LogFAQs > #975828735

Mortal Kombat 9: Shao Kahn has Raiden dead to rights during Armageddon, and Raiden realises how they should have defeated him back in the day. He sends a psychic projection back to the Raiden of the first Mortal Kombat game, influencing history and rewriting the timeline. MK9 was a hard reboot that explicitly covered prior games in the series as a way of giving the franchise a fresh start.

Mortal Kombat X: with the rise of Shinnok, the realms devolve into all-out war. A new generation emerges during a 25 year timeskip. This one was a soft reboot, focusing on the kids of several longtime characters and adding a lot of new elements like Kotal Kahn's rule of Outworld, Mileena's deposal and subsequent rebellion and everything about D'Vorah which is probably the most emblematic aspect of the Netherrealm Games era of the franchise.

Mortal Kombat 11: Kronika, the keeper of time, is working to create a timeline without Raiden. To do this, she uses her position to bring past characters to the present day - 28 years after the original tournaments - to do battle and establish her new timeline. The plot is literally just dragging past versions of the characters into the future, partially to retread old ground like Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade.

It's still an installment in the broader franchise, but the game exists as a reboot jumping off point - and as the advertising for the next MK game shows, this game succeeds. It's already kind of rebooty with the time travel, but the end of the game literally reboots the entire timeline. And now Mortal Kombat 1 is set in that new timeline, making it the fourth Mortal Kombat reboot in twelve years.

Basically, MK9 and X reboot the franchise at the start and 11 has a plot that relies heavily on playing with past versions of the characters, retconning them and changing them, before rebooting the entire franchise at the end. All three games are reboots, and MK1 is a fourth reboot.