Vidya Thoughts

NOTE: I will be spoiling the Mortal Kombat 1 story mode, I’m not giving warnings after this. If you want to see it for yourself, please do so before reading this.

Mortal Kombat 9 is one of my favorite stories in a video game. It takes the outline of the first three Mortal Kombat games and turns it into a cinematic story. It’s easy to follow, pretty wild and best of all it does not take things safely. MK9 ends with almost every single main cast member dead. When I put down the controller at the end of the story mode, I legitimately thought ‘I have no idea how they are going to make a sequel to this.’

It’s a story mode that was so impressive that it made me stick around with the franchise despite my misgivings about it. I don’t think it plays well and I think the monetization schemes around it are putrid, but I like seeing the stories they have to tell. I felt what Netherrealm Studios did for fighting games was something other studios should copy. I’m a Street Fighter fanboy and I wanted THAT franchise to take from MK. It would take a while but they’d get there eventually.

Unfortunately, those days are long over. Mortal Kombat 1 plays it safe. The end of the most recent game, Mortal Kombat 11, involves Liu Kang restarting history and making it in his own image. He purposefully kneecaps daunting figures from his own history in order to make things slightly better this time around. Shang Tsung is a snake oil salesman, Shao Khan is a loyal guard to empress Sindell, Quan Chi is…I don’t know what he was doing but he was not the wacky guy we knew and loved.

Someone doesn’t like this though! There is a mysterious figure that is convincing these evil characters to embrace their potential and sew chaos on Liu Kang’s world. This could be interesting because, well, how could someone be aware of a history that has been erased? How do they know the significance of these figures? For all they know, Quan Chi is just some bald fella who hangs out at the Hot Topic.

It’s revealed that this figure is a version of Shang Tsung from Liu Kang’s universe. In the Mortal Kombat 11 Aftermath DLC, Shang Tsung and Liu Kang fight for the ability to control the universe and rewrite history. The player can select either Shang Tsung or Liu Kang to get the ending of their choice. So the person fucking up Liu Kang’s new world is from a different timeline. This makes sense, but I do not enjoy stuff like this because I think it shows cowardice. The writers did not want to choose a definitive ending for the first game. Nier this is not.

Before this point, MK1 told a pretty straight forward story. You had a group of characters you got to know with discernable personalities and motivations. Things are different from the world you knew from Mortal Kombat 9, but it’s a different universe. That makes sense. When the reveal is made, all pretenses of having a focused story fly out the window. Mortal Kombat changes into a multiverse superhero movie and does not look back.

From the reveal of Titan (the other timeline’s) Shang Tsung, everything ceases to matter. None of the characters you have been around for the past few hours are important anymore. It’s Fire God Liu Kang and a multiverse of different versions of characters you like. You see, Liu Kang has the idea that there are actually multiple different timelines instead of just the two. So now you get to hang around a bunch of characters from a bunch of different timelines where someone other than Liu Kang or Shang Tsung took control of things. There wasn’t this kind of choice in the MK11 DLC. It was one or the other. So instead of making this a “well actually both endings were the real endings” scenario it becomes a “well actually there are infinite possibilities and anything could happen so maybe Sektor or some shit is a time god now who knows?” scenario.

So the game ends with a giant battle royale between warring timelines. Liu Kang with a bunch of people he recruited and Shang Tsung and a bunch of people HE recruited. You get to see a lot of blood and guts here with various alternative versions of familiar characters to see. My favorite is Quantum Chi, what a stupid name. The problem is: these are all meaningless. People die by the dozens, characters you are familiar with, but it doesn’t mean anything. They are alternate dimension versions of the characters you know. The ones you spent time with are fine. So why should I care if universe 9172 Mileena Khan gets her head bitten off by universe 8162 Tarkan Kabal? I don’t know her.

This all made me think of Across the Spiderverse. That movie took a little time to develop the alternate versions of Spider-Man. I’m not saying they were all fully fleshed out characters, but if Penny Parker were to get killed by Mysterio or something, the viewer would probably care. This game throws all this multiverse stuff at you at the very end. I think there was maybe an hour of gameplay after the big Shang Tsung reveal. There’s no time to care about anything. If the plan was a multiverse, why didn’t you try to establish it a little sooner? That way I could form an opinion about evil Sonya Blade (cameo only, please buy the DLC). I’m not even picky, just give me a couple lines.

When Mortal Kombat 9 did all of its killing, it took characters you knew for the whole game and just slaughtered them mercilessly. It’s not the kind of game where you’re going to shed a tear when someone dies, but you do feel *something* when you have to fight all the zombie versions of your characters in that game. Like, you went through a lot of stuff with those guys! In this, all the killing and violence meant nothing. It was just for show. People died but it doesn’t matter. They weren’t the ‘real’ versions of those characters. In the next game, we will resume from Liu Kang’s universe which is mostly in the same state as we started it in. The only character who dies is Sindel. They actually bring back Kitana’s dad from the dead, so our death count goes down by 1. We broke even!

They went the fanservice/multiverse route because it’s a popular thing to do. Those kinds of stories are in. But this was just violence for the sake of violence. There was no story to tell, just meaningless bodies to skewer. No real consequences. A decade ago I put down the controller for a game I didn’t even think I’d like and said ‘What in the world are they going to do for a sequel? I can’t wait!’ Today I put down my controller and just don’t care.