Smokes!
I beat the new Mortal Kombat reboot this weekend (I also beat Portal 2 with my Friend in Science Alyssa, but more on that later), and I have to say that I enjoyed the new kombat experience. The story mode was good and the fighting was fun, ringing in another new addition to the Kombatverse in the wake of all those crappy sequels of the past 10 years or so. Really, the cut scenes and the voice actors and the story was a blast.
Even if it did take me nearly 3 hours to defeat Shao Kahn at the end, and only after I cheated by going online to get some advice. That skull-masked bastardo was tough!
Anyway, playing the game made me realize that Mortal Kombat features my favorite cast of any video game series. From super-powered ninjas to ninja robots to vampires and movie stars, there are a lot of cool people in this game. And even if the story is pretty light (tournament/invasion/rinse and repeat), the creators seem to give each individual characters their own interesting back story.
Take Ermac. Essentially he’s just the red palette-swap ninja. But they decided he was actually the physical embodiment of the souls of hundreds of warriors, gathered together with sorcery and turned into a fighter. Pretty cool back story.
(By palette-swap ninja, I mean the characters that were basically just copied and pasted from other ninja characters, with color being the only difference in appearance. The first game had Scorpion (yellow) and Sub-Zero (blue) who basically looked exactly alike, except for their colors. They had their own moves, powers and stories, but they looked the same. As the games went on, they were joined by green, red, gray and purple ninjas, all looking roughly the same for the first few games or so. They all eventually got their own costumes.)
My favorite character is Smoke, the gray palette-swap ninja. Smoke is one of those minor characters who exists in the background, and he quickly became my favorite for that fact – but not that fact alone.
Smoke first appeared in Mortal Kombat 2. He would pop his head out from behind a tree in the Living Forest level. And on the Dark Portal level, if you performed an uppercut and then hit either ‘start’ or ‘select’ when the little head said “TOASTYYY” then you’d get to fight Smoke! I can still remember that night at my grandparents’ house on my cousin’s Sega Genesis when my brother, I think, hit the button and got to fight Smoke. He got his ass kicked, but it was still a blast.
This was back before we had the Internet, so we only knew this Smoke code by reading a video game magazine.
Then Smoke came back in Mortal Kombat 3, and his back story was revealed. Smoke turned out to be one of the only good guy palette-swap ninjas. He was also the best friend/sidekick of Sub-Zero (one of the heroes of the game). In MK3, one story line was that Sub-Zero and Smoke’s ninja clan was turning their human ninjas into robot ninjas. And the two friends tried to escape. But Smoke got caught and was turned into a robot ninja! So his storyline for that game, several other games and the MK cartoon series was that he was a robot trying to recapture his soul and be a good guy again.
So hidden extra character; personal moment of victory in unlocking him and really awesome back story make Smoke my favorite character in Mortal Kombat. He’s such a favorite that I actually worked him into some lame poem I wrote back in 7th grade advanced English. I was really dorky back in school.
And best of all, Smoke’s story was awesome in the recent Mortal Kombat reboot! He had a chapter all his own, like most characters, and joined the good guys for their fight against evil. So as a fanboy, I was very pleased.
Now I can’t wait for the next game!
Henchman-4-Hire 