Bone-crunching fatalities, Ketchup and Mustard colored cyborg ninjas, and Jean Claude Van Damme doing the splits in basically everything. Join us for a breakdown and conversation about the Mortal Kombat 1 Announcement Trailer.
Bone-crunching fatalities, Ketchup and Mustard colored cyborg ninjas, and Jean Claude Van Damme doing the splits in basically everything. Join us for a breakdown and conversation about the Mortal Kombat 1 Announcement Trailer.
In this episode, we "analyze" the Mortal Kombat Announcement Trailer scene by scene. But first, we try to remember what in the hell has happened in the overly complicated lore of the series, lol. Joseph brings up the long list of controversies surrounding Mortal Kombat in the mid-1990s and confesses he didn't know the secret behind Noob Saibot's name. Willie wonders which game in the series is considered Mortal Kombat 8 and talks about how much he enjoyed the first timeline reset in Mortal Kombat (9) from 2011. Taylor bails on us for 20 minutes of the episode, but not before he tells us that Baraka and Johnny Cage were two of his favorite characters. We wrap with speculation about Mortal Kombat 1 and how Fire God Liu Kang's new era will play out. Down, Up, Left, Left, A, Right, and Down.
Here's a link to the trailer we watched in this episode.
Games briefly mentioned in this episode: Mortal Kombat 1, Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat X, Mortal Kombat 11, Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, Mortal Kombat: Deception, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, Mortal Kombat II, Mortal Kombat 3, Mortal Kombat 4, Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Here's the full transcript for this episode.
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00:00:00
[Alienated by ELFL plays in background]
Joseph: Flashback to the 90s, there is a pretty lengthy Wikipedia page called Controversies Surrounding Mortal Kombat.
Taylor: That sounds like a rabbit hole.
Joseph: There's so much shit, dude. There's even more than I realized. And so until I started digging into it, I didn't know there were like murder cases that were blaming Mortal Kombat.
Taylor: Wow!
Joseph: And to my surprise, something as recent in politics, or at least on CNN. As recent as 2015, somebody on CNN is blaming Mortal Kombat for some, like, church shooting or something.
Taylor: Oh.
Joseph: Which is wild to me.
Taylor: Oh. I was assuming it was going to be something very relevant, like a guy, uh, shoved another dude's face down through his body and split his entire body with it.
Joseph: Yeah, like, somebody pulled someone else's heart out, like, just... [laughs]
Taylor: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah, the old, the old head spine rip, you know, it's like, [Joseph laughs] well, clearly you can see this person... You know, they docked, uh, 6, 000 hours of Mortal Kombat, and most of it was Sub Zero, and yeah, now we got a reason, but no, no.
[Intro theme plays - Tiger Tracks by Lexica]
00:01:23
Joseph: What's up? Welcome to Berries and Blades. Thanks for joining us for a casual, unscripted conversation about video games. My name is Joseph, and I'm here with my friends, Willie and Taylor, and we're just three regular guys wondering if Windows 10 is ever going to stop asking if we want to update to Windows 11.
But I digress. So what have y'all been up to lately?
Willie: Not a lot. I, uh, I've been trying to figure out at what point I'm going to give in and hit that button and just do it, but I'm afraid it's going to break a bunch of stuff. I don't know if that's true or not.
Joseph: I always feel that way about OS updates. You know, I was thinking about it recently when I texted you and I was like, yo, what version of windows are you running right now?
Willie: Yeah, I didn't even know if that's what I didn't know why you were asking at the moment, but I had definitely been thinking recently about how many times I get asked that. I mean, it's every time, right? And I just don't know.
Joseph: I'm lucky. I'm lucky that I'm mostly on my iMac and I don't have to like, see that shit every day, but it's gotten old.
Taylor: Are you though? I mean, you, like, I feel like I'm always having the same issues on my Mac.
Joseph: Oh, that's true.
Taylor: Where it's like, do you want to update to the latest wine country and then you, you know, [Joseph laughing] it gives you all the scary terminology where it's like, if you do this, you may lose everything and... you just have to accept all this stuff.
I guess I'm also bad at backing up, so it's always a scary endeavor.
Joseph: That's funny you brought that up because I'm still running Catalina [chuckles] on my iMac. What, what OSS do you have, Taylor?
Taylor: Um, I think I'm running the latest one, Ventura.
Joseph: Okay, okay, so you're up to speed man. Shoot!
Taylor: Yeah, but that, you know, some of my stuff didn't start working until maybe a month or two ago, so it took 'em some time and then some things break and they blame each other for it, which is very annoying.
Joseph: That is the exact reason that I always delay updating.
Taylor: I can't blame you, dude. And the, one of the worst ones has been universal audio, the, uh, sound copilot that runs on the computer to run all that stuff. And evidently it has a bug where when your computer, the Mac goes to sleep, it crashes. It crashes the Mac every single time.
And it seems to only do it in the middle of the night. So I come and my computer is all angry because it's been shut down in a bad way. And, um, and so I hit them up about it and they were like, yeah, we just recommend you don't use sleep.
Joseph: Hmm.
[everyone laughs]
Taylor: Oh, okay.
Willie: It's a good solution.
Joseph: Yeah, that's... [laughs]
Taylor: Yeah, for sure. That's totally practical. Thank you for that. That was the recommendation, was… for now, we just recommend you don't use the sleep feature, which is wild.
Joseph: Willie, do you still have the Mac Mini? Do you know what OS is on that thing?
Willie: Oh, I have no idea. I think that's in a box somewhere. We haven't used it in a while. So it's, it's old.
00:04:10
Joseph: Yeah. Hmm. All right. All right. Well, in today's episode, we're going back to our roots to talk about one of the best fighting franchises ever. Mortal Kombat. Specifically the new MK1 trailer that dropped recently. God damn.
Taylor: Mmm.
Joseph: That trailer still gives me goosebumps. And we've all watched the trailer before hitting record, but we're going to queue it up so that we can all watch it together.
And if you want to watch along with us or after the, this recording, you can look up the Mortal Kombat 1 Announcement Trailer and see what we were seeing. Willie, you ready to cue it up?
Willie: Yeah, let's, uh, let's do this.
Taylor: [In the style of "Techno Syndrome" by The Immortals] Mortal Kombat... trailer.
Joseph: [In the style of "Techno Syndrome" by The Immortals] Mortal Kombat.
Taylor: [singing] Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Joseph: Also, this is the first time we're attempting to share screen audio in a recording, so we'll see how it goes.
Willie: May or may not get included, but probably. Let's just, uh, go through this whole thing first, and then maybe we'll do a breakdown.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. Yeah, sounds good. Likely mature,17 plus.
Taylor: Definitely fucking mature. If not, not gonna make it.
[trailer audio starts]
Fire God Liu Kang: It is time!
Joseph: It is time! [singing] It's the WB! [laughs]
Willie: Just the close up on those eyes, like... looks so ridiculous.
Fire God Liu Kang: Time to wake up...to a new reality.
Joseph: The sunset, beautiful dude. So sick.
Fire God Liu Kang: To a blank canvas
Willie: Yeah.
Fire God Liu Kang: That I have painted in with warmth and peace. In my new era, the choice is yours. Whether to live in quiet serenity...
Joseph: I definitely recognized him as Kung Lao.
Fire God Liu Kang: Or bloody strife.
Willie: Yeah, that's a question I was gonna ask y'all. Like how many of these people did you recognize immediately?
Fire God Liu Kang: To dwell in joyous prosperity...
Joseph: Well, Katana.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: I love this scene too. The, the city, whatever they're in.
Willie: Yeah.
Fire God Liu Kang: or bitter rivalry.
Joseph: Mileena, and such a subtle reveal of her face before she puts the mask on. So sick.
Fire God Liu Kang: You can face each other
Joseph: Scorpion, obviously.
Fire God Liu Kang: as sworn enemies...
Taylor: Scrub Zero. [Joseph chuckles]
Fire God Liu Kang: or united as brothers.
Joseph: That part got me the first time I saw it for sure.
Fire God Liu Kang: For the storm is brewing.
Willie: Of course there's gotta be a portal opening to another world or something.
Fire God Liu Kang: And soon you will discover...
Joseph: and out of it, Fire God Liu Kang.
Fire God Liu Kang: That even in this new era...one constant remains.
Joseph: This is a good reveal too. Shang Tsung arrives.
Fire God Liu Kang: There is always something worth fighting for.
[sound of a metal blade piercing a skull]
Joseph: Fucking hell.
Willie: Yeah.
[trailer audio continues with sounds of bones breaking, blood splattering, and fighting]
Taylor: Oh man.
Joseph: So brutal.
Fire God Liu Kang: You have chosen to defy peace... then you have chosen war with a god!
Willie: Yeah, that's sick. And I feel like the, just the way the logo opens up to the background.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Yeah. Art is on point.
00:07:36
Joseph: There's so many moments that gave me the chills. There's one Liu Kang kick in there right before it moves onto the scene with the Shang Tsung, uh, Shang Tsung and then the two dragons.
Taylor: Dropkick?
Joseph: But he just like kicks the shit out of him in the best Donnie Yen from the original Ip Man movie. [Taylor laughs]
Taylor: Nice.
Joseph: Where he just like puts him down so hard.
Willie: Yeah. So I would say my initial thoughts of that trailer was just obviously like... Shit, hell yeah. I'm just excited to play another one because, you know, with the newest sort of trilogy of games, MK 9, 10, and 11, I played more 9 and 10 than I played of 11, so I only kind of remembered the story.
Like, so on my initial watch of this, I was just like, trying to catch up, trying to remember...
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: What the fuck like, why Liu Kang was the way he was. And it's like, oh yeah, right, like you said, oh, that's Fire God Liu Kang. So we're going we're continuing with a version of that story but who knows, could be anything.
Joseph: I have to say that's pretty bad ass the way they revealed, which is the ending that's canon from the end of MK11. That's what I assume, right? The trailer is the first time that they actually revealed what was going to be canon between those two endings, right?
Willie: Well, so how much did y'all play 11?
Joseph: I actually didn't play 11 at all, but I know the story of 11.
Willie: So do you know the MK11, like, Aftermath DLC stuff too? Because I don't know that I ever even played that. I only played the game itself.
Joseph: Like the base game?
Willie: Uh huh. And I had watched trailers and stuff for the Aftermath.
Joseph: Maybe that's what I don't know, where the base game ends and where, what is actually in Aftermath. Maybe what I'm thinking is the stuff in Aftermath.
Willie: Yeah, that's a good question. How about you, Taylor? Did you play, have you played the most recent games?
Taylor: No, uh, 10, 10 was the most recent one that I played and I definitely didn't get to the end of the story or anything. I want to say Rebecca and I picked it up just to kind of play around with it cause neither of us had messed with one for a while, so, so we wanted to check it out.
Joseph: 10 is the one I spent a lot of time playing out of like that 9, 10, 11, like you mentioned is 9 deception or was there something else there?
Willie: No-
Joseph: Or was it just called Mortal Kombat.
Willie: -I think it's just called Mortal Kombat. It's not even called Mortal Kombat 9. That's the one that like restarts the trilogy.
Joseph: That's right, you're... Okay. Right, right, right. So that's after that's every... after everybody just basically fucking dies, right?
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: And Raiden is like basically trying to reset everything and...
Willie: Yeah, so how much do you know about that lore because that shit is... that shit is wild like I didn't really know until like thinking about this episode and recording this episode that I went back and like refresh my mind on everything.
I don't even know I knew. Some of the stuff that's in there, some of the like convoluted stuff that's going on with the story.
Joseph: It gets confusing very quickly.
00:10:30
Willie: I think the coolest thing though, to like, know, if you don't, if you don't follow Mortal Kombat, is Mortal Kombat, what was what's considered the ninth game, even though it's not, it's not. I don't know how they count Mortal Kombat games because that, it's just too confusing to me.
Joseph: So MK one through four-
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: -and then it goes to Deadly Alliance-
Willie: Uh-huh.
Joseph: -and then it goes to Deception-
Willie: Yep.
Joseph: -and then it goes to Armageddon-
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: -and then it goes to Mortal Kombat.
Willie: And then it goes to Mortal Kombat, which is the game that people, and maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just wrong that I call it MK9 because there's MKX.
Joseph: Mh-hmm.
Willie: Which seems like it's supposed to be Mortal Kombat 10. Right. But if you count up what you just said, that is not eight games prior to Mortal Kombat 9.
Joseph: Is it not?
Willie: No!
Joseph: MK one through four.
Willie: It's four. And then Deadly Alliance-
Joseph: Dead Alliance-
Willie: -which is five. And then Deception, which is six.
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: -Armageddon.
Willie: And then Armageddon, which is seven. So I don't know where Mortal Kombat 8 is in this [chuckling] timeline of things.
Joseph: Oh.
Willie: And I don't know if they're counting Shaolin Monks.
Joseph: Are we just straight up missing one?
Willie: No, we're not. I've, I've done lots of reshearch and think... research and thinking about this and I don't know... I don't know if Shaolin Monks is supposed to be counted as eight because of when it was released.
Joseph: I doubt it. I doubt any of those, like Sub Zero spinoffs and, like any of that is, like, included in the, the numbers.
Willie: Right. It's not...
Joseph: Or that, that style of counting.
Willie: No, because if you counted those-
Joseph: Is there really one missing?
Willie: -there's three games, three other games that would be in that timeline. So then you would be well past nine. So I really don't know. I don't know what they're counting.
Joseph: Yeah. What...
00:12:07 Marker
Willie: I will say, one of the coolest things though, is about Armageddon. The end of that game sees the death of Raiden. Sorry. There are gonna be spoilers throughout this if we're gonna talk about this, but Raiden dies at the end of Armageddon because everybody else is pretty much dead.
What happens is he goes back, he sends a message to himself in the past saying, "he must win." That's what he says.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And that's where Mortal Kombat 9, Mortal Kombat starts, is this new timeline that Raiden has created by telling himself in the past, "he must win."
Joseph: Which, I have to say, why was he not more fucking specific? Because you could have avoided [Taylor chuckles] a lot of the events in the [Taylor laughs] 2011 Mortal Kombat. When like the timeline is redoing itself, you could have saved yourself... actually you could have kept a lot of people alive, if you would have just said like "Shao Kahn must win"
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Instead of "he must win" because then he goes on thinking that it's Liu Kang that should win and it really just gets a bunch of fucking people killed.
Willie: I don't know. It's just like a revelation and he's like saying it in his head to himself, but out loud almost, you know, he's like realizing like that, but you're right. It doesn't... he could have saved a lot of time if he had just said it.
Joseph: Yeah, I mean, we know why, right? We know why, like they had to give us a story, right? And make it mysterious, but looking backward. And connecting all these dots, you're like, come on, dude, [chuckling] you should have been more specific with yourself. But yeah, I see what you're saying.
Taylor: I mean, Mortal Kombat is not scared to take chances with changing the story up completely. [Willie chuckles]
Joseph: Oh my gosh, dude.
Taylor: They really go wild.
00:13:44
Joseph: Flashback to the 90s, there is a pretty lengthy Wikipedia page called Controversies Surrounding Mortal Kombat. [Taylor chuckles]
Taylor: That sounds like a rabbit hole.
Joseph: There's so much shit, dude. There's even more than I realized. And so until I started digging into it, I didn't know there were like murder cases that were blaming Mortal Kombat.
Taylor: Wow!
Joseph: And to my surprise, something as recent in politics, or at least on CNN. As recent as 2015, somebody on CNN is blaming Mortal Kombat for some, like, church shooting or something.
Taylor: Oh.
Joseph: Which is wild to me.
Taylor: Oh. I was assuming it was going to be something very relevant, like a guy, uh, shoved another dude's face down through his body and split his entire body with it.
Joseph: Yeah, like, somebody pulled someone else's heart out, like, just... [laughs]
Taylor: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah, the old, the old head spine rip, you know, it's like, [Joseph laughs] well, clearly you can see this person... You know, they docked, uh, 6, 000 hours of Mortal Kombat, and most of it was Sub Zero, and yeah, now we got a reason, but no, no, it sounds more like-
Willie: That uh... [chuckles] Sorry. That news clip that you, you shared Joey, in the chat or in that text thread, uh, was interesting because there's a, a father in that towards the end of it, who's like, "you know one day these kids are, they're going to find themselves in a fight and then they're going to try to make this, you know, a reality or try to make this real."
And it's like, huh, someone's really going to do that? I think that's, that's reaching.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: I don't know that, yeah, anyone's ripping anyone's head off.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: I get the controversy around it, but it's like, man.
Joseph: Talk about moments in video games that have changed video game history. This is one of them. The release of Mortal Kombat, if you, if you just know nothing about it or maybe younger than us and never really played video games at that time, it like broke the fucking industry.
They created the ESRB rating because of Mortal Kombat. Politicians were blaming Mortal Kombat and showing scenes from the game to try and pass legislation to restrict children from playing games like this. And it was wild, like, it had the reverse and opposite effect, obviously, right? Like, it made the game more desirable. [chuckles]
Taylor: Oh yeah, if you say no, you can't do that thing, everybody wants to do that thing, like, see, so many examples in history.
Joseph: And if you look at that Wikipedia page, there's so many instances where like it's being blamed in a legit way, which is fascinating. I don't know where else I was going with that aside from.
Oh, just just giving some general background is that like there was a lot of controversy surrounding this game in the mid 90s.
Willie: And I think to your point that it's sort of historic in the sense that, yeah, they literally had to create the ESRB in response to this and amongst a few other games. But they were just like, okay, we need a rating system to figure out what's age appropriate and just give parents a warning to like what ,what your kid is playing.
And then the whole system that I mean, they created a whole system for people to like self report or have... first have their games completely reviewed by people and then move to like a self reporting system on a questionnaire to say like, okay, this is what's in our game. Like, do you have these things, just to determine a rating so they could go out. And because it determines how the game is marketed too, to make sure that like, It's not targeted towards audiences that are too young for the game.
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: I do have some random facts that I'll bring up at some point. I was surprised that no Mortal Kombat game was banned until that 2011 Mortal Kombat, where it was basically like the refresh, right?
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: It's what they're doing with MK1, but they did it in 2011. It was like an attempt at that, to kind of rewrite history so that they could essentially make more games.
But that was the first time any Mortal Kombat was actually banned in places like Japan. And I don't know what other, what other countries, but I was kind of shocked that that was the first game.
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: Cause we're like a decade in at that point, even over a decade in.
00:17:38
Willie: Yeah. So let's go back to that question you said about, you were asking about where MK11 ends and where MK11 like Aftermath ends, because that's what's setting up this story-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: -that we'll talk more in depth about this trailer. Um, at the end of Mortal Kombat 11, again, sorry, this is spoilers for this game because it's going to set up this trailer, I think.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Um, so if you haven't played and you don't want to know, definitely go play that or go watch somebody else break it down or listen to this, if you don't care and you want to just, uh, know the story.
So at the end of Mortal Kombat 11, Raiden is forced to face off with Revenant Liu Kang, which is a dead Liu Kang that's been raised from the dead by Quan Chi, who's been alive for a while now. He's also merged, like Revenant Liu Kang has merged with his past self. And Raiden is getting ready to square off with, I think Kronika, who's like a time lord, basically in the MK world.
Joseph: She's a god, right? She's an elder god?
Willie: She's a god. Yeah.
Joseph: And isn't she also like Quan Chi's mother?
Willie: She's a titaness. And she is, uh, Shinnok's mother, I think.
Joseph: Shinnok, okay. That's what I was thinking.
Willie: Yeah, yeah.
Taylor: Now seeing as she has to absorb, absorb someone, that's... [Joseph and Taylor laugh]
Willie: Well, so she knows that the only people who can stop her are Raiden and Liu Kang. So she wants them to fight each other. But Raiden realizes that... and just gives himself over to Liu Kang, basically, and gives his powers to Liu Kang, making this Revenant Liu Kang and past Liu Kang into the Fire God Liu Kang. And then that Fire God Liu Kang is able to beat all of the Revenant army that exists, and Cetrion, who is like a soldier for Kronika, and Kronika.
Joseph: Mm hmm, mm hmm.
Willie: After that, MK11 ends with Liu Kang basically encountering the now mortal Raiden who is offering to be the advisor, like his advisor for as long as he lives.
Joseph: So at the end of Mortal Kombat 11 is Liu Kang already rebuilding the universe?
Willie: No.
Joseph: So that hasn't happened.
Willie: So Aftermath, which is the expansion to Mortal Kombat 11 is where Fire God Liu Kang and Raiden want to use Kronika's hourglass to reset history again. That's their goal. But Shang Tsung Ends up, uh, interrupting them.
Him and Fujin and Nightwolf, who were imprisoned by Kronika because they wouldn't join Kronika for some reason. They just refused to. She imprisoned them and when she died, they're released and they stop Fire God Liu Kang and Raiden from using the hourglass.
They're like, no, it'll destroy everything if you do that because we don't have the crown that she had. It got broken in the fight and we need her crown.
Joseph: Okay.
Willie: So Shang Tsung somehow convinces Fire God Liu Kang. I think because Fire God Liu Kang knows that it's, he knows that this is sort of a trap. So he's like, okay, whatever. I'll send you back in time to get the crown with Fujin and Nightwolf and then we'll have the crown.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: So he sends him back knowing full well it's probably a trap.
Joseph: Right, right.
Willie: Turns out, of course, it is going to be a trap and Shang Tsung ends up with the crown himself and ends up fighting Liu Kang, like Fire God Liu Kang and him fight.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: I'm skipping a bunch of stuff there because we don't need to know it all. But-
Joseph: Yeah, yeah.
Willie: -basically, Shang Tsung battles Kronika, gets her crown and steals her soul and becomes like super powerful. But Fire God Liu Kang is able to stop him.
Joseph: Mm-hmm. So then at the end of Aftermath, you can choose, right? You can choose.
Whether or not you get the, the Shang Tsung ending or the Liu Kang ending, right?
Willie: I don't know well enough to answer that, I don't think.
Joseph: I think that's the case. Yeah. And that's where it cliffhangs and leaves people wondering, like, which of these endings is canon.
Willie: Okay.
Joseph: And I don't think that was ever revealed, that it was Liu Kang and that ending, until the trailer. But I could be wrong.
Willie: So the reason I think that that might not be accurate is because. I think the, whatever I was watching to like catch myself up on all of this was months old now and they believe that like Liu Kang wins and erases Shang Tsung from existence and then forges his own era to go back to the Shaolin temple to train Kung Lao.
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: But maybe there are, there's another ending and this person just didn't reference it when I was like looking up stuff about it.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: So, I don't know, but that's, I think you're right though, that now we get to see Fire God Liu Kang and know that he's obviously, he is real. He's out here doing stuff again.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And so, yes, to your point, does exactly what Mortal Kombat, what Mortal Kombat 9 does and resets the timeline. So now we can see what this new world is.
00:22:16
Joseph: So why? I don't know why this one is speaking to me so much more than any of the past MK games. Like then that, that 2011 I think it was-
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: -that Mortal Kombat when they essentially reset time. That did not have an effect on me. But somehow this one dude, this one, when I woke up, because you sent me the trailer. I was fucking blown away. Like I could not think of anything else that day besides that trailer and just how brutal... [in the style of the Mortal Kombat announcer] Brutal! How brutal that trailer is.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: I'm watching the ending of 11 right now. And it's, uh, like the kind of. The more like animated illustration parts of it where it's explaining when... everything happened. That is explaining like, it says Scorpion just said he was, he was no longer going to hang on to his quest for revenge. He was letting all that go Sub Zero saved and unfroze the heart of one of his clan members, I believe, or maybe his brother or something.
But yeah, so it's kind of explaining all this. And I guess Raiden, Yeah, I guess it's Raiden who's re-crafting the Sands of Time, and yeah, this is pretty extreme.
Joseph: What, are we talking about Prince of Persia now? [Willie and Joseph laugh]
Taylor: Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what it looks like too. He's got a little hood on and everything, but he's...
Joseph: But before we jump into just like a deeper dive into the trailer itself, here's an interesting thing that I didn't know until recently that Noob Saibot is Boon Tobias backwards.
Willie: That's weird that you didn't know that.
Joseph: I did not know that.
Taylor: What's the significance there? Is that a different character or something?
Joseph: Yeah, it's a character that's like from MK1, I think. Oh, okay. Or MK2, MK1.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: He was like a secret character in MK1 that you had to do something very specific to end up fighting him.
Willie: Yeah, but it's more importantly, it's... it's the creators of Mortal Kombat.
Joseph: Oh, sure. Yeah, I kind of glanced over that, but...
Willie: Yeah, it's Ed Boon and John Tobias. It's their names are the. That name and then spelled backwards is Noob Saibot.
Joseph: I don't think I knew that until recently.
Willie: I don't remember when I found that out, but I've known that for a very long time. And it's like, oh, that's very cool. So I can understand that revelation being like, oh, shit. [chuckles]
Joseph: Yeah. [laughs]
Taylor: Oh, that was Kung Lao, who is now the Lord of Time. Whoa.
Joseph: And it gets even more confusing because the, the Kung Lao we see in the games there, he has an ancestor called the Great Kung Lao.
Taylor: Right. Cause they're like a, that's, I forget about that. Oh my God. Baraka chopped somebody's head off. Okay.
Willie: Yeah. The lore is deep, man. And so I will confess that like I played one through four for sure. And then I think Deadly Alliance. And I don't know if I ever, I played a little bit of Deception, but not enough to remember the story myself. And I don't think I ever touched Armageddon.
Joseph: I didn't either. Cause there are definitely some characters in Armageddon where I'm like, what the fuck? Like who, who dis?
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: And I kind of feel that way about Deception too. Like I vaguely remember Deception. Deadly Alliance, I mean, I knew that from the beginning of the game. Like that's when they really shook things up.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: They're like, we don't give a shit. Like we're fatigued. We need to do something big.
[Taylor laughs]
Taylor: Doing something different.
Joseph: And they made a splash with that at the beginning of Deadly Alliance.
Willie: I do want to go back real fast. You said the Mortal Kombat, 2011 release didn't do anything for you. The... I really liked that game. I looked at that... that game told a story. I just liked reliving the entire franchise, basically, in that game. Like that felt just really badass to me, to just go through the story and like, figure out what the canon endings were for sure, and just like, play them.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And I thought it did it really well. Taylor, I think you and I played that together. We were living off of that, off of Sherwood Forest at the time, I think.
Joseph: Nice.
Willie: And, uh, me, you and Nick played through a lot of that game together, like just passing the controller back and forth.
Taylor: Yeah, we did some, uh, uh, we also, one of the other ones we played together was uh, Shaolin Monks, that was a fun one.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah, I don't think I ever played, I don't think I played any of the spinoffs, except for maybe the Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero, Mortal Kombat 4. That might be the only thing I played.
Willie: I think Shaolin Monks is the only spinoff of them I played.
Taylor: Yeah, and they did it right, in my opinion, because they, combining the depth of the lore and everything and then adding a co -op element and go kill a bunch of dudes, kind of beat them up style. Like, it was definitely good.
Willie: Yeah, it was definitely different and much needed, like something different, you know, like you were saying.
Joseph: Real quick, here's another random thing that I learned recently. So Cyrax and Sektor, red and, red and yellow cyborg ninjas.
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: They were originally called ketchup and mustard before [Taylor and Willie chuckle] they were given like official names. Which I thought was pretty hilarious.
Willie: Nice.
Taylor: That's amazing. You bringing ketchup. Yeah. You got that mustard? Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah. [In the style of MK announcer] Ketchup wins.
Taylor: Yeah, [In the style of MK announcer] Ketchup.
Oh yeah, I bet those audio...
Joseph: [laughs] I don't know if they went that far with it. It seems g.... just like internal code names for the characters.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: But I thought that was hilarious because they do very much resemble a bottle of ketchup and mustard.
00:27:31
Willie: I have a few questions that I was thinking about as I watched it, like in preparation for this, that I'm just curious about and stuff that we haven't, somehow we haven't touched on some of this, which is, first off, do you have a favorite Mortal Kombat character?
Joseph: Ooh.
Willie: Maybe overall, or maybe if you just go back to the first game, is there someone that you would say is like your favorite character?
Joseph: If I was going all the way back to the beginning, I did really like Liu Kang, like at the, in Mortal Kombat. The original arcade release, I did like Liu Kang a lot and then Sub Zero. So I might even put Sub Zero all time favorite above Liu Kang.
Willie: How about you, Taylor? Did you have any favorites or even now just some that stick out to you that you're like, "oh yeah, that's what I associate with Mortal Kombat."
Taylor: Overall, game.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Um, I mean, the original ones, of course, playing the first one and the second one and those lines of characters that have kind of stuck with it and the theme and everything. I mean, those still probably stick with me the most.
Willie: Can you pick a favorite character out of those?
Taylor: Oh, a favorite character? Um, I was a big Baraka user.
I used a lot of Baraka. I used Johnny Cage. Um, I like his moveset just because he was, both of them kind of have a confusing moveset. Like they're, the way that they move and, Johnny Cage had that slide kick that you could bust out and kind of go across the screen on people.
Joseph: Yeah, the nut punch, man. The splits.
Taylor: [chuckles] Yeah, oh, the nut punch. [Joseph laughs]
Yeah, just literally having the nut punch was enough to make me pick a character for sure. Uh, Bo Rai Cho was fucking badass too.
Willie: Oh yeah, in the later games, yeah. [Joseph laughs]
Taylor: Yep, yep, because yeah, he had another confusing ass skill. It was just hard to block his stuff because he moved so much.
Joseph: I guess in the more modern games, I do like Erron Black.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Just, I think it's a cool character and in the competitive landscape-
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: -which I've sunk a lot of hours of watching into. [Willie chuckles] Like I love people that their main is Erron Black just because the movement and the pistol and the outfits, I think are really cool for that character.
Taylor: Oh, he's cool looking. I don't think I've ever even seen this guy, Western themed. He's very cool.
Willie: I think if I had to pick early on, I would say it's either Raiden or Scorpion.
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: Those two always were the people that I preferred using.
Joseph: I like Raiden as a character. I've never really used him very much. Like I'd never played as Raiden in the game very much, but I love, I love that there is that one wise character, you know, that is kind of leading the entire pack.
Willie: Yeah, I liked his moveset a lot as a kid, I liked being able to teleport, you know, the other characters did it too, but I really liked that teleport behind somebody and just like, fuck'em up.
Taylor: It was easy to whip out too, just that down up or whatever the quick combo was.
Joseph: [chuckling] Oh yeah.
Willie: Yeah, I think so. I always liked that. And then, especially in Mortal Kombat 2011, I liked his moveset enough that, like, I could do some really long fucking juggles in that thing. I got really good with him, and that, that also takes me to my other favorite character, because the other person that I got super good with, because I played that game a lot, was Kenshi.
Joseph: Mmm.
Taylor: Oh, yeah.
Willie: I really liked having telekinetic powers and just being able to, like...
Taylor: And he had a sword, so in...
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: He didn't only use a sword, he would just pull it out with certain moves, right? Which was...
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: That was also, cause it'd give him an extra two feet all of a sudden on his character and became a little different.
Willie: And the other character I liked like that was, uh, this is ridiculous, but I always liked Rain. I think I just liked Rain cause I really like purple. It's probably one of my favorite colors. So it's just like... [chuckles]
Joseph: It's funny you brought that up. You know why his name is Rain?
Willie: No, I don't think so.
Joseph: He's named after like the song Purple Rain by Prince.
Taylor: Oh, sweet.
Willie: Nice.
Joseph: Because he's purple, his name is Rain, and he's actually the prince of like Edenia.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Oh, that's great.
Joseph: Which is pretty hilarious. So, I mean, I guess they were pretty big Prince fans at the time.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: That's freaking awesome. I mean, who's not?
Joseph: I think Smoke is cool too.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Like, not really getting caught up in like who these characters actually are in the lore.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Like who Noob Saibot is. Or who, you know, who came back as Noob Saibot.
Willie: Yeah
Joseph: Like not getting mixed up into that, but what the characters look like, I thought the like monochromatic gray looking ninja was pretty badass.
Willie: Oh, before I forget. And before we get back in this trailer, I was going to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure one of the things that we learned once the Mortal Kombat website launched is that, there is a, a Jean Claude Van Damme skin for this game. Is that true?
Joseph: That's hilarious. I don't know.
Willie: I think that's one of the things that uh...
Taylor: I believe it. He's having a resurgence right now. I mean ever since he made that commercial a couple years ago where he was doing the splits between the 18-wheelers-
[all laugh]
Joseph: Yeah.
Taylor: It's hard to deny him. It was like, oh, yeah, we remember this guy. He's alright.
Willie: He is the person who is doing the stuff for Johnny Cage, I think, is what's happening because that's who, like, that's originally the inspiration, right? Which, like, is why there's the nut punch from the splits sort of thing.
Joseph: They had a different actor, though. He didn't do, like, the digitized acting.
Willie: No, he never, he was just the inspiration for it. They didn't get him.
Joseph: Right.
Willie: He didn't have anything to do with it.
Taylor: That was from Bloodsport or something that he did that I'm trying to...
Joseph: Yeah, yeah, he did.
Willie: [chuckles] Yeah.
Joseph: I mean, every movie he did the splits. Let's not get that twisted.
[all laugh]
Taylor: That's true. Yeah. But the splits nut punch, like sometimes you would do a split and pour some milk in the coffee here.
Willie: Also, I didn't mean to gloss over that, what Taylor was talking about, because if you've never seen what Taylor's talking about, Jean Claude, Jean Claude Van Damme doing the splits across two-
Joseph: Uh-huh.
Willie: -two semi trailers, semi tractor trailers, like. You should go watch that because it's ridiculous.
Joseph: Mm-hm, yeah.
Taylor: It's epic.
Willie: The whole point of the trailer is to prove like the stable ride system that is in these semis to show that like- [Taylor and Joseph laughing]
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: It's just like completely stable and it's not going to do anything when you hit bumps.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Taylor: Who thinks of that.
Willie: I don't know.
Taylor: Who comes up with that? Was it a Family Guy style? Like they had a board and just threw some shit at the board and wherever it landed, they were like-.
Joseph: Hell yeah. You know who came up with that? Somebody experienced. [Willie chuckles] Somebody experienced in advertising.
Taylor: Yeah, whoever did that knew what the fuck they were talking about [Joseph laughs] for sure because that was perfect. But ever since then, I mean, he's, he's had a good momentum like anything he's done. So I'd be cool to. So is he actually going to play this character or something or...?
Willie: I don't know exactly what the involvement is, but there is literally a, um... there is a skin that's included in the games, like first add on. Like if you buy the premium edition or whatever, or collector's edition, you'll get that pack with a bunch of skins in it, including Shang Tsung, which we see at the end of the trailer, but also Van Damme as Johnny Cage.
Taylor: So Shang Tsung is not, um, I saw that and meant to say something on the trailer where it says you get him for pre ordering. I guess that's, um, so he's not the big bad on this one then, otherwise he would just be included.
Willie: So that's what I wonder about the trailer itself. Does this all happen before we play MK1?
Joseph: Actually, [chuckles] I have to do this before we move away from [in the style of Mortal Kombat announcer] Jean Claude wins.
This is random bits of knowledge, but when they were trying to come up with a name for Mortal Kombat, here were some of the other options before Mortal Kombat became the name. Kumite.
[Taylor chuckle]
Willie: Nice.
Joseph: Obviously related to the inspiration. I think the whole game was supposed to be about Jean Claude Van Damme, but anyway, Dragon Attack.
Taylor: Hmm.
Joseph: Death Blow, I think that's also kind of like Kumite inspired, [Willie chuckles] and then...
[in the style of Mortal Kombat announcer] Fatality.
But back to your question.
Willie: No, now, I'm thinking about how the, how effective any of those titles would have been if they would still have carried on through all of this, all of this time. [chuckles]
Joseph: I think Dragon Attack or, uh, Dragon Attack or Death Blow could have worked because they're, they're two words.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: [in the style of Mortal Kombat announcer] Kumite. Fatality.
Taylor: [in the style of Mortal Kombat announcer] Kumite.
00:35:15
Willie: Alright, let's, uh, we'll take this pretty quick, but we'll go through in chunks. Let me, uh, share this screen again, I think it's not that one, it is this one. Okay, it didn't play, but now it is playing.
[trailer audio starts]
Fire God Liu Kang: It is time.
Willie: I'm gonna let it go through this scene.
Fire God Liu Kang: Time to wake up to a new reality.
Taylor: So that's Raiden?
Fire God Liu Kang: To a blank canvas that I have painted in with warmth and peace.
Willie: Yeah, so, trailer opens on... I'll just say it. The first eyes, set of eyes we see is Liu Kang, as he says, it is time and then it shifts to another set of eyes which are, I think, as Taylor said, Raiden, and he's standing in a, in a house, a hut somewhere.
And he stands up and looks out onto a field that looks like a farm, a village. There's some houses in the distance, but, did you both know, did you know who those characters were immediately? It's like just seeing their eyes at the first, what were your first, initial thoughts when you saw it for the first time?
Joseph: Liu Kang immediately, knew who that was.
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: And then the kathunk, like right after it's like, it is time and it's boom. And then you see the WB, uh, Mark. Already, I was feeling it, like as soon as that dropped. And then we, we panned or we, you know, and then we see, uh, mortal Raiden. I did not know that was Raiden.
Willie: I wasn't sure.
Joseph: My initial thought when I saw it, I was like, is this Kung Lao? That was my original thought.
Willie: That was my original thought. Like, was, is this, is this Kung Lao? Is this Raiden? And then in the next scene, which we can take a look at, is, is where I was like, oh, okay, I understand now, I think.
Fire God Liu Kang: In my new era, the choice is yours.
Whether to live in quiet serenity... or bloody strife.
Willie: So, in that scene we see this low angle shot looking up through some plants and a character with the sun behind him, which we now know is Kung Lao, and they sort of wiped the sweat from their brow and put on the large, like, round, flat brimmed hat, which is one of the things that gives it away.
That hat versus the hat that Raiden wears that's more conical in shape.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: That's what gave it away for me.
Joseph: You can see it in the outfits too, like on second watch, like if you consider what they're wearing, but for sure the flatness of the brim.
Willie: Right. To your point, the emblem that is on the, that character's chest is very clearly like Kung Lao.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And then Kung Lao and Raiden sort of look at each other in the distance. You're not sure what's going on, but the voice over there is like, In my new era, the choice is yours. Whether to live in quiet, serenity or bloody strife.
Joseph: Love that man. I'm immediately thinking like, holy shit. Do you get to make decisions in the game? Do you get to decide-
Taylor: Can you sneak past every character? [Willie chuckles] Like it's also a sneak game.
Joseph: Yeah. [chuckling]
Taylor: You can just start the match and sneak around them.
Joseph: -can you just like straight up side Outworld versus Earthrealm, you know, like how are those decisions going to be played into the game but...
Taylor: That would be a fun dynamic. That would be a lot of fun to see because they haven't... I mean, in my in the ones I have played, they don't seem to do that too often. You just, maybe you can get a different ending or something like that, but it doesn't seem to usually base your stories on.
Joseph: Yeah, they've always been very linear.
Taylor: Yeah, your decisions don't really do much.
Joseph: Visually, this shit is stunning.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: Everything you see up to this point, I mean, we haven't seen enough of like really closeup shots, but immediately you're like, this is a fucking high fidelity cinematic trailer that looks amazing.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: It looks like it's in engine too. Like, uh, the, the look, the CG and everything looks very, very much like, I don't know, is it, we do see some gameplay in this, right?
Or is this purely cinematic through here?
Joseph: There's no gameplay.
Taylor: Oh, okay.
Willie: To your point about this game looking beautiful, the shot that we see after we see Raiden and Kung Lao square off is like, the sky in the background looks like there's a storm, like rolling in and we see this lightning flash. Uh, and hear the thunder.
Taylor: Yup.
Willie: And the thunder like mixes with that music in a really cool way, as the music hits. That's just like really bad ass start to like kick in the music for the rest of the trailer.
Joseph: I'm kind of surprised the music is as epic as it is. They kept it pretty reined in, which I really appreciate. Like it's, it feels very serious. The tone of the trailer, the tone of how they want to start the story of like this rebirth or, you know, Lui Kang's version of the timeline of the universe. I like that it's super serious, you know, versus like having some rap music in the trailer or something.
Taylor: Hmm.
Willie: Yeah. If there is something like that, I do think that would be more of a gameplay trailer sort of thing.
Joseph: Yeah, for sure.
00:40:06
Willie: Uh, let's see what we got next.
Fire God Liu Kang: To dwell in joyous prosperity, or bitter rivalry.
Joseph: Love that so much.
Willie: Yeah, we then see a close up, another close up, on another face of a character who's wearing a blue mask. And that masked character moves. It's a blue mask. So we, we know that that's Katana and she moves to the curtain and looks out as the camera zooms out and we see they're sitting in this moving carriage.
It's being pulled by two horses. Uh, I don't know if ostentatious is the right word, but it's like very like fancy carriage, like with gold rims on it, basically-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: -and gold features like everywhere. And there's a single person driving in the front, lots of people lining the streets looking and there looks like there's like armed guards or something following this carriage.
And in the background, we see a large structure on the right, some sort of building, maybe a palace of some sort, and there's some similar structures in the distance behind it. And the voiceover says, "to dwell in joyous prosperity or bitter rivalry."
Joseph: And essentially, the camera pans from Katana, revealing Katana to Mileena who's like sitting in this carriage and they both have masks obviously, but Katana's putting, or not Katana, Mileena is putting hers back on her face. So you get a small glimpse of her teeth and her mouth, which I fucking love the way they executed that.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Here's my question. We don't know what they're going to do with the story, like how different it can possibly be from the lore of these characters and like everything that's happened. Like how much of a reset is it going to be from like the stories that are being told and like what exists already.
But this makes me feel like it's all Outworld. You know, without getting too caught up in the lore, they're the daughters of Shao Kahn and they're probably like in a city of Outworld where they're like traveling together and they're royalty. So that's why they're being paraded through the streets.
Willie: I do wonder if, I think we said this before we started this play through again, but I wonder if all of this trailer takes place before whatever the Mortal Kombat game is going to be.
Joseph: I think so.
Willie: Because, if all of this stuff is canon, we're not there yet, but we get to, we're going to get to a montage at the end of this with Shang Tsung, like killing a lot of people. [chuckles]
Joseph: Yeah, like fucking everybody.
Willie: It would be weird if they're in the trailer, but they're not in the game. And I don't think they would do that just because that seems like you would lose a lot of people. Though, it is a reset of the timeline again. So who knows it could be literally anything.
Joseph: I don't know how all of this fits into the timeline of the news stories being told, but that's a good point. Like, I, I seriously doubt they would do that, like put Kitana, Mileena in the trailer and then they're not in the game. That would be, I think, a pretty ignorant move.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Not, not a fan favorite move.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: But so far we have Raiden or mortal Raiden. We have Kung Lao, and we have Kitana and Mileena, and it's interesting to me that they're showing them in pairs.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Like there's this duality happening because it's like talking about choice, and like you can either be enemies and bitter rivals or you can be, you can work together toward a common goal, but they're also showcasing all of these people in pairs, which is pretty interesting to me.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: I don't know if that's anything to read into, like there's going to be like fucking tag team in the game or something like that.
Willie: I don't know how much you want to talk about that because there has been like, there's some stuff on the website about, they're being sort of this partnership that might be like a tag team sort of thing.
Joseph: Mmm. Okay.
Willie: I'll look it up in just a second. I'm trying to think of the, the mode. It obviously has an unnecessary K in the word. [chuckles] I don't remember what it is. So I'll look it up in a minute.
Joseph: [chuckling] I don't, I can't think of what it would be. But one of the games had that, didn't it? Where you had like, you had two people on your fighting roster and when one person went out, the next one would jump in, right?
Willie: I don't remember if any Mortal Kombat games have. It's very possible, but there have been games like that. Very similar style, for sure. Because, like, Capcom did that. I'm trying to think what else, there have been some, but I can't remember if any of them have been Mortal Kombat.
So, yes, there have, I guess, because in those, that new trilogy, there were a couple of rounds where that happened because of the story that was being told, like you were together with someone else.
Joseph: Mmm.
Willie: So, like, you would fight two people or you would fight as two people against one or against whatever-
Joseph: Right.
Willie: -and you could trade off, I think.
Joseph: That sounds familiar. I feel like it happened in one of the earlier games too, like in the, like past MK4, like somewhere in like the Deception-Armageddon, in that kind of mid section of the titles. I feel like that that was happening in there too, or when it was first introduced.
Willie: Yeah, I didn't play those games enough to remember.
Joseph: Yeah, neither did I.
Willie: Okay, so the Mortal Kombat website says Kameo Fighters. Obviously, Kameo is spelled with a K.
Joseph: Oh.
Willie: So, choose from a unique roster of Kameo fighting partners to assist you in battle. There's a question on their FAQ that is that question, like, what are Kameo fighters and how do they work in Mortal Kombat 1?
Joseph: Oh, wow. What does it say?
Willie: And the answer is, Kameo fighters are a unique roster of partner characters to assist during matches, creating expanded gameplay possibilities for players. These characters are chosen separately from the main roster of fighters.
Joseph: Okay. Interesting.
Willie: Which I hope that that doesn't mean some of the, some of the people who players really like aren't even usable, like as main fighters.
Joseph: Sure. Yeah.
Willie: We just have no idea how it's going to work. Like what the story is, like how much choice are you going to have? Or like, maybe there is a list of Kameo fighters, but if you choose, if you choose no... Based on this, you can't choose somebody to be one of your main fighters from that list.
Joseph: Right.
Willie: But who knows, they could also be lying.
Joseph: I assume if they at least include Scorpion, that a lot of fans will be okay. [Willie and Joseph laugh] Because I think it was MK4 that they, that Scorpion wasn't in the game and like all hell fucking broke loose.
Willie: Oh, the other thing I didn't say about this character, we see they're putting on the purple mask and the sharp pointed teeth is obvious. We also see her eyes, which are like reptilian in...
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: Like, they just have a vertical slit in them with like, and they're very purple looking.
Joseph: Yeah, Mileena, I don't think you said it was Mileena, but we're talking about Mileena right now. Oh, also, Taylor stepped away, so if you don't hear him for a bit, we don't know what's going on.
Uh, hopefully he'll return, but... If he doesn't, we'll just fucking do this alone.
00:46:45
Willie: All right. Yeah.
[trailer music]
Fire God Liu Kang: You can face each other as sworn enemies...
[trailer audio - horn blares]
Fire God Liu Kang: or united as brothers.
[Joey mimicks the horn blaring]
Willie: I'm going to stop on this beautiful screenshot.
Joseph: [chuckling] Yeah, that's a good place to stop it.
Willie: So, again, another fucking close up of [chuckles] some character's eyes. And we see sort of a golden, like, half mask on them. And they turn their heads to the side as we hear that voice again that's voicing over this whole thing say, "You can face each other."
And I won't even go on to what he says next, but we then get a shot of a teapot and mug and saucer on a wooden table which slowly gets covered in ice from right to left which is obviously a... Immediately, anyone who likes Sub Zero is like, "oh shit, we get to see him. "
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: -and we see a character walk into frame.
Joseph: I was going to ask, so when it reveals Sub Zero and it's just a close up of his face, like half mask, half face, can you see the color in there? Do you see any blue at all in there?
Willie: Yeah, I think so. So first we see the sort of gold in Scorpion's. That's the first person we see.
Joseph: Oh!,
Willie: The first one we see is Scorpion, I'm pretty sure. And then we get another low angle shot, this time, and we see the character who is walking towards the camera-
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And Scorpion's like rope, knife thing.
Joseph: His spear, yeah.
Willie: I don't know, his spear. [chuckles]
Joseph: [chuckles] It's a spear on a chain.
Willie: Yeah, his spear on a chain drops into frame and we see the boots of whoever's holding that, which is Scorpion. And then the long, low angle shot switches directions so we can see the character with gold, the gold mask in full. So we see Scorpion in full, dressed in yellow and black.
And there's some red accents throughout that. And then the room they're standing in has like sort of multiple tables with teapots and mugs everywhere. Like he's just hanging out, having some tea, trying to enjoy his day.
Joseph: And again, showing the characters in pairs.
Willie: So we see that other character walk into frame, Sub Zero, and switches angles so that we can see the character wearing a silver mask, and he's dressed in black and blue.
Joseph: I do like the... the costumes.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: I'm not the kind of Mortal Kombat fan that gets too caught up in like how good or bad the costume designs are, but I do like the way they're being interpreted for everybody in this trailer. Like, I dig it.
Willie: So on his mask, yeah, you don't see any gold. You see silver and black, right?
Joseph: Yeah, okay.
Willie: But with the other one, we can probably go back to it real fast. We see gold.
Joseph: Okay. So, okay, that is Scorpion.
Willie: But we don't necessarily see any other colors besides gold. There's a little bit of black underneath and from the side, some black.
Joseph: And so that right there is also Scorpion turning.
Willie: Yeah. He's turning around because somebody's walking into the room.
Joseph: Okay. I think I had it mixed up and I thought the person turning was actually Sub Zero.
Willie: Yeah, no, I think he's noticing Sub Zero walk into the room.
Joseph: Yeah.
00:49:43
Willie: Let's uh, let's move forward and so we can get... talk a little bit more about this.
[trailer audio - horn blares]
Fire God Liu Kang: -or united as brothers.
For the storm is brewing.
And soon you will discover.
Willie: So we saw Scorpion and Sub Zero like looking towards something out in the sky. As the voiceover says "as sworn enemies or united as brothers for the storm is brewing."
Joseph: Definitely looked very portal-like.
Willie: We hear some sort of horn in the distance too that makes it sound like there's a warning or something. Like we don't know if that's supposed to be something they hear, so it's a warning of this portal opening up in the sky.
Joseph: Yeah is it like a warning, is it a portal warning or is it just in the track? You know, like a sound effect in the music.
Willie: I feel like it's supposed to be, it's not quite the same thing as being diegetic, being music in the world, right?
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: But it's like the horn itself is, I think, in the world. And so they turn towards that giant glowing ring in the sky. And again, that... that shot is beautiful.
Joseph: So sick. I love the way it's written right there. Being enemies or being brothers, that, that shit hit me hard. And then when the music drops, when they're looking out into the sky and you see like this sun slash portal shape thing. When the music drops right there, I don't think the editing is fantastic.
Like it's very abrupt, it's very jarring. But the music itself is very epic.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: And so, that was a give me chills moment all the way. And it actually even started before the music dropped. It happened when it said brothers. And I was like, oh, cause now I'm like.
Oh my gosh, you get to like choose to fight together. Do you get to choose to fight together or against each other? Like how much choice is there?
Willie: I'm definitely excited for that aspect of it. If this is more, obviously I think there will be a canon ending probably, right? Because to make a new game there will have to be. But if there's like a lot of deviation, a lot of chances to deviate from each other in your playthroughs, that'll be really cool.
Joseph: Is it like other games with multiple endings like Elden Ring?
Willie: Sure.
Joseph: It could be like that where you just like you choose at some point in the game, there's a fork and you have to make a decision about which ending you're going to play through. I guess the question is how do they wrap it all up and then create a new game after MK1?
Willie: What if they didn't? What if this is just it?
Joseph: [chuckling] Aw, there's no way.
Willie: This is the last experience they're ever going to get. We're putting it all in this, in this game.
Joseph: Well executed with the spear drop. I think that angle, how it's lower and it's focused on the spear tip. I love that too.
Willie: Yeah. Uh, I'm going to move on and describe the next thing because we see that portal open. We see Scorpion, Sub Zero look at it and then we switch back to the characters in the cart. We switch back to Mileena and Katana who's still looking out from the carriage at something and we see. Mileena has also stepped out of the carriage and is now looking at the sky, seeing that same glowing ring, I think.
Joseph: Oh.
Willie: And then we switch over to the two characters from the beginning of the trailer, Kung Lao and Raiden, who, one is kneeling, sifting through the dirt and the other is looking to the sky and they both look up to see this character in like a Christ pose, like floating down from the sky, which we recognize as Fire God Liu Kang.
Joseph: What an entrance.
[Joseph and Willie laugh]
Willie: Yeah, just a come at me bro sort of, uh, thing.
Joseph: It's like, I am here.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: I have arrived. Isn't this the Christ the Redeemer pose? It's a similar pose, right?
Willie: Yeah, I wonder if that, is that necessary for him to like fly? He can only fly like that.
[Willie chuckles]
Joseph: I don't know, but it works. [Joseph and Willie laugh]
00:53:23
Willie: Yeah. All right. Let's hit this next part.
Fire God Liu Kang: That even in this new era...
one constant remains.
Willie: I'm going to stop there as we have this character coming out from the portal or this other like fire portal that I don't think is the same portal as the other one, but maybe it is. But this one's on the ground, not in the sky.
Joseph: I felt like the other one had closed up already.
Willie: And probably where Fire God Liu Kang came out of.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: So we hear the voice, the voiceover say, "soon you will discover that even this new era, one constant remains." And that character, the floating character, Liu Kang lands, get another close up of a face and his eyes light up with like this golden light as he walks between the two, other characters, between Kung Lao and Raiden.
And now we see the three characters looking at this other glowing ring of light directly in front of them. That's like a ring of flames that I just mentioned.
Joseph: Very common in the MK universe. If you've never played, a lot of fucking amulets, a lot of portals. A lot of people being resurrected by some kind of magic.
So this is definitely not out of the norm [chuckles] to see these kinds of like multiple portals springing up.
Willie: And we see someone walking out of this ring of fire. And we can tell that they have long hair and like some spiky pauldrons, like covering their shoulders, but not much else.
Joseph: I feel like any Mortal Kombat fan knows who the fuck this is, like just by the silhouette. Did you feel that way?
Willie: I mean, I had a feeling, for sure, but Shang Tsung's also had some different looks over the years.
Joseph: Oh gosh, you just reminded me of, is it MK2? When he comes back as his younger self and he literally looks like a dork? [laughs]
Willie: I think three, he's a little different looking-
Joseph: [chuckling] Okay, is it three?
Willie: -and looked weird to me.
Joseph: No, I think it is two. I think it is two, because Liu Kang beats Shang Tsung, and then Shao Kahn basically wants to execute Shang Tsung because he failed. But then Shang Tsung convinces Shao Kahn, who is the emperor of Outworld at the time, he convinces him to lure all of the Earthrealm fighters to Outworld, which is where the tournament is being held in MK2.
Willie: Yeah, yeah. You're right. He is younger in that one.
Joseph: He like basically allows him to live. Or, or did he kill him and bring him back?
Willie: He didn't kill him at that point. He let him live. I don't know how he became younger. I don't remember that part. But you're right, he is. I think what I was thinking about is the version in MK3 had a weird fighting stance that I never liked.
Joseph: Oh, the weird crouched over like,
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: [chuckles] Yeah.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah. I agree. That one is super strange. I'm, I'm doing it on camera right now. [Willie laughs] Y'all can't see it, but it looks ridiculous. I'm like, I'm T Rexing or some shit.
Willie: It definitely looks like some sort of T Rex move going on. And I'm sure it's a perfectly legit fighting style. It didn't, for whatever reason, didn't resonate with me when I was like, uh, I'm not going to pick that character. That's weird looking.
Joseph: Uh-huh. I felt the same way. It was a reason I never played with him because he looks strange.
Willie: Now I'm just pausing to see if Taylor's going to come back again.
Joseph: Oh yeah, he did show back up for a second. Yeah, let's just move on.
00:56:31
Willie: Alright, let's see. Spiky Pauldrons now. Just so you know, that's what I refer to him as in the rest of this [Joseph laughs] breakdown I wrote, is Spiky Pauldrons, because I was not naming characters when I first wrote this.
Joseph: Nice.
Willie: Uh, let's see.
[trailer audio starts - music crescendos before coming to a stop]
Fire God Liu Kang: There is always something worth fighting for.
Willie: I'm gonna stop just before we get to this montage and say the last line the voiceover says, "There is always something worth fighting for. So the full sentence was "one constant remains, There is always something worth fighting for." And now we're about to get a montage of Shang Tsung fucking up a bunch of people.
Joseph: This is where all hell breaks loose. [Willie chuckling] And it happens very abruptly in a-
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: In a really shocking way. Go for it.
Willie: Let's just watch this whole section.
[sound of a metal blade piercing a skull]
[trailer audio continues with sounds of bones breaking, blood splattering, and fighting]
Willie: Let's stop there cause it went to a black screen and we cut to the character with spiky pauldrons, cutting the throat of the character [Joseph chuckles] wearing yellow and black with a gold mask, then stab the face of the character. And I think I might've wrote that wrong. Cause I think he's not killing Scorpion in that it is Sub Zero-
Joseph: In the first scene?
Willie: -that he is stabbing in the face. I think. I don't know if we see...
Joseph: I thought it was two different characters.
Willie: Is it? Okay, it might be both of them then.
Joseph: Yeah, it could be. Yeah, so we get the neck, the throat slit, and then he jabs whatever, I don't know, Enter the Dragon claw.
Willie: [chuckles] Yeah.
Joseph: Through this dude's face. And it's brutal. Think blood spurting, [Joseph laughs, Willie chuckles] arterial bleeding, like it is savage.
Willie: And then, we see Spiky Shoulders Guy standing behind the Purple Masked Character and
breaking her neck.
Joseph: So we got three kills.
Willie: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: Which, who's that third kill?
Willie: Well, so, we cut to Spiky Shoulders Guy stomping on something and cut to the head of the character with the silver mask being splattered under his foot.
Joseph: Oh yeah. [chuckles] Like [laughs]
Willie: This thing is very brutal.
Joseph: Over the top, over the top brutality-
Willie: For sure.
Joseph: -but in the most glorious way possible. This is why MK was so controversial in the early 90s. It's because you had me, at like seven years old wanting blood and guts.
Taylor: All of it.
Joseph: [laughs] Taylor's back. So we, we got yellow and black, blue and black.
Who do we go to next?
Willie: We saw, we just saw, we saw Mileena getting her neck broke.
Joseph: So he's just mowing through these characters.
Willie: Yeah, and then we see Spiky Pauldrons, uh, shoving his thumbs in the eyes of Kitana.
Joseph: Oh yeah, straight up just mountained.
Willie: Then we see, uh, Shang Tsung holding up the character who's wearing the flat brimmed hat by the neck. That's how I described it when I was writing this, because I was, again, trying not to say people's names. But we see him holding up Kung Lao by the neck, just in the air.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And then...
Joseph: And basically, it sucks his soul.
Willie: I say, was wearing, because the hat is gone now, and Spiky Pauldron's mouth is open. As like, there's this green energy flowing from the hat guy into Shang Tsung.
Joseph: [laughing] From the hat guy.
Willie: Uh, and as that green mist leaves the character, like, you can see his face just rapidly decay and become skeletal. He then, like, slammed face first on the ground.
Joseph: Oh, and his head explodes. [Joseph and Willie chuckle] His head erupts once he slams him face down into the ground, because MK.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Oh, the kick. So the kick happens right after that. That's the kick I was talking about that just felt so Donnie Yen in Ip Man.
Willie: Yeah, the last thing we saw was, I wrote the character wearing a bandana kicking spiky pauldrons in the chest.
Joseph: Just kicking the shit out of him. I love that you can feel the weight. You can feel the force and the weight of that kick. So I love the way they captured that.
01:00:26
Willie: Yeah. Let's check out the rest of, not the rest of this, but quite a bit.
[trailer audio - fighting sounds]
Fire God Liu Kang: You have chosen to defy peace...
then you have chosen war with a god!
[trailer audio - sounds of blood and fire, character screaming in pain]
Willie: All right. I'm going to stop there.
Taylor: To even make that look physically plausible, [Joseph and Willie laugh] it takes a lot of art, a lot of man hours happening right there. Cause wow.
Willie: What Taylor's referring to is a gruesome death at the hands of Fire God Liu Kang to Shang Tsung. So, we cut to Liu Kang kicking him in the chest, and then he speaks again as we get another close up of their eyes lighting up with that gold light.
And he says, "you have chose to defy peace, then you have chosen war with a god." And we cut straight to Shang Tsung being bloodied already, and Liu Kang is looking down at him. And one hand is blue and one hand is orange, like fire coming out from his hands. And both arms light up and look to shoot out flames. And the flames turned into these dragon heads that arc up and into the sky and then back down in front of Shang Tsung. And they smash into him and grab his arms, hoist him up into the air and as he's being held by those two dragons, this is what Taylor was describing.
Fire God Liu Kang jumps into the air behind them and slams down on this dude's head and just smashes it through the rest of his body and down into the ground.
Taylor: I mean, if you watch it in slow mo, [Willie chuckles] as the face is going down, there are literal just intestines flying up around the face and stuff. And you can see this just look of fear that's frozen on there. Oh my God. That's bad.
Joseph: And don't forget the part where he splits his body in half-
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah, with his face.
Joseph: -as he comes down with like a Superman punch thrust through his entire body. Obviously, I mean, if you're a fan of the series, you know, like Lui Kang has always had some type of dragon fatality, so...
Taylor: You think we'll see dragon or do you think he'll take more of a ethereal, ethereal kind of, you know, more magic and fire and stuff.
I mean, I feel like it would be crazy to think there's not a dragon, right? Like he's not going to turn into a dragon, at least as one of his moves.
Willie: I think there has to be dragon in it for sure.
Taylor: Maybe just putting it in the trailer was too cliche. Like that would have been too, they've probably done it a thousand times so...
Joseph: I mean, what they did kind of is right. Like what they're showing is very expected. You know-
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: -I think it's executed brilliantly and it looks amazing. And the just brutality of it, I think makes it super successful. And then the logo reveal like-
Taylor: Oh yeah.
Joseph: -that was the moment that gave me chills for sure. Like all the speculation was there that it was going to be called Mortal Kombat 1 from the teasers they did before the launch of this trailer, but that was the moment where you're just like, "oh shit, we're taking it back."
Taylor: Yeah, that's... and the art is fantastic.
Joseph: Dude, it's amazing.
01:03:48
Willie: So we do, as Joey said, we see this logo at the end, sort of takes away the speculation of what this might be called, and it's really badass to see Liu Kang just sort of centered in it.
I do want to call attention, we'll watch the rest of this real fast, till the very last bit though, that's not, it's not part of the trailer, I mean it is part of the trailer, but it's not the cinematic stuff. We see the release date, September 19th. It's in our blood.
Joseph: Hell yeah, that's not that far away.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: Uh-uh, is that the same time as Starfield? Is that the same day?
Willie: I think Starfield is August, but maybe it's not.
Joseph: Oh.
Taylor: Oh shit. It's not that soon, is it?
Willie: I don't know.
Joseph: You know what this is the same month of? That fucking Robocop game, I think.
Taylor: Oh man.
Joseph: Is that a September game? I think it is.
Willie: I was going to say this is the original-
Taylor: September 6th.
Willie: Um, it's not the original release day, but it's same month as the original MK game coming out.
Joseph: Ah, nice.
Willie: I had looked it up earlier. I think it was September 13th or something like that.
Taylor: That's cool. They were able to do that.
Joseph: You know what this should be the date of? The release of Cyberpunk, just so it wasn't a nightmare.
Taylor: Oh, oh.
Willie: Got it. [Taylor and Willie chuckle]
Joseph: Maybe this is the day they should have released Redfall.
Taylor: No, absolutely. Yeah, that's um, [Joseph laughs] I haven't checked back into Redfall, but I am just really waiting and hoping that they're going to polish that one out, but it may be unpolishable.
Joseph: I haven't really entertained the idea. I've been lost in Tears of The Kingdom. To be honest, I haven't even thought of playing anything else.
Taylor: That's great.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Game of the year 2023, Taylor?
Taylor: Oh, my gosh dude, there's so much year left. You have no idea.
Joseph: Yeah, we'll... we'll see who rises to the, the... to the challenge of being a competitor against this game because it's pretty fricking polished.
Willie: I feel like that's going to obviously, that's going to have to be some sort of episode leading towards the end of the year is our game of the year discussion.
Joseph: Oh, yeah, that'd be fun.
Willie: And you're already talking about Tears of The Kingdom being game of the year.
Taylor: Yeah.
Willie: This one's not even out yet.
Joseph: Oh, yeah, but there's no way, [Willie laughs] there's no way this even stands a chance dude, against Tears of The Kingdom. Maybe, maybe it gets, uh, what's the word I'm looking for, nominated, but there's no way.
01:05:55
Willie: Yeah. There's one last screenshot that we haven't seen in this, in this trailer, which is literally just pre-order information. And we sort of talked about this already, right? But it says like pre-order to get Shang Tsung and beta access, which, you know, obviously beta access is a thing that lots of games are doing now if you pre order, which is cool for sure.
Joseph: Mm-hmm.
Willie: And they get to test their system on like a huge number of people and obviously get some good data from that. So that's always good. It is weird that Shang Tsung is sort of a pre-order.
Joseph: Yeah.
Willie: He's not playable in the main thing without that.
Joseph: I wonder if he is, but not until later in the game or needs to be unlocked by finishing th... the story.
Willie: Sure.
Joseph: Not a, uh, a default character at the start of the game is... that would be my guess. I think I read the beta is like four days before the release of the game. So like September 14th or something, four or five days before.
Willie: Uh, it'd be interesting if it was on the 13th-
Joseph: Ah, it could be.
Willie: Literally 30 days to the release of the first, and I should say... clarify that it's 30 days or 30 years of the initial console release, because the game was actually out before that in arcades.
Joseph: I think one through three were arcade, maybe four.
Willie: I feel like four was too, but I don't really remember.
Joseph: I don't remember if four was. Yeah, I don't remember, but just in general, overall, most of my experience and my favorites in the entire series are definitely MK one through three. What I played most growing up. I mean, I have all three of those NES, uh, super NES cartridges right now in the bookcase. Like those are my jam.
10 is the next game I've put the most hours into, and then there's a whole mix of games. Uh, I did play Deadly Alliance but Deception, Armageddon, or... and the Mortal Kombat reboot, like 2011, I didn't spend much time in those games, I just kind of like glossed over them.
Willie: Man, that 2011 release was so good. I can't believe you haven't played that one.
Joseph: Yeah, maybe I should play that, dude.
Willie: It's good, man. I think it holds up, too. I still have it on my Xbox as well as 10 and 11.
Joseph: Nice.
Willie: I have all of them, like still ready to go.
Joseph: That's my problem with the 3D games where everything looks pretty fucking busted up.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Like those are the hardest games for me to go back to-
Taylor: Oh yeah.
Joseph: -because they look ridiculous.
Taylor: Yeah, or Star Fox or something, it's so slow too.
Joseph: Exactly.
Taylor: Like it looks bad and it takes forever to do the thing. Like they still take a good amount of time to beat unless you're speed running.
Joseph: But it's everywhere, right? It's in Super, uh, Mario 64.
Taylor: Yeah, that was it. Yep.
Joseph: That's probably what I'm thinking, like, that whole area. The only one I will forgive is, like, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.
Willie: I was gonna say yeah, you're gonna say some Zelda shit, [Joseph laughs] for sure. [laughs]
Taylor: Of course, yeah.
Joseph: Those get forgiven, but everything else, like the wrestling games, like you got fucking triangle heads. That stuff is the [Taylor laughing] hardest for me to go back and play-
Taylor: Triangle heads, is that an insult, bro? [Willie laughs]
Joseph: -because it looks awful. [laughing]
Taylor: That, was that at me? How dare you?
Joseph: Shoot. At least you can fit those headphones on your head, man.
Taylor: That's true.
Joseph: It's impressive.
Taylor: Thank you, man.
Joseph: [in the style of the MK announcer] Impressive.
Taylor: [in the style of the MK announcer] Thank you.
Willie: Last thing I'll say about the Mortal Kombat from 2011 is, I liked that game so much that I bought another controller for it. Like I bought a filing-
Joseph: Oh!
Willie: -a fighting game pad for that, which I still have.
Taylor: Oh wow.
Joseph: Nice.
Willie: That was the first time I ever like got into a fighting game that much that I was like, I need to have a special controller for this. I need my shoulder buttons on the face of the controller.
Joseph: Is it a flat surface, almost like a, like an arcade?
Willie: It's not one of those.
Joseph: Okay.
Willie: It's still like a handheld sort of controller.
Joseph: Gotcha.
Willie: It's just wider and bigger and has six face buttons on it.
Joseph: Hmm, okay.
Willie: It still has shoulder buttons too, I think, but the main, the three kicks and the three punches are all like easy to access.
Joseph: I really wanted to hook up the SNES and play like last night, but I had class. And then after class, I was like just reading stuff online, but I really wanted to play it, but I was too lazy to hook it, up probably like MK2. I think MK2 is probably my favorite. Like, of those earlier games.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: I guess MK3, the ultimate. Or not the ultimate trilogy where it had like all fucking 70 characters.
Willie: Yeah, but there was just like ultimate edition, right? MK3 Ultimate edition, I think.
Joseph: Yeah, it was MK3, MK3... or Ultimate MK3. And then the Mortal Kombat trilogy, which was basically just all, every single character that existed up to that point was playable in that game.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Which was a lot. [chuckling] It was like, it was a ton by that time.
01:10:19
Willie: Yeah. That feels like it. It feels like we covered the trailer. We'll definitely talk about it as we get closer to release, and if there's more information, I'm sure it'll come up in some of our, our check-ins.
Joseph: For sure. I'm excited, man. I love the... even them calling it Mortal Kombat 1, I think is amazing. Oh, that reminds me.
Willie: I don't know how I feel about that, because I don't know what that means.
Joseph: Well, let's check in with Ed Boon. [Willie chuckles] This is some article I came across on a website called harddrive.net. Check it out, somebody's interviewing Ed Boon. They say, why is it called Mortal Kombat 1? Oh no, sorry, this is Ed Boon, responding.
He said, "Why is it called Mortal Kombat 1? Uh, because it's the first ever Mortal Kombat game. What," Question mark. And then goes on to say, "Frankly, I'm not sure why you're all confused, why you're all so confused about this. It's the first game in a new fighting series we're calling Mortal Kombat. Are you implying that we already released games in this series? Seriously?" [Taylor chuckles]
"I think we might be, I think there might be something wrong with you. You all need to see a doctor." [Taylor laughs]
"You're making me genuinely worried about for your health and sanity. You're acting crazy again."
Taylor: I like it.
Joseph: This is the first ever Mortal Kombat game. That's why it's called Mortal Kombat 1.
Taylor: That's great. I think that's a perfect response. [Joseph laughs]
It's absolutely perfect.
Joseph: They know it's ridiculous-
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: -you know, that like people are confused and like, people probably think it's not, you know, people might think it's dumb, but leaning into it like that. I'm like, okay. Yeah. Like y'all know.
Taylor: Oh, yeah.
Willie: I think if you're aware of it, it definitely is, it's different.
Taylor: And they're playing on a current meta, which is that the public in general as a very fish or goldfish knowledge, whatever you would call it.
Joseph: Oh, like our attention span and is running shorter and shorter.
Taylor: Yeah. And you really see it in, you know, certain, certain areas more than others, but still, it's in general.
Willie: So here's something we didn't talk about because we didn't really get into lore, but I think what will really make it that much better is if we learn that it's called MK1 because it's about the One Being. Like somebody in this timeline will actually reunite the six realms and somehow bring about the One Being who is part of the lore from before all of the Mortal Kombat shit. And that One Being will come back to be, like the One Being is the like boss for this entire thing. That makes a lot of sense to me actually.
Joseph: Yeah, interesting. That kind of happened in Armageddon, right, with Blaze? Like he became this like big fucking end boss that was like greater than all the end bosses that came before.
Taylor: Hmm.
Willie: Yeah, it was like reconstructed sort of the six am... the six stones, whatever what are they called. I don't remember right in this moment.
Joseph: Yeah, I don't either.
Willie: But they reconstructed those things and, but the thing about Blaze coming back was Blaze was trying to restore order because, because of the first games, all of the characters, had gotten so strong that they were in danger of in... ending all of the universe. So Blaze was like a reset, Blaze was supposed to come back and kill some of them so there'd be a balance back to the world and the world wouldn't end. [chuckles]
Joseph: Right.
Willie: And that ultimately changed because of what happens with the rest of the story, which we won't get into, but it's very convoluted. It's actually, what I think is interesting about all of it, is it's way more complicated than just like, oh, you fight people, there's a tournament and you go fight people.
Joseph: Oh yeah.
Willie: Like there is a whole rich backstory that exists that if you go read into, it's like, "oh, there's a thread that connects everything." And again, I think with the reset at the end of Armageddon to go back to reset the trilogy, even having this new trilogy makes a lot of sense because this is the new timeline for all the stuff that happened before trying to recreate that and refix that timeline. And now this appears to be continuing that trend of like, now Fire God Liu Kang exists and he's trying to right history.
Joseph: There are parts of me that is like, is this a cheap way to just keep making games. You know?
Willie: [chuckling] Yeah.
Joseph: It's like, "Hey, we're going to hit the reset button. And like, this is a new timeline. That's like, this is a different universe." Sure. Somehow they still pull it off in a way that makes people want to play these games-
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: -which I think, deserves a lot of my respect, you know, that you can still capture somebody like me that grew up on the original games. That's pretty, pretty damn cool. There's one other thing I was going to mention that I'm forgetting. Oh, it was the general kind of basic setup. Willie, you were mentioning that there is a lot of lore, there's a lot of backstories.
In this game, all the characters themselves have different backstories, which I think is... I don't know, maybe that's not unique for the early nineties, but it is a game where each of the characters has their own story. They have their own endings and they have a life of their own and all different reasons or they all have different reasons for joining the tournament in MK1 or like the original Mortal Kombat.
But the setup, there's even a setup before Mortal Kombat, like the original game-
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: -which I think is impressive because this is the game that you don't feel like has a lot of backstory, you know, because it's a fighting franchise. You don't really feel that until the later games because it's all text based in the first three.
But there's a pretty deep story that even exists before the first Mortal Kombat and it's basically these realms fighting against each other, there's these Elder Gods that could intervene if they really needed to, but the way that you conquer realms is by winning 10 of these Mortal Kombat tournaments in a row and when you start Mortal Kombat, nine of them have been won by Outworld.
And so Liu Kang is the hero, right, of the story. He saves Earthrealm and they kind of reset that counter and then Earthrealm wins like three or four in a row before like all hell starts breaking loose with like time travel and resurrections and stuff like that.
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Joseph: I definitely appreciate that there is some step... there is some setup leading into the beginning of the original Mortal Kombat, which I think is impressive looking back at, but also speaks to that thread, right?
It's some cases kind of bullshit and kind of cheap the way they've like, continue to make these games, but they're finding ways to connect everything in a way that's good enough to, like, make the story believable for players.
01:16:37
Willie: Yeah, I definitely would have to do more of a deep dive on other fighting series to know.
Joseph: Right.
Willie: I'm sure their backstory is rich in different ways, but uh, this one is interesting to me just because it's the one I've, I don't, is this true for y'all? Is this one of the fighting series that you've probably played more than any others?
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: Yeah, this one and Street Fighter, which was the direct competition.
Taylor: Yeah, same.
Willie: Those are obviously the big two, right? Yeah. I think I played a lot of II and II Tu... Street Fighter II Turbo. And I don't remember if I played much of III at all, honestly.
Joseph: I think I fell off at Turbo as well. So I played, I played that, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Clay Fighter, Killer Instinct. Soulcalibur, a little tiny bit of Tekken.
Willie: Tekken is the one that, for me, was the one that I really liked growing up, besides Mortal Kombat. That's the only other game that I can be like, yeah, I played a bunch of those.
Joseph: Last thing I want to say, if you've never seen competitive play for either Street Fighter or something like Mortal Kombat 11, go, go and look up a video of competitive play.
It is mind blowingly impressive. I actually have a former student, shout out to Trinidad, but he plays competitively and sinks a ton of hours into getting better at the game on a competitive level. But he's excited about the...at the game, we were chatting through IG.
But if you've never seen one of those videos, the hype, the hype and the intensity of those matches is something to at least, uh, experience once.
Willie: Taylor, were there any, um, were there any other fighting games that were like, stand out to you?
Taylor: I mean, I probably played most of the ones that Joey listed, but not, not very often. Like I, fighting games have never really been my thing. The uh, Capcom versus Marvel was a little more fun to me than a lot of the other ones.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: I had a lot of fun with that one. Just, I think I really clicked with the art and the more anime styling of it. A lot of the control styles, a lot of the flipping players in and out, and all that stuff, there was a lot going on there.
And at some point, I don't know if it was towards the beginning or later on that they added it, but man, you could just juggle people so high in the air. It just got to be like. You had your stage and then the air above. It's never really been my thing, though. I'm not, I'm not that great at learning a bunch of moves.
And then knowing those moves and then taking those out and doing it. I don't even make it to that point. I usually just pick up the stick and try out a couple things. See if the Hadouken works.
Willie: Yeah.
Taylor: That's about it.
Joseph: Yeah, that's fair. It takes so much time sink so many hours into like, well, learning all the move sets, how to chain the combos together and stuff like that.
Taylor: Exactly, man. You... it's... you got to learn the entire game. That's funny because that's... on the surface it doesn't look like much. But then when you start digging into the mechanics of those things, they are just as much or more than any open world gigantic game that you know of. It's just all tucked in to the fighting system. It's pretty neat.
Joseph: Nice. I'm happy with what we covered and glad we could watch the trailer in real time and break it down and react to it. It was, it was kind of hard for me to react to it 'cause I've seen it so many fucking times [Willie chuckles] that it's not like a true, genuine reaction.
Willie: Yeah.
Joseph: Because I feel like if we recorded, when I saw it the first time, we'd be a lot more loud and obnoxious and ridiculous.
Taylor: That'll work in the future. We could do that and just make a pact with each other that we're not going to watch it without all being here.
Willie: Yeah, save one.
Joseph: Oh, that would be good.
Taylor: Yeah. I'm down.
Joseph: Word.
Willie: Yeah. We could, we could save the gameplay trailer for that, when that happens.
Joseph: That's true.
Willie: And there'll probably be more cinematics before, right? I mean, it is wild that it's September. So it's like close already, but...
Joseph: It is close, man. Yeah. Like I hope it flies by I'm going to keep playing Tears of The Kingdom. So I'm distracted for, you know, another month or so, but anyway, thanks for writing that Willie, like breaking down, creating a transcript out of that.
Cause that definitely helped communicate it for listeners.
Willie: It was nice for, it was just good for me to like, be able to process what was happening too what I was looking at and what my initial reactions were. There's a whole lot of stuff that I wrote that we don't have time to get into. Cause it's all the lore.
Cause I literally like went through-
Joseph: Oh shit.
Willie: -wrote like 10 pages of lore stuff that I was like, trying to remember.
Joseph: Oh my gosh. [laughs] Yeah, we'll have to, we'll bucket, we'll save that.
Willie: Yeah, yeah, that's for something else, completely. But now I'm more well versed on Mortal Kombat lore than I have been in a long time.
Joseph: Hell yeah. I feel good about that. Discovering some things that were, I was learning for the first time.
Willie: Yeah.
[Outro theme begins to fade in - Caribbean Arcade by Christian Nanzell]
Joseph: And just going back through the series and be like, okay, M3 was the game that they introduced combos, period.
Taylor: Yep.
Joseph: You know, when you can chain them together and stuff like that, like going back and revisiting those key moments throughout the history of this series was nice to revisit.
Willie: Cool, well, since we're at the end of this episode. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed it.
Taylor: Thanks everybody for tuning in.
Toasty!
[Outro theme continues - Caribbean Arcade by Christian Nanzell]
01:21:38
Joseph: Berries and Blades is an independent podcast created by Joseph Bullard, Willie Garza and Taylor Garratt. Thanks for tuning in, and consider subscribing if you enjoyed listening to this episode. You can also support us by telling your friends about the show, and we hope to see you in the next episode of Berries and Blades. Until then, thanks again.
[Outro theme fades out - Caribbean Arcade by Christian Nanzell]
Taylor: [In the style of "Techno Syndrome" by The Immortals] Mortal Kombat!
["Techno Syndrom acapella] Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot.
Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot.
Doot, doot, doot, doot, do-doot, do-doot, do-doot, do-do-doot
Padup, padoot, doop, doop, doop... [continues] [Joseph and Willie laughing but mostly Joseph]
Mortal Kombat!
Sonya.
Johnny Cage. [laughs]
Joseph: Sonya. Raiden.
[Joseph laughing] [Taylor continues singing]
Taylor: Yeah.
Joseph: That's perfect.
Taylor: Thank you. Yeah, you know.
Joseph: [laughing] The breakdown was good. [Willie laughing] The breakdown, I cannot laugh at. [laughing] [Joseph mimicking Taylor mimicking "Techno Syndrome"]
Taylor: [laughing] Oh, man. Like I said, I had that, I had that album, dude. It was like one of my first CDs. That might have been my third cd that I had, was fucking, the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, that was just that song remixed 20 times.