The Full Stop - Mortal Kombat

Fatality!

- Mortal Kombat

Happy Friday on the Art of Caesura!

I hope you all have plans for a good weekend ahead. Once again, I'm starting a new job on Monday, so looking forward to that with equal parts excitement and trepidation...okay, more parts excitement!

Just this week I finally "beat" Mortal Kombat X. I know, I know, it's been out for a good few years at this stage, but you know me, I flit between different entertainment sources. When I say "beat" I don't just mean the story mode (pah-leease, I beat that on opening weekend!) I mean beat the traditional towers (and thus unlocked the ending cinematic) as every single character (including DLC)! This felt like a bit of an accomplishment, but also gave me the idea to have a little look at where Mortal Kombat has come from, and what makes it so great! So hold on to your heads for this Full Stop - Mortal Kombat.

Long time readers might remember from The Full Stop - Hellboy, that these posts are not meant to be the most exhaustive review of the topic, but rather a fun glance at what it has meant to me.

I first came across Mortal Kombat about a year after it first came out (1992). We would house-swap with my older cousin's family, and between visiting relatives, my brother and I would be button-mashing as much as our pre-teen fingers could manage through the first two games on Super Nintendo. 

Although  (or more accurately, because) I was way too young to be playing it, I thought it was great!

When we got older, my parents would let my brother and I rent a Super Nintendo  for a week a couple times a year, and Mortal Kombat would often be one of the games we rented. This trend continued when we got an N64 of our own. 

Having basically grown up with Mortal Kombat, I love the associated stories behind it. To save on budget and processing requirements, the first three games just used the same actor / actress to be most of the main fighters and they just changed the colours of their clothes. Thus Scorpion (yellow) and Subzero (blue) were born followed by Reptile (green) and other palette-swaps. One of my favourite characters, Ermac, (red) started life as an error message "ERror MACro" on the diagnostic screen of the original game!

There are other fun tidbits: one of the characters, Noob Saibot is the last names of the original creators (Ed Boon and John Tobias) backwards. And in the Sega port of the game, Raiden could perform a "Fergality", turning the opponent into Fergus McGovern, who worked on the port of the game. 

In the early days, MK set itself apart from the likes of Street Fighter, by having more gore and comedy. In recent times it has leaned more into the gore side of things, but still has comedic elements, like, if you perform a strong enough uppercut one of the developers will pop onto the screen and sing "Toasty!" because apparently when they were gaming around the office his catch phrase was "you're toast!".

With all this talk about the lore behind the games, what about the lore within the games? Well...it's...fine. Elder Gods using mortal combatants to fight for the fate of all the realms, yuh know, the yoozh. The plots of the MK games have never been a massive draw for me. Don't get me wrong, I love the Story Modes that have been introduced in recent times, but they are very guilty of various deus ex machina in order to bring characters that they killed off in previous games back to life. 

This story hasn't only been confined to video games. 1995's film remains a (cult) classic, as far as I'm concerned. I loved that movie as a kid - the forest fight with Scorpion; Johnny Cage doing his famous splits-uppercut crunching Goro in the junk - ahhh good times.

 

I'm pretty sure the film is where the bitchin' 90's MK Theme Song masterpiece came from (it's one of my ringtones!):

Then in 2010, as the video game franchise was being rebooted with 2011's confusingly titled "Mortal Kombat" (though many know it as MK 9), a fan-made "trailer" (Mortal Kombat: Rebirth) came out made by Kevin Tancharoen, who made this as an application plea to reboot the franchise on film. My brother and I (and I'm sure many other MK nerds) thought it was amazing - he was trying to bring the zaniness of the MK universe into the real world with extra grittiness and fun twists on the origin stories for some of the characters. 

I was pretty disappointed when, a couple years later, it turned out that they gave him his wish - only in web series (straight to Youtube) format (Mortal Kombat: Legacy). For me anyway, it kinda sucked. It felt super campy (in a bad way) and inconsistent in tone and style. Nothing like the cool, dark MK: Rebirth that had preceded it.

This brings us back to where I started this post, with MK: X. This game came out in 2015 and I have totally loved it! It had 3 fairly different fighting variations for each fighter, a ton of new characters (some of whom were related to established characters - Cassie Cage and Jacqui Briggs) and some awesome DLC. You could get Predator and Alien and even a Carl Weathers skin (and voice!) for Jax. Amazing. 

So that's the game that I've just been fiending, but it's not the end of the Mortal Kombat story. A few months ago MK 11 came out, and remarkably I haven't got it yet. I had wanted to complete MK X before getting it, and now there's nothing stopping me! Although it has received mixed reviews, from what I can tell, that is largely down to complaints about the rate at which you unlock things in the game, rather than gameplay. It seems they've toned down combos, which suits me just fine and their tweaks to other elements seem largely for the better. They're also (finally) bringing in Spawn as a DLC character! My only real gripe is that I haven't seen any cool costumes for Sub Zero in the gameplay ;)

And the next scratch for our MK itch is already on the horizon. A new MK film (which will be a reboot) is slated for 2021 and is being produced by James Wan.

So there you have it, our Full Stop look at Mortal Kombat through the ages. Now, for all my worlds to collide, they just need to make a miniatures game of Mortal Kombat and my wallet will be fatalitied...wait a minute...

See you next Friday on The Art of Caesura!

Drinking: Uncle Coulomb's Session Ale - West Kerry Brewery

Listening: You Jerk - Kim Stockwood

Reading: The Myth of Sisyphus - Camus

Next Week: 

The raven's call...