Tag: 3D mortal kombat games

Midway’s Rise and Fall

TiberiusLeave a comment

Toy company extraordinaire brought down by hemorrhaging money

Last week’s gap was a “woke up and chose violence” moment. This time, for something back on track: Midway!

This blog has talked about individual Midway Games, but hasn’t brushed up on the developer-publisher itself. Best to round out the picture by looking at the factory’s skeleton then so we can learn how the Mortal Kombat developer went under in 2010. Midway’s origins are certainly a story worth telling, they may have gotten famous in the 1980s and ‘90s in the arcades, but they began in 1958 as any other toy company in Chicagoland. Pinball, party games, amusement park distribution, cheap carney games made for ripping off unsuspecting children. I swear that baseball hit the bottles! Gimme my prize, old man!! The eventual shift to video games by the late ‘70s and beyond is consistent then with their philosophy. Bought by Bally in 1969, they expanded into arcades, distributing known titles and developing their own, one of their earliest being Space Invaders.

Beep, beep, beep, blast!

For North American distribution, these guys made Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man a household name. It was a gilded age for arcades and also quite short-lived. Keep in mind, that the gaming industry back then was mostly carried by Pong. There was only one game, but 20 billion different devices running that game in arcades, on early consoles like the Atari 2600 and the Magnavox Odyssey, on toasters, on walls, on lamps, on tree trunks—market oversaturation brutally killed the gaming industry back then, hurt worse by the release of admittedly experimental, but otherwise manure-level “games” on later consoles like the 2600 or the NES. The most catastrophic being that of E.T.

An early tie-in for the movie, the window was extremely small and putting together digitized Legos in six weeks could work in theory, but those who were there saw the end result of applying it in practice and apply it they could not. The difference between bugs and glitches then and now is that today’s bugs and glitches are prettier, cost 18 terabytes of data, and need to be connected to the internet despite being singleplayer. So where was Midway in the middle of all that? Sitting undisturbed in the arcades where a couple of quarters could get you to Pac-Man level 256 where things got funky.

Now it’s time to get funky!

By the late 1980s, Midway was a solid pinball and arcade cabinet manufacturer-distributor with association Williams Electronics and Bally Manufacturing. These combined forces worked together crafting machines, entertainment machines for you, me and every ‘90s kids’ favorite wallaby. But what would they have as their most famous video game series? Rampage? Paper Boy? Galaxian? Nay, it was:

I won’t look down on you if you weren’t there for this era, I barely caught the tail end of it with Ermac whooping my ass at Mach s[souls]t. And if there’s a difference between those who saw Tetris get released and those who simply grew up with its colossal number of ports (right here), then I represent a portion of those who grew up playing the home release of Mortal Kombat trying to play the arcade games. It didn’t translate as well as I’d hoped, but I wasn’t raised on quitting juice, I was breastfed!

Mortal Kombat was originally meant to challenge Street Fighter II. Developed by four dudes in eight months, the framework in place and one that Midway let Ed Boon and John Tobias use until 1995 was digitized sprites of neon-colored actors imitating ‘70s Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan flicks. Funny enough, a bunch of these mo-capped actors are retired martial artists and such. They even tried to grab the Muscles from Brussels to star in the game, but depending on the source he either couldn’t do the motion capture, outright rejected the offer in favor of a competitor, or his agency did. Not that Boon Tobias was salty per se, but it’s been said that Johnny Cage is a direct parody of the Belgium’s Most Muscular Waffle.

Buns and thighs

Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Van Damme I Screwed Up went on to act in the 1994 Street Fighter live-action movie whose only claim to acclaim should be the monumental work put in by Raul Julia as M. Bison, going out with a bang later that year from stomach cancer. And Street Fighter took a reputational hit while MK3 released the year after that and broke into Hollywood with campy action movie goodness. Suffice it to say, the ‘90s were great for Midway…

…now where did it go wrong? Right around the late ‘90s, actually. Reaching its zenith, around the time of the first movie and MK3, consoles didn’t stop releasing. Disgruntled Nintendo personnel crafted the PlayStation in a wizard’s lair (but forgot to clean the cauldron after use, rude), Nintendo themselves continued to make hanafuda cards and SNES, Sega was crapping out console after console and finding some way to put their blue mascot on them all, the Neo-Geo, and the 3DO admittedly came and went earlier, but also helped to shift the market console-wards with arcades becoming more and more cumbersome to travel to and from.

Yeah, I only ever went to arcades when I was in summer day camp and we traveled by rented school bus to go there. Great memories, but I probably wouldn’t wanna handle the logistics of that either.

Now, Mortal Kombat would see a myriad of ports to different consoles, some of which I listed here over the years, and the last main title being 1997’s MK4 reaching arcade cabinets. General reception at the time and now disregard it as a high school or college project. Those are my words, by the way. The reception was probably not that harsh…

They weren’t harsh enough

A professional developer’s first go at 3D games was seen as a huge step back into a shallow grave with Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, and Abe’s Odyssey serving as the pallbearers, and the implementation of 3D like this into a violent video game just elevated critics and news reporters even more. Even Ed Boon acknowledging its missteps didn’t do much to drive the attention away, but fortunately, they had enough cash to work on further future projects. MK: Mythologies – Sub-Zero released the same year to similarly ugly criticism, and no one has ever played Mortal Kombat: Special Forces because it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist.

F[Scorpion’s spear]K!

Saying it thrice doesn’t make it true, dammit! Nevertheless, the innocent quarters sent to slaughter in the arcade era made for further funding and with the writing on the wall in blood, Midway’s arcade division was officially shuttered by 2001. The next year, Mortal Kombat returned to force with a new graphics engine and an expansive mythology beyond the old comic books of the 1990s. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance fixed what the other three games broke over its back and if you believe the 3D era of Mortal Kombat was MK4 and not Deadly Alliance, then this was a time when Mortal Kombat got weird and for better or worse, these games took the spotlight away from some other titles that blessed the 2000s. Highlighting just a few gems and coals really quick in no particular order, there was Area 51, Rampage as said before, The Suffering and its sequel Ties That Bind, NFL Blitz, L.A. Rush, SpyHunter and several others for distribution in North America, developed by smaller devs in association with Bandai Namco and Square Enix. Yeah, yeah, this kind of s[footstomp]t happens all the time. Still does.

But you probably didn’t notice some of those other titles with Mortal Kombat’s strange mechanics taking the spotlight. For me, Chess, Puzzle, and Motor Kombat were nifty little additions. The series didn’t have to take itself seriously and in many ways it didn’t. Hell, one of the composers made a cameo in MKII!

TOASTY!

But it’s not like this was enough to save Midway in the new millennium. Their machines stopped robbing us of our hard found quarters sandwiched between couch cushions and underneath desks and chairs, and Midway carried themselves in stride belting out game after game after North American release of obscure JRPG after game, but MK was the company’s face. Not even a collaboration with John Woo and Inspector Tequila for 2007’s Stranglehold could help, then again market trends change faster than people change their underwear so for all the trouble I went through to blaze through that Hong Kong-infused Max Payne clone may seem like a waste, but waste not, want not is my motto and I try what I can to live it to varying degrees of success.

Midway’s twin peaks were before the turn of the millennium and ever since the arcade cabinets lost relevance, the money’s run empty ever since with Mortal Kombat’s 3D era eating up what was left. If you pay close attention to the mechanics and art direction from Deadly Alliance to Deception to Shaolin Monks to Armageddon, you can pinpoint and examine what part of the games had the most attention and what parts had the least. Deadly Alliance put a lot into the engine, but was basically a 3D arcade game. Deception did more with its Konquest mode and Chess and Puzzle Kombat modes but even these weren’t spared the cutting room floor in some areas. Konquest mode segments are either rushed, scrapped, or unfinished and it looks like they had a bunch of ideas that would never be explored.

Shaolin Monks revamped the free roaming Konquest idea, took out the RPG-esque side questing and gave us a Streets of Rage/Final Fight-like beat ‘em up! Hell yeah, after about 12 or 13 years. Probably could’ve done this sooner, but the biggest sacrifice suffered by this game is its plot. Mortal Kombat’s framing has almost always been some flavor of otherworldly warriors fight to the death in bloodsport in a mystical tournament with the wider plot being an evil conqueror tries to take over the earth but the tournament is implemented as the ultimate legal arbitration before the conqueror reminds us of his evil.

Channel: Leah Stevens

But Shaolin Monks is largely only good if you ignore the writing or try to rewrite it like Dragon Ball. Guess I have to perform a séance then to get inside Toriyama’s head. And also learn Japanese well enough to talk to him. And yet it funnily enough had more on its plate than Armageddon that suffered the most from rushed and unfinished development. The two-year wait time for games might have worked well enough at the time, but without enough time to let the dough rise, the bread gets lumpy, the booty gets soggy, and it doesn’t even clap audibly when I—

Sorry, we’re still talking about video games, right?

This one gave us Motor Kombat and by far the largest cast of any Mortal Kombat game to begin with, resurrecting some maligned characters and reintroducing those who fell by the wayside over the course of Midway’s last puffs of air, but to do that a bunch of other stuff needed to get the boot. Fighting styles were chopped to two (boo), but Motor Kombat was introduced (yay); Konquest mode has a bunch of cut content (boo), but it makes for an interesting plot that ties everything together concerning Blaze (yay); and the cardinal sin this game commits is that unique fatalities are not here at all.

(⊙ˍ⊙)

Yeah, put in the different unique button inputs and roughly every character can do exactly the same f[bone crunch]ing fatality as everyone else. You can call it Copy Paste Mortal Kombat and in some spaces that’s exactly what it is. Mortal Kombat without fatalities is like Doom without the unique kills. Wait a minute

Quantity over quality aside, you really see here how much the budget was beginning to dry up with stages and select plot points dropping off into the Pit without a designated recovery team to wade through the spikes and get them back. Then again, one can argue Deception also had this problem and I’ll put my hat in the ring and say that Shaolin Monks was also a victim of this in some capacity. For Deception, it picked up a bunch of characters that were supposed to debut in Deadly Alliance, but the roster was filled up so Dairou had to wait for Deception to finish.

As for Deception’s Konquest mode, a side plot concerning the Wu Shi Academy’s selection for a champion to represent Earthrealm happens if you talk to specific elderly masters. The most Shujinko walks away with is a White Lotus Society headband since his quest, while it took priority, didn’t have a deadline, so Shujinko nearly spends his adult life leveling up for nothing while they go with a champion anyway, and it feels doubly worthless when those old masters are killed by the Deadly Alliance. In my post about the 3D MK series, I noted that if Quan Chi and Shang Tsung were smart, they would’ve selected whose souls to steal and transplant into the Dragon King’s Undefeatable Army, and most of those would have to be fighters. With human aging being a joke in this franchise (a census taker in Seido asks for people’s ages, with one woman being 354 years old; Kitana is 10,000; Goro is at least 2,000 or more years old, etc.), you can bet your sweet bippy that some of those stolen souls are ancient kung fu masters exhibiting loads of tropes that erupted with Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and the original Karate Kid that they didn’t really start walking back or reinventing until after the 2011 reboot.

But I’m jumping the bladed hat again. The main point here is that from Deadly Alliance in 2002 to Armageddon in 2006, Mortal Kombat existed in a strange window that for some would either be on brand or out of place. For me, there were plenty of developers taking the piss out of their own products at the time with GTA being so satirically black Dave Chappelle would give applause and Sony Computer Entertainment letting David Jaffe put Kratos in a cow suit and a potato suit. Even in MK9, Ermac’s shrinking fatality is comedic and Boon and Tobias never really abandoned friendships; they just came back after a decades-long hiatus.

For all of the 3D games’ weirdness and charm, of all the things to feel like an NTR-level betrayal would be none other than:

It sounds both absurd and fantastic. Scorpion and Michael Keaten squaring the f[batarang]k up, but look under the hood, and trouble is a foot that the developers weren’t allowed to remove by contract. Another game that on the one hand, had fatalities, but on the other had to censor them because Warner Bros. and Daddy DC explicitly stated that the Justice League must maintain its family friendly image and my reaction to googling executive meddling in MK VS DC was this:

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Bull f[broken chair]ing s[door slam]t.

This game came out the same year as The Dark Knight, and well after series like Teen Titans and Batman Beyond. Cherry-picking? Actually, maybe. Those might be outliers to the standard, but a DC funded Batman or Superman or Green Lantern film at the time…

ಠ_ಠ

 …provided the studio can stop helicopter parenting the project. A neat script about an interesting plot concerning a beloved character can easily feel f[pig squeal]ked if DC execs get their hands on it and gangbang it into a wheelchair with or without Warner Bros. approval. Midway must’ve been feeling desperate to grovel before these girthy presentations for nearly $50 million, and another hot take I have here is DCEU was always gonna collapse and their heavy-handed approach didn’t help, but an early sign of trouble had to do with the treatment of their characters to third parties. Sony can pretend to be a team player by letting Netherrealm Studios and Warner Bros. keep Kratos’ personality intact for the funnier fatalities, and for DC, I take it that they need to be convinced to take darker risks for their characters or straight up don’t understand why certain characters are dark to begin with. You know how many times Joker’s thrown Harley out on her ass in the cartoons? And then there’s the emotional and physical abuse, who’s to say she doesn’t have scars and bruises in that HBO cartoon she’s in?

Thus Midway came to a bitter end in 2009 with Warner Bros. eating the remaining assets and greenlighting Mortal Kombat 9 for 2011, considered by many to be a great game if not the apex of the reboot games, and not for nothing, MK VS DC may have cut too much trying to trim its own fingernails, but the idea to gift us 2013’s Injustice and the 2017 sequel is at least one thing DC hasn’t bungled in the last decade. One… they still have a plethora of sins to pay back.

I want my money back, Joss Whedon!! (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Mortal Kombat 3D Legacy

TiberiusLeave a comment

Controversial, but for different reasons

In Part 2 of this 3D Video Game Lookback Series, I bring you to the Midway era of the Mortal Kombat franchise. For this post, I’m largely going to include the games I have played from this era being Deadly Alliance (2002), Deception (2004), and Armageddon (2006). For those seeing this lineup and wondering about the others, I will briefly touch up on MK4 (1997), bear in mind that my exposure to that game is limited as I’ve never been able to play it even emulated or remastered as the Midway library only ever mentions the three arcade games, most likely due to the little love it received for being a subpar transition to 3D from 2D, written well in this blog from February 2020 and explained by Ed Boon himself in this documentary video included in Deadly Alliance, most likely recorded prior to the game’s October 2002 release window:

Channel: Ro Sohryu

On YouTube, MK4 gets its spotlight about five minutes in.

Suffice it to say, MK4’s experiment with 3D showed the desire to follow a trend that would shape the future of the video game industry roughly indefinitely save for a few outliers calling for a simpler time.

Thinly-veiled marriage proposal to 2D platforming, I say.

With MK4 designed as an arcade game like its original predecessors, it doesn’t necessarily follow a canon ending, though some individual characters’ endings flow into Deadly Alliance. The only one so far that I know does this is Scorpion’s ending. After defeating Sub-Zero, the Grandmaster of the Lin Kuei accepts responsibility for the destruction of the Shirai Ryu clan, but reveals that no Lin Kuei ever touched his family. Quan Chi reveals himself to be the mastermind behind Scorpion’s vengeance and attempts to trap him in the Netherrealm. Fruitless endeavor as Scorpion drags the sorcerer to hell with him for the torturing. This is consistent up until 2004 where Shujinko has a hand in helping to find Quan Chi in the Netherrealm while there for his own reasons, but we’re jumping forward a bit, let’s bring it back.

Deadly Alliance follows on from Scorpion’s MK4 ending, with Raiden as the narrator of Quan Chi’s escape through a portal. On the other side, he found a tomb housing the legendary undefeatable army of the long, deceased Dragon King, deciphered the ancient rune stone, and the one that disturbs Raiden the most, he’d formed an alliance (based on ignorance) with Shang Tsung of all people. Per this deal, Quan Chi will help Shang Tsung gather the souls necessary to revive the mummified army of budget samurai warriors.

Wonder if the inspiration came from the Chinese terracotta army design-wise…

Shang Tsung meanwhile will teach Quan Chi the soul transfer spells that achieve this mass revival. Evil as they are, you’d probably expect them to singlehandedly lay waste to some innocent village, and as either of the two that’d be my first suggestion… and one I’d personally shoot down considering the types of souls I’d like to inhabit these skeleton warriors. Any old soul would likely not make the cut–if I’m bringing an army back from the dead, I’d want the souls of trained fighters, warriors!

And going with that thought process, the sorcerers went to concoct a plan to lure them all into one place. Two great problems lie in the way however: Emperor Shao Kahn and Liu Kang. No, the Emperor of Outworld isn’t aligned with the Champion of Mortal Kombat. Just that the two know they’d face heavy resistance from these guys. Shao Kahn would want to take part in the tournament and Liu Kang won’t stop until all threats to Earthrealm are beaten fair and square, this last part biting him in the ass. Naturally, they feign loyalty to kill Shao Kahn and make a beeline for the Wu Shi Academy where the Mortal Kombat Champion trains extensively. Shang Tsung could still not hold a candle to Liu Kang, unassisted at least. Enter Quan Chi to put him in a vulnerable position allowing Shang Tsung to take the killing blow.

The body of Liu Kang is the first of several transported back to Shang Tsung’s palace (whose construction has an interesting story that unfolds in Deception’s Konquest mode). An undead soldier is voluntold to get the Shaolin monk’s soul, and the intro cinematic warns of impending doom should the Deadly Alliance succeed, bringing Raiden to his closing argument. He turned away from the realm of Elder Godhood to mount a resistance against the sorcerers.

Channel: merocch

Spoiler alert: it fails. And looking at how Deception starts, miserably. Raiden might as well have been feeding them soul after soul. Shang Tsung didn’t necessarily need them, but knowing his greed, there’s never enough souls. It’s never explained how many of the souls in the Soulnado in his palace are suitable for transplantation to the undead army, nor is it ever explained if there’s a purpose beyond prolonging death. The most we get out of his use of that Soulnado is to prop himself back up after a devastating blow from Raiden.

Deadly Alliance still suffers from the Arcade framework of all the other games before it, but its not like Midway couldn’t write a compelling story in the MK-Verse. Deception proves it with Shujinko’s narration of events that bring us up to speed on the results of Raiden’s impromptu militia. Needless to say, it got so bad, he had to face the Deadly Alliance himself. The final bastion against misery and terror.

Thunder god or not, the man couldn’t do much against the Deadly Alliance’s plans. And when they merged their own powers, they took him out of the fight for at least five minutes max. Naturally, treachery followed this short-lived victory. In either of their endings in Deadly Alliance, both have secret alliances with third parties: both used Kano in their respective endings, although Shang Tsung allied with the Oni that were about to feast on Quan Chi’s innards in the Netherrealm (which does happen in Drahmin’s ending); and Quan Chi with anyone who’s capable of putting the squeeze on Shang Tsung before he destroys the traitor he hired to carry out the initial betrayal. In the Deception intro, they simply betray each other for power, knowing that the command “Obey he who possesses the amulet,” depends on who he is. Quan Chi won out and kept the amulet on his belt.

In the distance, Quan Chi could hear a loud and approaching stomping, a crescendo of an even worse danger than even he or Shang Tsung could threaten to unleash on reality. The one-eyed man may be king in the land of the blind, but in this instance, the undead army would never bow to a pretender. They knelt in recognition of their one true ruler as he revealed himself to the lone sorcerer.

An ancient prophecy kept alive by the remaining holy men of the Dragon King, the last Dragon Egg had hatched, and had taken on a host in the form of the gradually devolving Reptile (further confirmed in his own ending). The true emperor of Outworld had returned to show everyone what a real monster is, stopped only by a duo of treacherous sorcerers and a thunder god in a desperate attempt to reverse course.

Even with their powers combined, Raiden realized it would take more to defeat Onaga, and so made a final sacrifice… that ultimately failed to even scratch Onaga. The blame falls largely on Shujinko for bringing this ungodly power to him. To take responsibility, he vows to right wrongs committed by his unknowing service to the Dragon King.

Channel: MKIceAndFire

To make sense of these dire straits, we go back forty years to Shujinko’s youth. A bright-eyed young man with a special place in his heart for the Great Kung Lao. Sadly, he lacks his idol’s martial arts’ skills and seeks to learn from one of his teachers, Bo’ Rai Cho, an Outworlder who has taught warriors for the last few Mortal Kombat tournaments to include the Shaolin Monks among others. Stuck in the confines of his village, Shujinko is essentially forbidden from venturing into the outside world until a strange entity called Damashi visits him in the street. With an offer of adventure and the chance to save reality from destruction, he gracefully accepts a quest that will take him throughout the Mortal Kombat universe (and expose players to some neat and interesting level design).

Over the years, he adopts the fighting styles of numerous warriors, is exposed to different rivalries between established characters of old and newer characters, and finds himself the star of several complicated overarching plots that resolve relatively quickly, to include one that involves a sorcerer and a ninja specter. Keep in mind, this is all for the sake of collecting six tools known as Kamidogu. Hiccups abound, but at the ripe old age of approximately 65, Shujinko concludes his quest in the Nexus.

…or so he thought. The last Kamidogu is in place, but not immediately taken to the Elder Gods. The final piece needed to achieve this is Shinnok’s amulet, attached to Quan Chi whom he found in the Netherrealm twenty years prior. The Kamidogu now sitting in Onaga’s palace, Shujinko’s ending suggests he uses the fighting abilities acquired over the decades to destroy Onaga. All’s well that ends–no, that’s not what happens either. He does redeem himself in his ending, but in Raiden’s ending, he’s tortured over this mistake. And this isn’t the same Raiden that narrated Deadly Alliance. Deception gives birth to Dark Raiden, ironically hellbent on protecting Earthrealm.

Channel: i’m playing it!

Unbeknownst to the rest of the cast, Raiden doesn’t die very easily. He came back heavily corrupted and negatively influenced by the doings of mortals. No longer content with playing defender, he’ll take a page from Shao Kahn and directly challenge his adversaries, and effectively press any fighter into defending Earthrealm to the death. This new thunder god was a force to be reckon with.

Channel: Kamidogu

Further explained in his Armageddon ending.

For Armageddon, it’s exactly as advertised. If you noticed over the course of this entry, numerous factors I mentioned specifically as well as those I couldn’t specify for brevity’s sake, have a grave impact on the health and future of the realms. The sorcerers were always a threat, though the original timeline shows that the Elder Gods’ hardline inaction was what would ultimately doom the realms.

Armageddon explains that their solution to this was to brainstorm ideas with the parents of Taven and Daegon, Argus the Protector God (read: Raiden) of Edenia, and his sorceress wife, Delia. Argus outright proposes extinction, but Delia, levelheadedly, asks to render them powerless in recognition of the heroes that sacrificed themselves to save the realms, even if it was only their own homes. Thus was given the Armageddon Konquest plot where it was passed off as a competition between the brothers to defeat the firespawn, Blaze. Taven and Daegon were told what their respective dragons, Orin and Caro, were told, in that the quest was intended to challenge the brothers to see who could succeed Argus as the Protector of Edenia. Defeating Blaze grants this as well as full godhood to the victor.

Over the course of the quest, however, Taven discovers numerous details that don’t add up. His parents have temples in Earthrealm, which I personally don’t find all that unheard of. It’d be the equivalent of a cult of Raiden in Outworld or Edenia, presumably in defiance of Shao Kahn or worse. MK lore does establish holy men responsible for the upkeep of these temples, and when they abandon it (or get killed), it inevitably falls into disrepair. So imagine how surprised Taven was to find that red-clad warriors bearing the mark of a Red Dragon occupying it.

It wouldn’t be the last time he finds the Red Dragon clan on his journey. They hide amongst the traps outside his mother’s temple, the same one commandeered by the Lin Kuei generations before, and the same one where Shujinko learns Lin Kuei martial arts at from Sub-Zero himself. After a confrontation with the same Grandmaster of the Lin Kuei and an impromptu offer of help when Noob and Smoke plan an infiltration on the grounds, Taven is led to the Red Dragon stronghold where he discovers a twist for the ages.

The founder of the Red Dragon clan was his own brother, Daegon.

Further exploring the Red Dragon stronghold, Taven is made aware of a sickening series of science experiments to physically alter the appearance of individual members into dragons themselves. Funny enough, Kano clues him in to all of this. He’s a Black Dragon member with no love for the Red Dragon and if spilling the secrets of a hated enemy means anything, who, besides Mavado, was gonna stop him?

Taven reunites with Daegon’s companion dragon, Caro, imprisoned and forced to scatter the Red Dragon clan throughout the realms. From Caro, Taven learns that the entire course of events that precede Armageddon relied on a mental connection to Blaze. However, he was kidnapped by Onaga’s holy men and enslaved to safeguard the last dragon egg. Since it hatched in Deception, his purpose there had concluded and a side quest in Deception resets his path to continue the quest.

Except the damage had been done. Daegon was awoken prematurely and pretty much singlehandedly set the course of events from Deadly Alliance onward. Blaze made cameos in earlier games, but didn’t come into prominence until Deadly Alliance as a secret playable character.

Caro had felt personally responsible for setting this course of events to occur, but Taven is right. The dragon was being too hard on himself. No victim plans their own kidnapping unless they’re in on it. As Daegon also knew the quest wasn’t all it was said to be, he sought the answers from the source and killed them where they stood. Taking responsibility for all of that, Caro sent Taven to follow Daegon and stop him while Caro stayed behind to destroy the Red Dragon Clan by himself.

Following Taven into the Netherrealm, he happens upon a weakened fallen Elder God, and here we learn how long Taven had been in slumber. The gap in his memory seems to begin with Mortal Kombat 3 and ends in this game. Oh, to fill him in on all the lore.

Shinnok offers to help Taven find and stop Daegon from corrupting the quest further, but he puts Taven through a series of trials first to reclaim his spire. When all is said and done, Taven had been delayed by an elaborate ruse orchestrated by Shinnok and Daegon to advance Daegon’s position as Protector and by extension, god. He also revealed the quest’s existence and prize to other combatants as a means to slow Taven down, from Sektor’s initial ambush at Argus’ temple in Earthrealm to Prince Rain challenging him outside Delia’s.

Taven goes back to Earthrealm where Orin was subject to fatal wounds by Quan Chi. In pursuit, he follows him to Outworld and fights his way through Shao Kahn’s fortress to learn that A. death is a bitch ass in the Mortal Kombat world since Shao Kahn’s fortress would’ve been reclaimed by Onaga and B. Onaga, Shao Kahn, and the former Deadly Alliance have all formed an alliance (still based on ignorance, they all betray each other in the intro cinematic) and fled to Edenia.

Dark Raiden rears his corrupted head once again, having struck an uneasy truce to stop Taven so long as Shao Kahn ignores Earthrealm. A desperate Raiden would definitely do this, but a smarter Raiden would incapacitate Shao Kahn and company. Finally in Edenia, Taven is ambushed by the last of Daegon’s impromptu agents, Scorpion himself. After his defeat in Edenia, Daegon shows up to finish the job but is interrupted by the firespawn himself. The quest didn’t have to and ultimately did not pan out how Argus and Delia foresaw, but by the Elder Gods, if Blaze had to make sure it ended a certain way than gods dammit he will!

Taven and Daegon were taken to the rim of the crater where Armageddon would begin. Finally able to confront Daegon over his corruption and evil, Daegon revealed that he would’ve been a potential victim of primogeniture. Taven earns a pyrrhic victory, and almost walks away from the quest being the sole survivor of his own family.

He finishes the quest after Blaze reveals the truth of the quest to him. If anything, Taven chose to do so because the role needed to be filled. As a result of the events of the other games, Armageddon’s stated mission purpose was to resolve the instability of the realms. It did nothing of the sort. The godlike power wound up empowering the rest of the combatants in Taven’s ending.

Channel: MKIceAndFire

If things went right, Argus and Delia would’ve annulled the combatants of their abilities and made Taven the successor. No Red Dragon, no atrocities, nothing.

Everything does connect in the long run, though. Dark Raiden shows what he’d do to save earth, Onaga shows himself the most treacherous and self-serving, and Blaze reappears to fulfill a greater role since 1993. But as I’ve said before in a prior post, if it wasn’t for the last-minute distractions, most of the plot would have more neat and tidy endings. Not that I’m asking for rewrites after twenty years since the HD Continuation is the rewrites, but more like there were a few areas of the 3D games that could’ve used some ironing out.

The hunt for lore and information is there, and it’s deliberately hidden so that the player can be challenged into finding it, but it’s an uphill battle of sorts when things don’t flow neatly from game to game. Some stuff is left too open to interpretation and while I maintain that Mortal Kombat is guilty of abandoning plot points, the ones they leave in place weren’t any better. Maybe this is a consequence of doing the same thing over the course of thirty years, the same story beats rhyme like an epic, but unfortunately Mortal Kombat ain’t no Beowulf. All in all, this all sounds like a job for The4thSnake on YouTube.

The 3D era of Mortal Kombat is, what I’d call, a conglomerate of rough gems. The beauty exists in the lore than in the visuals and I’m sick to death of this part of the franchise’s history being buried by many so-called fans.

Bring back Chess Kombat, and I’ll wear clothing too explicit, even for pornography.

Forgotten Mortal Kombat Plot Points that Had Potential

Tiberius1 Comment

With more time and care, these could’ve helped the old games

This post was originally supposed to be about different archetypes in anime, though I’m delaying that to sometime in December as I don’t yet have enough research to discuss those in full detail. This week, however, I’ll bring up something that has crossed my mind before, but not with enough frequency to expand upon: forgotten plot points from the 3D Mortal Kombat universe.

The original idea came from a MojoPlays video that I couldn’t f[head rip]king find until a few minutes before writing this because I misremembered the title. Abandoned Story Threads instead of Forgotten Plot Points; potato, potahto. Either way, the video can be viewed on the MojoPlays channel through the link below.

Credit: MojoPlays

The gist of the video is that throughout the series, the Mortal Kombat games have introduced plot points that were about to heat up only for the devs to go in a different direction. With over 30 years out on the market, you’ve got your pick of the litter to choose from. For this week, it’s the 3D games from MK Deadly Alliance to Armageddon. Here’s the f[scream of pain]king short version: starting with Deadly Alliance, Quan Chi escaped from a fiery ass-whoopin’ at Scorpion’s hands, discovering the Dragon King’s “undefeatable” army in the process and bringing these mummified warriors to Shang Tsung where they formed a bond based on ignorance.

Context:

Channel: Kamidogu

After the Deadly Alliance is formed, they remove all obstacles that would block them from ruling all existence. Not happy sucking up to Shao Kahn for millennia, they kill him in his throne room then make their way to the Wu Shi Academy where Shang Tsung finally gets to consume the soul of the greatest warrior in Mortal Kombat History: The Great Kung Lao I mean, Liu Kang!

OGs can’t be beat!

So with Liu Kang and Shao Kahn dead, they operate a tournament under false pretenses in Outworld and use the defeated to return the mummified army to life with the goal of marching on Earthrealm with malicious intent. Raiden saw this from the heavens and organized the remaining warriors across the realms to stop them. Fun fact, you can find archived websites and forums debating the plot points of then-upcoming games, like this website MKSecrets.net, which for some reason still looks like it was made in 2001 even though it has details on MK1 (2023)… I thought that was most Japanese websites…?

Anyway, MK: Deception picks up from the premise of Deadly Alliance only the sorcerers were too powerful for all of the warriors (could’ve probably sent them all as a group, but MK9 proves that that wouldn’t have helped much) and so at his wits end, Raiden challenges them himself. Not even a thunder god could defeat the sorcerers and realizing that their goals were nearly complete, what was left was the amulet Quan Chi stole from Shinnok in MK4. He hangs onto it defeating Shang Tsung in the process, only to have Onaga reborn (hinted at from Reptile’s ending in the last game) and return to reclaim the army that the sorcerers so generously returned to life with the souls of conquered fighters.

All three men realize that danger was marching towards them and while they managed to temporarily hold them back, Raiden uses a last ditch attack on the Dragon King. It failed to even scratch him and he grabs a hold of the amulet which will be needed to form the six Kamidogu into a single entity.

Channel: MKIceAndFire

As for how Onaga acquired the Kamidogu, well it involved tricking a young boy named Shujinko and leading him across reality by the nose for 40 years. If this game were canon, that would’ve come back to bite Onaga in the ass, only for Shujinko’s efforts to go unrecognized as redemption and still get punished by a Dark Raiden. This will become important later.

Shaolin Monks was a bit of a beat ’em up remake of MKII (kinda) and I’d already talked about that before, so we’re skipping it considering it has nothing to do with the 3D trilogy anyway.

Armageddon was supposed to cap it all off and the more I’ve thought about it, the more it felt like a final send off before Midway got the crappy ideas out of the way in time to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010.

Let’s not be too harsh though, it did help pave the way for the Injustice line.

Story-wise, the protector god of Edenia, Argus, is made aware that between the actions of the sorcerers and Shujinko being duped for that long, the warriors of the realms were learning more about the construction of the realms than the Elder Gods would be comfortable with and proposed to Argus to come up with a solution. He suggested total annihilation to protect the realms from their own residents, but his wife Delia suggested depowering them all since there were many heroes who fought tooth and nail to defend the realms from evil, not the least of which was Shao Kahn and Shinnok (whom we learn later was banished to the Netherrealm for eternity for treachery, leaving Quan Chi to do the heavy lifting through the Brotherhood of Shadow).

They’re granted the power to do this and choose to do so by making a competition of things for their sons Taven and Daegon. If things went to plan, the two men would engage in a friendly competition, grab their weapons and armor and race to defeat their mother’s firespawn (half-brother?) Blaze to achieve full godhood as both of them are demigods. In reality, the two brothers, under the watchful eye of a pair of dragons, Orin and Caro, are set on a different path. Caro, who was the guardian dragon of Daegon, lost contact with Blaze believing it to be an early sign to set him on his path. Instead, Daegon forms the Red Dragon clan in Caro’s name and signs off on unethical science experiments for the purpose of choking existence into coughing Blaze up. The way its presented makes me think of Unit 731 in Manchuria and its surgeon general Shiro Ishii. If you don’t know, look it up at your own peril.

This makes Daegon the antagonist of the Konquest mode and through no fault of his own Taven loses sight of the purpose of his quest. And his frustration and confusion at this whole course of events is best reflected at the several times he’s questioned and even considered abandoning ship. The quest stopped being fun for him as he lost the things he cherished. Blaze appeared at the end to catch him up to at least what the true purpose of the quest was and Taven is a hero if we compare him to the Ancient Greek model similar to Perseus or Theseus. Self-serving at times, but the guy still knows the difference between good and evil. Daegon’s descent into evil seems random until he learned that he was supposed to lose the quest and decided to take matters into his own hands, hence the birth of the Red Dragon.

Dropped and abandoned plot points are still a problem for the series as it’s developed a reputation for introducing points and leaving them to collect dust. We barely get five minutes with the concept before the devs (read: Ed Boon and John Tobias) moved onto something else. You could say the fandom is also to blame for this as dedicated fans have asked (demanded) the team to release canonically deceased characters as DLC, but staying with the 3D games where the problem expanded, there’s more to say about it during this era than anywhere else in the series.

Starting with Deadly Alliance, Shao Kahn was established to be killed in the intro to this game, with Deception and Shujinko’s story acting as a prequel taking place some years before the events of Deadly Alliance where it all converges. Shujinko himself was invited twice by the White Lotus Society and later by Shang Tsung himself to represent Earthrealm in the tournament but couldn’t attend for different reasons. The White Lotus got tired of waiting for him to power up (never mind that the tournament is hosted every 50 years) and due to his cleansing journey with Nightwolf, he had to go back to the Netherrealm to gather more hatred, from none other than the ghost of Hanzo Hasashi.

This part doesn’t necessarily screw around with the timeline as egregiously as following plot points, but Armageddon is where it all breaks down. Canonically dead characters are resurrected off-screen and based on what we know we can connect the dots, but often the devs are a bit cagey when it comes to showing how, who and/or why characters are returned to life. The 2011 continuity shows that Quan Chi has brought Noob and Sindel back to life and claimed the souls of those killed by Sindel herself in the eleventh hour, but it’s not shown whether he brought Shao Kahn back to life or if he did why he’d do so, or even why the rest of the villains would agree to this arrangement.

Channel: BruskPoet

I’m not saying this moment in the story is bad, I like it a lot. But the nonexistent explanation for how all this can come to be is what sours me on it somewhat. I’d say there’s no care for a consistent timeline especially in a fighting game (something that doesn’t escape Tekken), but I think it’s more along the lines of the devs wanting their personal favorites to shine brighter than the others, which is why the franchise works better as video games and toy lines than it does movies.

Most of the time…

For what it’s worth, the characters have been mostly consistent with a few touch ups here and there, but if you ask people like The4thSnake, there’s a lot under the hood that could use some light to heavy rewiring from individual characters to whole ass f[swords clashing]king plot points, like what I’ve been writing about here. I’m a bit torn personally, because it brings a charm not found in other series, but this many plot holes treats the timeline like a redheaded step child. Doesn’t stop people from trying, as I’ve stated before, I rewrote MK: Shaolin Monks myself like it was Dragon Ball as that was what I was watching at the time.

Why bother with the 3D games, though? Well, of all the plot points introduced and left by the wayside, the 3D games did it the most and the worst of any other era, which seems to be the result of developmental inconsistencies prior to release on store shelves. It certainly hasn’t stopped people from trying though and it likely will keep going for as long as there is a Mortal Kombat to fix. Nothing too serious at this point, but it’s both fun to expand on what was and offer critique for one of the series most tumultuous times in its history.