Mortal Kombat 9

'Cause Khan's too beefy.

Gameplay and Story Segregation. Mortal Kombat's bosses have to be blatantly unfair.

Further irony being that Raiden Electric-Flies Motaro, one of the least fair bosses in the entire franchise, through an overpass and kills him unceremoniously.

edited 27th Apr '14 2:00:45 PM by FOFD

I dunno, Shang Tsung and Quan Chi weren't really unfair in MKDA (Unless you played the GBA version where they double team you all the time)

Moloch fit that bill though even if he was only a sub-boss.

Yes, a system where winning a tournament ten consecutive times lets you take over a realm. The key word here is consecutive. The Mortal Kombat tournament is heavily unbalanced against Shao Kahn, not for him; as long as you aren't the invading party, a 10% Win/Loss record is all you need to keep your opponent from taking home the spoils of victory. Earthrealm was able to parry Outworld for a thousand years by winning 2 out of 20 tournaments.

As for the Elder Gods, they have a long and storied history of underreacting to things. They did nothing about Onaga. They did nothing about Shao Kahn until Earthrealm's failure to defend itself forced their hand, and they only did that much on the second go-round. Shinnok rose from the Netherrealm and the Elder Gods did nothing. They did nothing about the Deadly Alliance. The most they did about Onaga's resurrection is to hire some faceless douchebag to get his ass kicked by Shujinko halfway through, and then they did nothing from that point on. They did nothing about Armageddon.

The Elder Gods are dicks, yes, but the reason they're dicks is because they never do anything. Even when all the realms are threatened, they do nothing. Expecting them to do nothing is not unreasonable.

edited 27th Apr '14 6:20:35 PM by TobiasDrake

I'm not sure why you think I brought up the rules of the Mortal Kombat tournament. I did it to show that the Elder Gods are fans of overly complicated systems. They could have just said "Whoever can hold control of a realm gets to keep it." Instead, they set up a system that takes minimum a millennium to complete.

And the last bit was more of a joke. About how this is a franchise where tearing a man's spine out of the top of his body is considered pretty reasonable.

If anything, aren't the Elder God's just scared of the One Being coming back, and with what Onaga was doing with the Kamidogu, they used Scorpion, whom they fished out of thew Soulnado, to exterminate Onaga?

Ed Boon is counting down days on Twitter, leading up to June 2.

Why? Not a clue. Could be an Injustice sequel announcement, could be a Mortal Kombat 10 announcement, could be be both, probably isn't neither.

Clearly it's counting down to Mortal Kombat Conquest on DVD. :p

Someone on Reddit found something interesting when he went to his local Game Stop. Possible MK10 teaser poster?

The MK Facebook page got a cover photo change to a "Who's Next?" picture as well, so yeah, all signs point to new MK

Music's pretty bad, but at least we get a sick trailer!

We have a Mortal Kombat X thread.

edited 3rd Jun '14 5:46:47 PM by BadWolf21

Onaga with the Komidogu is a potential peer of Shinnok's and the only rival to The Elder Gods.

But in his ending, Shujinko shattered each of the Kamidogu and killed Onaga, despite not actually being the champion of the Elder Gods. So by that logic, does that mean that Shujinko is an powerful as Shinnok?

Maybe all that weird time and realm travel (and being trained by other kombatants) made him some kind of ultra-human?

And to further complicate things, Onaga was killed and has his throne usurped my Shao Kahn, who gets "killed" by Liu Kang, and the Deadly Alliance on separate occasions. The Deadly Alliance kills Liu Kang, and the combined effort of the Deadly Alliance and Raiden don't even scratch Onaga.

How do power levels in this universe work, exactly?

edited 3rd Jun '14 11:11:16 PM by IWasJustPassingBy

It does not mean Shujinko is more powerful than Onaga. It means Shujinko was able to defeat Onaga despite being less powerful than him. Mortal Kombat is not an anime, where characters directly match up their stats and whoever has a higher point value is automatically the winner. The winner of a fight is determined by a lot more than just who is physically superior. In Shujinko's case, he had a superior plan of attack and was able to execute it in the heat of combat, overcoming Onaga's superior power by striking at his vulnerabilities, stripping him of that power, and then defeating him in his weakened state.

Skill, experience, tactics, luck, training, muscle memory, split-second decisions made in the heat of the moment as to where to move and where to strike, all of these are critical to determining the outcome of any fight. Anime is in love with the idea of a power hierarchy, "Character X defeated Character Y, and that means Character X is more powerful than Character Y and will win any encounter between the two forevermore," but that is complete and utter bullshit, and a gross oversimplification of how violence actually works.

So the answer to your question of how power levels work is that they don't. Power levels are baseless, utterly ridiculous tripe with no place in any proper martial arts story.

edited 4th Jun '14 7:38:50 AM by TobiasDrake

Although there are power levels overall in general in Mortal Kombat. It's usually well ignored for skill and gameplay alone. Stryker, for instance, is an ordinary human with no powers. He's just that badass and strong due to his great tools.

Then we have most fighters, like Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, etc. They're the next actual power level. After that, we go into the regular Gods, like Raiden(before becoming an Elder God as is), post-power down Shinnok(the one we actually see in gameplay, mind you. He was an Elder God), and Fujin. Possibly Blaze is about the same power level. Lastly, we have where are pretty much Elder Gods(as in at full power) and Onaga.

The thing is, there's really only two levels in the gameplay compared to the story; Boss and Regular. Bosses are just overpowered and have special properties. Whether unique to them, or something else. Like Onaga has one mode, takes less damage than others. Where as Shao Kahn is similar, except modes didn't exist when he was first introduced, otherwise he was near identical to Onaga gameplay-wise. Notably, when Shao Kahn was playable in Deception(Gamecube version first), he had two modes, weapon and regular. Onaga still had one period. Yes, he was more or less treated as a normal character for once.

Anyway, I find that neat that they've gone out of their way to nerf or start treating even previous bosses as normal guys. You could say it's Badass Decay, and that makes sense too. But making them playable while still immensely good regardless felt really neat. I've noticed, likewise, that a lot of Nintendo ports of games tend to have some really unique stuff. As mentioned with Deception before, but also, the n64 version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy has the most glitches(wait, that's not good, is it?) and Wii Armageddon managed to actually have the most characters by adding Khameleon. I can't remember if it added another fighting mode too. Motor Kombat. That said, it only lost online, but that was Nintendo's fault for forcing it so only Mario Kart Wii can have it first(Midway should've delayed Armageddon instead >_>).

Onaga with the Komidogu is a whole different beast from the one that got "killed" by Shao Kahn. The Komidogu are the power of the One Being, the ultimate God of MK, and Onaga was going to use them to merge all the realms into one. in short, he wielded power on a universal scale. As shown with Raiden's futile attempts hurt him in the opening of Deception, he was pretty much invulnerable. Shujinko had to remove the Komidogu's powerup and then empower himself with the energies of other fighters to defeat him.

Power level work like this and then they go like this in the reboot.

Also Shujinko has many impressive feats to his name - he defeated Elder Gods' Champion Scorpion, he drew with Raiden (in the process convincing the Thunder God that he, Shujinko, was the Elder Gods' Champion), and a lot more that I can't remember at this point. I need to replay Deception...

But he's also an idiot isn't he?

Though I'd be curious to see if they have the guts to bring him back and try again.

Yes, he is.

Impressive feats and having things happen to you does not make you an interesting character. Shujinko himself is pretty shallow, as personality goes.

Liu Kang was also a pretty shallow character originally; most of the cast was. Side effect of the Fighting Game storytelling; it is really hard to give depth and complexity to someone in maybe three paragraphs of storytelling.

But Shujinko got an entire plot to develop himself and never really developed beyond "Good-hearted dumbass who does whatever he's told to do." Winning a bunch of fights doesn't make him compelling.

Taven had more personality than Shujinko and was, all-around, a better attempt at creating an actual character, but still suffered significantly from, "Meet this new guy. Now watch him beat the shit out of all your favorite characters, because he's just so much better than everyone. Isn't he awesome?"

edited 5th Jun '14 8:02:04 AM by TobiasDrake

It probably didn't help that Blaze was a lot more interesting than either Taven or his brother, who was the actual final villain of the game.

Shujinko is dumb but so are most heroes in fiction.

The fact is he took us on a more complex journey of the MK Universe than anyone else ever has. We got to explore all the Realms, we got to see most of his life, and so I feel much more attached to him than Liu or Taven.

Shujinko's not that bad. I think he's pretty cool actually....not like 'Reptile' cool of course, but he's still up there. Plus he did develop, after learning Onaga was a lying dick, he expressed a lot of Genre Savvyness. Like not going up against him alone, shattering the Kamidogu, and then afterwards when summoned to Kahn's old palace he formulates a plan to knock out all the bad guys at once, because of course it's a trap. (That last parts all int he bio)

Also, you know what's weird? Everyone insists that before Shao Kahn Outworld was a great place to live, and if Onaga was ruler before Kahn, shouldn't that mean Onaga's a good guy? That bugged the hell out of me during Deception.

Not really. Onaga could have been a great ruler, but a terrible person.

Onaga may have been a rare example of an Evil Overlord who doesn't kick puppies for lulz, and instead actually bothers to do the work necessary to run a nation.