated by Shujinko himself.
Shaolin Monks is more of a retelling of MK2 so it won’t get counted here. After the events of Deception though, the stakes are so high that Armageddon is on the horizon.
New game, new protagonist, new set of priorities. Shujinko’s quest spanned over forty years, while the new guy Taven pretty much has only a few days to finish his quest. His parents, the god Argus, and the sorceress Delia, set him and his brother Daegon on a quest to acquire weapons and armor and defeat the firespawn known as Blaze. Unbeknownst to them, Blaze’s death is supposed to have two outcomes: annul every warrior’s abilities or exterminate them all. Things don’t go as planned and Taven is found battling his brother in Mortal Kombat as opposed to facing him in a fair and friendly competition as advertised. By the end, the power released by defeating Blaze does nothing. In fact, it makes things worse. No one dies or even loses their powers — they get stronger in the Konquest ending, and this is repeated in Taven’s Arcade ending which is narrated by Argus instead of himself.
If I had to give my two cents on the 3D era of MK games, I’d say that there was a benefit and a hazard to their inclusion in the lore as well as from outside forces. Objectively, Shujinko was written as an unknowing tool of evil with no ambitions beneath the surface. He has an admiration for the Kung Lao lineage, and a desire to live like the original Kung Lao from centuries prior. Not everyone needs lifelong goals or at the very least, it’s better to have something that’s adjustable instead of elaborate and rigid, but Shujinko’s goals seemed to be a bit too idyllic. He had a few of the same problems that Zuko had in Avatar, in that he didn’t really think very hard about what he expected to get out of life. Getting the avatar, winning the cinderblock affections of your callous father, and redemption from a royal faux pas. What next?
Similarly, Shujinko’s goals were to become a great warrior like the Great Kung Lao prior to his replacing the mop in Goro’s hands and defeating Shang Tsung. Not much beyond that. Regarding goals, Taven’s aren’t worse, they’re nonexistent. He goes on the quest because he’s told to and the stakes become personal when he finds out how psychotic Daegon has become.
But even these hazards to the MK lore didn’t really deter me personally. I wasn’t that attached to MK at the time, and I’m willing to let the creator continue unimpeded, though it would help me to try to pay attention to the important bits that get thrown at me all at once so I can point out inconsistencies as I see them. For example, without proper reading between the lines, Shao Kahn seems to come back to life between his death in Deadly Alliance and him appearing in the Armageddon opening cinematic. I heard it was explained that that’s not the original Shao Kahn but one of his generals, most likely Reiko, but finding that piece of info requires some digging.
In one scene in Konquest mode, Shang Tsung, Quan Chi, Onaga, and Shao Kahn are all in the emperor’s throne room, yet all of them betrayed each other or expressed hostilities towards each other before this point! Hell, Onaga admits to seeking the power of Blaze to usurp Shao Kahn to his face. If there was consistency in this timeline, Onaga would really be the last one still alive as the Deadly Alliance killed Shao Kahn, and the duo along with Raiden failed to stop Onaga.
And it’s not just that plot thread. There’s more threads that seemingly have no connection or go nowhere or get dropped half way without addressing the consequences across Deception’s and Armageddon’s Konquest modes. Do the Lin Kuei remember Shujinko? Does Bo’ Rai Cho remember his student? Would Taven have gotten revenge on Quan Chi for killing his partnered dragon Orin? Does this Alliance of Darkness move forward with their plans to conquer all?
It can seem like a waste to put forth this plot point and drop it half-way, but I can see why such a move would be made if it’s unimportant to the rest of the plot or the character in question. Both Konquest modes get back to the original focus, but the midlevel faffing about can seem like reading a story spearheaded by a hyperactive ADHD sufferer. The type who’d get sidetracked in a Skyrim or FromSoftware game.
All that being said, MK9 is a proof of concept that the mess of a late stage investment can be fixed or reworked with a reboot. MK9 goes down in video game history as a success story, and MK X and 11 seemed to be doing fairly well. But there’s some aspects of the old 3D games that deserve a comeback. Mini-games for one would be appreciated like Chess Kombat, Puzzle Kombat, and Motor Kombat which are all entertaining and work towards gathering coins for the krypt as well. Speaking of which…
The krypt also went through its own evolution upping the creepy to full-blown horror. I’m not entirely a fan of the move to make it available for purchase, and it might be the subject of its own blog post in the future, but overall, it’s a better way of unlocking content without forking over IRL cash. Earning money through fighting and game modes and mini-games is an objectively better way.
I’m not sure if this is a conscious decision from within NetherRealm or WB Games is opposed to it, but for some odd reason, the 3R games are largely forgotten. If you have the means to, I encourage you to try and experience them yourself somehow. Gameplay video, emulation, however it’s done, you’ve got to try them. It’s worth an experience.
Before I go, I have plans for February to introduce readers to YouTube channels I have been watching, my subscription to said channel notwithstanding. I watch these channels a fair bit and use the videos at times to fuel my research for these posts. It would only be right that I share and try my best to help them grow to the best of their abilities. This isn’t a sponsor by the way, think of it more as a recommendation. They’ll be there if you would like to explore further. The choice is yours.
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