Current Events > Every Mortal Kombat game of the past 12 years has been a reboot (series spoiler)

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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.

Mortal Kombat is what happens when you want to constantly kill your characters and consider all their deaths canon. "Let's bring this character back they were unexpectedly popular" "We can't we killed them in the last game" "Shoot uh, TIME TRAVEL".

...X and 11 weren't reboots of any kind. They were sequels. What?

9 was an actual reboot, 1 is a soft reboot. X and 11 were just straight up sequels, there is literally no way to classify them as "reboots."

StealThisSheen posted...

...X and 11 weren't reboots of any kind. They were sequels. What?

X was a soft reboot where they do a big time skip and focus on a new cast in the same setting, like how the Star Wars sequel trilogy was a soft reboot.

I'll admit that my reasoning for 11 is nebulous, but the entire plot builds up to Liu Kang rebooting the universe. I guess it's more accurate to say that MK11 ends up rebooting everything, rather than the game itself being a reboot. I still think recalling old characters like Liu Kang and Kitana to continue those storylines, instead of working with their current revenant forms, is kind of like rebooting those characters - but ehh.

Though there is the assertion that Kronika reset the timeline multiple times offscreen, which would mean there's like eight different timelines between MKX and 11. But that's pedantic and stupid so I'm not going to talk about it.

MrMallard posted...

X was a soft reboot where they do a big time skip and focus on a new cast in the same setting

...What? No. Time skips are not "reboots." How does that even make sense? It features the exact same cast, just with new additions and later in time. It straight up continues the story from 9, including the Revenants and everything.

I'm cool with a reboot every 3 games tbh. X and 11 aren't reboots tho

StealThisSheen posted...

...X and 11 weren't reboots of any kind. They were sequels. What?

9 was an actual reboot, 1 is a soft reboot. X and 11 were just straight up sequels, there is literally no way to classify them as "reboots."

Yeah this, tc is being dumb