Thank you, Razor.

Cyrax
I am a big fan of Cyrax. Unlike many, I loved Mortal Kombat 3, and felt it was a daring and logical follow-up to MKII. The blending of Asian tradition and technology was also a very interesting move. If Scorpion and Kitana were around for MK3, I think the game would have been much better received, and the newer characters would have fared better.

That being said, Cyrax has had plenty of chances. Something about him makes me want to see him return, though. It may seem like he's reached an "end," but I think he should return and have some sort of heroic moment. That could have come during Armageddon, but the story of that game was abysmal.

Whether or not they should return or not, it's likely that Sonya and Jax will be back. Perhaps having Cyrax return for that storyline -- while originally seeming like an over-crowding of the story -- would be a good move? Cyrax could be caught in the middle of the two, or perhaps find himself betrayed by one or the other. If he is back, an altered appearance would be appreciated by me. So ultimately, I am on-board with Cyrax for some reason I am unsure of.

Dairou/Darrius
The Seido storyline produced one great character, in my opinion: Havik. Hotaru had greatness somewhere, but it was lost in Deception. There was too much going on. I think Dairou and Darrius would have benefitted from completely different stories. They could have been so much more, but unfortunately they were not. I would not be surprised to see one of them back, though. Call it a hunch. I think there's a surprising lot of love within the MK Team for these characters.

Darrius would have been cool with an "Afro Samurai" type thing going on, in my opinion. I think he would have been more interesting if he had been from Earthrealm. Dairou just felt disconnected from everything. Poor guy. Loved his Fatality, though. The one where he ripped his opponent's ribs out and pierced their eyes with them. Ouch. Dairou could be salvaged relatively easy, in my opinion, but is the new era of MK going to be about saving old characters?

They're not nihilists though, they're anarchists. Nihilists believe life has no meaning...an anarchist believes chaos IS meaning.

I would argue that if something is meaningful, it ceases to be chaotic.

Chaos is just the absence of rules and laws. It's all about being FREE. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness taken to its furthest possible extreme, to the point where there are absolutely no rules standing between you and doing whatever you want, whenever you want.

For some reason, I find this explanation for a new black character concept to be completely racist and blatantly stereotypical.

And I don't think you fully understood what kind of a character Darrius was.

But freedom only has value in its utility. In terms of achieving goals and obtaining happiness, of course freedom is valuable. I'm sure Subzero and Sonya hold that to be true; what separates characters like Havik and Darrius is that they value chaos in of itself.

Unless I'm misinterpreting Darrius and the rest. Maybe they only value chaos as a means to an end and believe that removing order will bring about utopia. If that's the case... well, that's unrealistic. More reason to get rid of Darrius.

I gather you hate Tyler Durden.

Luckily there's no rule that says you have to agree with a characters point of view or personal philosphy.

Darrius isn't even a chaos character. He's a freedom fighter in a tyrannical fascist state! Orderrealm's government is oppressive, man. It's like Nazi World.

I don't know if I hate Tyler Durden, but yeah, we're definitely playing on different teams.

I do like some chaos driven characters, though. Kefka from Final Fantasy VI/III is one of my favorite villains ever. But he didn't want Utopia, he wanted to destroy reality brick by brick.

Edit: RazorsEdge701, I'll look into Darrius' character again. I thought I remembered him being chaotic in the same lines of Havik, but I'll re-check his bios.

Ever heard of Beowulf, or the Divine Comedy? I guess not if you said something that ignorant.

Y'know what? Epic narrative poems and modern poetry are NOT the same thing just because they both have the word "poem" in 'em. It's two completely different goddamn genres and if you're really as intelligent as you want people to think you are by name dropping famous literature, then I'm SURE you knew that before you posted your insulting little remark, but you did it anyway.
I'm getting just a LITTLE fucking sick of people today trying to challenge my intelligence or beat me in a debate. I didn't realize I was holding the Arguments World Championship all of a sudden and everyone suddenly thinks it's okay to start some shit like they're a contender for the title.
How about getting back to Mortal Kombat characters, huh? How about staying on-topic? I believe we're still on the subject of Darrius, so how about that? You got any thoughts on the subject of Darrius? Can we do that? Can we stop bellyaching and be grown adults for once? If you're so much more intelligent than me, why don't you be the bigger man and talk about the SUBJECT instead of getting off-topic some more? I'm fucking sick of the diversions and the personal attacks and the trolls. We can be better than this, god dammit.

Razor, FYI, I wasn't trying to be a troll and I wasn't trying to attack you or argue simply for the sake of arguing or whatever you were accusing people of. Both you and another poster stated an opinion and I was maturely, and without insults or anger, simply disagreeing with that opinion. To be honest, I just thought that this sub-topic/tangent was interesting.

See how the whole chaos/nihilism sub-topic has sort of taken on a life of its' own? Stuff like that happens in a thread where people are debating things. We're all giving our opinions on characters and picking apart every aspect of what's good and bad about them. Other stuff just comes up naturally.

I'd contend that post modern poetry, as we were talking about before, can certainly have the kind of form that you talk about, even if my example from Ginsberg does not contain that form.

I don't know how "post modern" he is, but I always thought that James Wright's poems had a form to them that told a traditional story, or even just a slice of a story that still somehow felt complete, in poems that might not imply such a traditional form.

But again, I wasn't trying to pick at you, piss you off or get under your skin. It was definitely a tangent from the original thread topic and you seemed like you saw some value in it since you weighed in on it before in the first place, then responded later on.

I thought that we were just having a friendly discussion. Clearly I was mistaken. You don't want to talk about it though? That's fine. No problem.

not mentioning any names or anything but such reactions show the amount of maturity some people have or don't have. "shakes my head"

can we get the next character icey?

Baraka, it's fine. I was responding to jbthrash calling me ignorant for no good goddamn reason, not you. I wouldn't call the stuff about chaos and anarchy a tangent, because we were discussing the motivations of Darrius and Havik.

Anyway, I agree, can we get the next character? I believe we're going alphabetical, so it's gonna be Drahmin?

Just to make it clear: I think you're a tremendous poster, Baraka407. Even if I think Baraka is a crappy character.

Onto Drahmin. Personally, I didn't get the fuss about this character. Some of his moves were cool to do (the one where he swings his club around comes to mind), and I loved the "controlled monster" mode he had whilst wearing the mask. It almost added a sort of mysticism to what is merely rotting flesh.

Many talk like he is this massive lost opportunity. I never got that. I think people looked into that note dropped about him being a "landlord" in Deadly Alliance. It's just a little bit of background for the pile of rotting flesh. Yeah, surprise, the Oni tormenter was a bad guy.

The idea of him regaining his humanity was not the worst one anyone has ever had, but it seems like such an...attempt to make him interesting? The zombie has his face back. Cool? Does he want his land back? Does it even still exist? Would he be able to contest with the other heavyweights in the story? It just feels a bit too thin to me.

Drahmin's "Pinky and the Brain" relationship with Moloch was kind of cute, but besides that, he was one of my least favourite characters from Deadly Alliance. That's not to say he was horrible, but he just wasn't great. You can bargain with yourself, and make excuses to like Drahmin. "Oh, he's some bad-ass torturer in hell." But in the end, he's just a zombie with a club.

I've got no real desire to see Drahmin back.

no drahmin is just stupid. im sorry, but he probably is one the the top 5 worst mk fighters. he was slow and had a stupid design. he felt like he should have just been in the background story.

drahmin - i would say go but he may or may not have story potential. his look i thought was pretty cool and i did like his move the balls of flies. maybe to make him more interesting have his metal club come off and be able to have a drill on it instead. maybe have multiple types of weapons attached onto his arm. that way he can attach an dissasemble his weapon.

maybe during a fight you can knock the club off and find out why he has an arm for a club.

You should reread that backstory. He was a WARlord. Not just a landlord.


Anyway, I love Drahmin.

They took what could've been a very simplistic and basic concept..."the psychotic bloodthirsty monster"....and actually took the time and effort into making him an actual character. They could very easily have simply left Drahmin as "some crazy demon from the Netherealm that likes to kill people."
But they gave him a developed backstory (and a good one too, IMO)...an individual presense (one of the chief torturors in the Netherealm)...and they gave him defining quirks (such as having to channel his rage into his mask in order to maintain some kind of control over himself, among other things).
Drahmin is a quality character that could very easily had been just a simple throwaway or another Baraka.

He could use some touching up on his appearance though. I think if they made him look closer to how he does in his alt. costume...with the bandages and armor...and make him look more like a decaying corpse than hamburger meat, he'd look pretty bad ass. He could also use better special moves.
But I like his backstory. Once a warlord who was so evil he was damned to the 5th Plane as punishment where after suffering such horrible tortures he became so consumed with rage and insanity, he was transformed into an Oni.

And I like his potential for the future. I think once Noob Saibot's little sub-plot runs its course...assuming they don't end it in Armageddon...we can see Drahmin become the new ruler of the Netherealm. But what I like best is his potential as an antagonist for Sareena. If they play up her as the central protagonist of the Netherealm sub-plot...which I believe they should...they can set up a feud between these two which has some potenial history to it.
When Sareena helped the older Sub-Zero in Mythologies, she was banished to 5th Plane as punishment. Drahmin was one of the chief torturors of the 5th Plane. Perhaps he was Sareena's tormentor, or at least one of them? In my storylines, I always played up Drahmin having this creepy love/hate feeling towards her. I always had him refer to her as "pretty, pretty Sareena" and basically act like a dirty old man towards her. Kind of a Freddy Krueger vibe.
And from her side, she can maybe be a little afraid/traumatized by him...which could lead to her moment where she overcomes him and gets her payback.

There's more that could be done with him, but that's the stuff I'd most like to see.

Anyway...Drahmin is a definite STAY in my book. They only need to touch up his appearance and give him some better special moves, as said.

Basically, I agree with everything XD just said. My own story ideas for future games also have Drahmin assuming the throne of the Netherealm because Shinnok, Quan Chi, and Noob all feel played out to me and I'd take them off the board, at least for a little while.
The guy's got a great look, very unique and yet he fits in naturally with the aesthetic of Mortal Kombat...he could just use some more clothes. I'm certain people wouldn't hate him like they seem to if he didn't have the annoying flies buzzing around and he had better moves. The idea they seemed to have had in Deadly Alliance of a guy who has no combos at all was just fuckin' dumb.

drahmin...i don't need to explain i just don't like em...gone

Drahmin is a hard one. He's kind of like Bo Rai Cho or Sindel who I'd love to keep in the game but not at the cost of a better character.

I guess it just depends on what our votes mean in this thread. If voting "stay" means "I generally like this character and if there were no limitations implied, I'd put him in every installment," then sure. But if "stay" means "There are 15 character slots in the next MK and I believe this character should occupy one," then that changes things.

If the latter is the case, I'd say gone. Drahmin has great design potential (that never really got fulfilled), and his story is okay, but he's simply not in the budget.

Ah, it's nice to really see some real division on a character!

As far as Drahmin's look is concerned, I liked it a lot. It would be cool to see him with his mask and a bit more armor, with some bandages thrown in. I wasn't a huge fan of the brown undies/hamberger skin look. To me, that's what Meat looks like in MKA, not what Drahmin should look like.

But if you combine the two looks, with the mask, the bandages with the blood symbol and the armor... Well, as I said before, I'd give him more armor, perhaps samurai armor, I think he'd look AWESOME.

As for his story, I thought that it was also solid. He was a warlord that was so freakin evil in life that he was banished to the netherealm and made in to an oni. Not a bad start!

I also wasn't a fan of the "Pinky and the Brain" pairing that he had with Moloch (great line by the way YKW! Both humorous and accurate lol). He has more than enough ability to stand on his own.

As Icebaby said, I'd like to see Drahmin after he went in to the inner sanctum. This is why I'd have him be more human looking in appearance and less hamberger skinned. I'd also get rid of his club arm. It seems too caveman-ish to me. Either give him a normal arm or make it a blade perhaps. I'd personally prefer a normal arm.

To me, Drahmin has a ton of potential as far as story continuation and possible conflicts with other characters. He's an inherently evil character that has the ability to surpass the typical grunt or henchmen stigma that alot of the bad guys in MK have.

His moves... Ugh. His one big weakness, in my mind. As many others have said, I dig his flies projectile, but the rest of the moves, and his overall style just felt plodding and primative. Maybe that's the look they were going for with the mask and the club, but I always thought that the mask was simply used to contain his rage and his armor/symbol etc suggested something more than a big, dumb cave man.

Keep the flies, only maybe he spits them from his mask instead of his club (which never made logical sense, but I guess that's on par with people throwing fireballs with their naked hands lol). But put some new moves in, maybe that showcase his brutality.

I thought that MK:DA had the best new group of characters since MK2 and while I know that alot will disagree with me on that, I also think that he's near the top of this good group.

VERDICT: STAY STAY STAY

WHAT!?!? Crappy!?!? lol, I'm joking. To each his own, of course! I think that you're an awesome poster as well, man. Without a doubt! Really, I wouldn't have even bothered talking to you about all of that stuff if I didn't want to hear more of your opinion on it.