Hello and welcome to Wasted Plotential, where we discuss
the wasted potential of our favourite plotlines.
MK11's story simply does not work. There's a reason it took three hours to dissect
its myriad issues in the big kritique and even then, I still missed a few details,
like why was the Shaolin Massacre necessary if Kronika can just teleport directly into
the Dragon Grotto? Why are Liu Kang and Kung Lao assisting in the extermination of their
Shaolin brethren? There's too much wrong with it to even attempt to fix it in one video, so
MK11's getting an entire series of WPs, starting with fixing the flaw in the game's core concept.
Seeing how this trilogy was kicked off with time shenanigans, bringing that back in the third part
of the trilogy set it up as the big climax of this arc, as if everything from 2011 has been building
up to this... so why does it feel like this plot development came completely out of nowhere? Oh,
right, because it doesn't follow up on what was set up in the previous game at all. MKX's
stinger had Dark Raiden make a threat towards the revenants, who now rule the Netherrealm,
setting up one or both of these as the big threat in the next game.
Just the idea of the mentor or the hero being corrupted and serving as the final boss is,
admittedly, rather enticing as a concept. But no, Dark Raiden gets wiped at the start of Chapter 2,
while the revenants are relegated to minions of Kronika with zero personality. It's like when
Injustice 2 opened on Supergirl and a flashback centred on Bruce and Damian's relationship,
and then proceeded to do nothing with either for the rest of the story.
There's a lot you can say about MKX, but at least it followed up on the previous game's stinger.
If MKX was written like MK11, Shinnok would be beaten in the opening chapter
and then drop out of the plot entirely. Hell, he'd probably be cutscene only and Johnny's
chapter would end with a Quan Chi fight to set up the return of Onaga or some shit.
Chapter 1 is what the whole plot should have been about. Save the dumb time travel shit that proves
you're unwilling to actually do anything new with the series and would rather nostalgia bait the 2D
era elitists, for the next game. Let this trilogy have one overarching plot that goes somewhere new,
and then bring back the classic takes on the characters for contrast if you absolutely must.
Another plot point absolutely worth going into is one that was set up across multiple arcade
endings: that Raiden will declare Mortal Kombat against Outworld. This completely flips the
narrative, making Earthrealm the aggressors and Outworld the defenders. Raiden gave Kotal a chance
to prove he was better than his predecessor and he failed. But even so, most of Earth's heroes are
against the idea. I'd reinstate the concept that competitors have to fight for their homeworld,
and can't fight for the other side. We'll say the Lin Kuei fighters have ancestry in Outworld
and other realms merged into it to justify them fighting for Outworld in 2011. Alternatively,
Raiden insists on this being a rule now to stop his uncertain allies from fighting against him.
Scorpion is on Raiden's side to repent for dooming the revenants, and Sub-Zero is probably opposed,
setting up the fight that we're obligated to include by law. Frost is on Raiden's side,
as are villainous Earthrealm factions like the Black and/or Red Dragon. The
SF decide to help Kotal gather allies from other realms to help fight against Raiden,
but we can have some division within the SF with some members thinking it might be
for the best to get rid of Kotal. Maybe even Sonya or Jax does, after Kotal captured and
tried to kill their daughters. Sets up some decent drama between friends and family.
Raiden gets Hotaru and the Orderrealm on his side, while Kotal gets a new Chaosrealmer he's reluctant
to accept the aid of because of Havik, but knows he has to because his options are limited. Kotal
also needs to get the Shokan and Tarkata on his side. Nitara, who has freed Vaeternus at some
point by now, is another major force that both sides are after, and she's uncertain because
fuck Outworld, but also fuck anyone trying to conquer other realms. And if we have time,
Edenia is freed from Outworld, earning enough good faith for the one responsible to have King
Rain on his side. If not, it's whoever he trusts more to deliver on that later.
Act 1 is the build-up to the tournament as characters fight over which side is right
and the two sides gather their fighters. Act 2 is the tournament itself. For our purposes,
it really doesn't matter which side wins, but I like the idea
of an Earthrealm victory being a bad thing, so we'll go with that. Plus,
it establishes Raiden's faction as a serious threat, which antagonists in MK
very rarely are nowadays. So, what's Act 3? Act 3 is where the revenant plot comes into sharp focus.
They've been around in the background, popping up now and then to observe or interfere as needed.
Maybe they've been secretly helping Kotal gain allies against Raiden,
or killing them as part of their larger scheme. So, what's the deal with the revenants here?
Well, for one, they have individuality. There's already an issue where groups of
characters or artefacts can lose all sense of identity when brought together. Like how MVC
Infinite uses the Infinity Stones in a way where it doesn't matter which stones the heroes have,
so long as they have more than Ultron-Sigma has. The revenants don't get much in the way
of unique characterisation from one another in MKX, with most of it going to the one you
can fight but can't play as, weirdly enough. In MK11, Kitana is more than happy to work with the
man who conquered her people and destroyed her mother and father, and Kung Lao will work with
that same man who directly murdered him, like how Scorpion will work on the same side as the Cyber
Lin Kuei. And then there's the aforementioned Shaolin massacre. It's like Armageddon's
intro all over again. There's nothing to them, other than hating Raiden and wanting him gone.
And I've seen people express fatigue with the overuse of mind control in these games, which
is a shame because when used effectively, mind control can be a very potent plot device. The main
issue is that those being controlled/corrupted rarely get any confrontations of significance.
In MKX, Jax faces Sonya twice and I can't remember anything either one has to say about it. And
Kung Lao faces Raiden with little to say beyond that he hates him, which all the revenants do.
Liu Kang at least taunts him about his visions. But that's it. In MK11, we get Jade and the monks
fighting their heroic counterparts and, again, that's it. We need to keep their personalities
and relationships, both before and after their corruption, in mind when writing them.
The revenants should want to save the realms, but in a twisted manner. So, my take is that
the revenants do pick a side and have a warrior compete on that realm's behalf, with some rule
making it that only one person from any given outside realm can compete. This gives off the
impression that they have a vested interest in the outcome of the tournament to distract from
their true motive: during the tournament, some other revenants raid the Sky Temple and steal
Raiden's amulet, which is locked away in a vault guarded by Kung Jin. Kung Lao leads the raid and
defeats Jin but opts not to kill him, allowing him to get a rematch later and defeat Lao.
With the amulet in-hand, the revenants can now proceed with their true scheme.
First, they begin turning dead characters into revenants en masse - Shang Tsung, Quan Chi,
Mileena, Baraka, Motaro, Shao Kahn, Onaga, characters killed in the comics;
building an army to oppose other factions. But, their real goal isn't to beat everyone
in the massive battle they're setting up; it's to trigger Armageddon.
Armageddon was caused by there being too many warriors, whose abilities tore at the
fabric of reality. The revenants are trying to intentionally trigger this. Why? So that Liu
Kang can kill Blaze, take the prize and become a god, and then use his godly powers to activate
Raiden's amulet and send visions of this timeline back to himself before MK1, so he can create a
better timeline. Again, the revenants should want to save the realms in their own twisted way, and
this brings the Netherrealm trilogy full circle in a way that MK11 didn't - because it's all based
around the action that kicked it all off, and is the natural progression of the story, based
on the motivations of the characters that became twisted by the consequences of that opening act.
Of course, there is some internal conflict among the revenants regarding how to go about this.
The Edenians, for example, want to stop their realm from ever being part of Outworld,
but Liu Kang, ego significantly swollen as Earthrealm's hero and the King of the Netherrealm,
insists that "I must win". After a clash, the Edenians lie dead,
including Kitana at Liu Kang's hand. Kung Lao shows his character by asking
his friend to give him some glory in the next go around, which he agrees to. Then,
the heroes arrive to stop them, setting up the final battle against Nether God Liu Kang.
There are so many ways the plot could go from here: Raiden and Liu Kang fight
to the death and the winner is the boss; they merge into a more powerful threat;
Raiden thinks Liu Kang's idea has merit and wants to help, forming a Deadly Alliance of sorts.
Whatever the case, they both must be stopped. One idea I have for the final boss is what I thought
MVC Infinite was going to do when it randomly gave you Dante and Carol to fight Ultron-Sigma with,
instead of the brand leaders or rivals to Ultron and Sigma: you have all of the surviving heroes in
a list and you throw all of them against a threat with far more health and far greater attack power
than anyone else. You're just trying to whittle down their health before all of your fighters
are beaten. For one last bit of character focus, the player can be given tag teams that consist of
former enemies and rivals, putting aside their differences to fight for the greater good:
Sub-Zero and Frost, Hanzo and Bi-Han, Kotal and Rain, Sonya and Kano. In the end,
the villains are beaten, the amulet is destroyed, and time travel is now entirely off the table.
I'd say that, if we are going to do the time merger in MK12 (which we shouldn't)
then we see Dark Raiden from the old timeline in a mysterious void, revealing he was plucked from
that timeline at the last second by Kronika, who is the Elder God of time that provided him
with the amulet to begin with, and now shows him how severely wrong his new timeline went,
prompting him to agree to help her reset time. This sets the stage for MK12's New Timeline Raiden
vs Old Timeline Raiden fight. And instead of time travel, MK12 is the clash of the two timelines.
But, if this whole plot feels a bit cramped, there's always the option to use Aftermath
for this. Either the tournament is interrupted by the revenants around
Chapter 7 and restarts in Aftermath; or the main game is just the tournament stuff,
with the stinger setting up the revenant plot for Aftermath.
Either way, we'd have a plot that feels more like a natural continuation of MKX that does kepe the
next next generation fighters around instead of dumping half of them for no reason, and doesn't
dust the stinger character from the last game at the start of Chapter 2 because someone involved
with the story doesn't like Dark Raiden and should have vetoed him four fucking years
earlier instead of pulling a DC and rejecting the idea after it's already been released.
Oh, and one last thing about this game? It wouldn't require you to do 30 King of the Hill
matches just to unlock revenant Kung Lao, making him basically inaccessible once the online dies,
nor would it leave Kung Jin off the roster The game would feature both Kungs and let us have
the Jin vs evil Lao fight we should've had back in MKX. Honestly, it feels like Netherrealm are
determined to not let us have this fight, either in story mode or basic vs modes.
Is this my fault for trusting Netherrealm to deliver on that in MK11 a few years ago?
Honestly, this whole thing with the Kung Lao skin just really pisses me off. Like,
when I show Jin vs Lao in this, the reason I have to sue normal Kung Lao is because
I don't have the revenant costume. I had some footage of it in the past thanks to BruskPoet,
but now he doesn't have access to that save and no one else I know has access to that save and...
I guess if there's one thing I can say about MK11 that's kinda nice is that it's all tied
directly to your profile. So, even if you lose all your data, you can still get all that stuff back.
I guess, when it comes to complete versions of these games, MK9 is the best because you
just get all of it by default, instead of having to unlock it all. Costumes and
characters shouldn't have to be unlocked unless they're spoilers. Honestly. There's no reason
to lock any of the actual gameplay content, especially if it's shit that requires online.
"Here, do these online matches." What about when the servers go down, that content is
gone forever. There's no future-proofing at all in fighting games, especially with MK. Holy shit.