I never liked Dhramin since his first appearance, and I never expect to like him. He reminds me to much of Meat, and he looks like a bad guy from a survival horror game rather than a mortal kombta game. I say he goes.

Despite me agreeing with you Baraka407 on the matter of Deadly Alliance having the best cast of new characters in it, and I like Drahmin very much, considering my feelings of what MK9 should be, I have to say that I want Drahmin to go as well.

Drahmin has a cool evil thing about him, but he wasn't developed enough, and at this point, I don't think he should be. I think he shouldn't come back.

Ehh... I'm just going to be blunt. What a crappy and ever-so-ugly design. Drahmin = Raw Flesh + flies + a club + The Mask? He looks like he smells... Gross. What I don't understand is why Midway decided to create such different designs from those that made it's series so popular in the beginning. In other words, if Drahmin was in Mortal Kombat 1, I don't think people would have gotten into the Mortal Kombat series quite so much.

Lebe wohl Drahmin

He's got a cool design. So he should stay, but needs more interesting moves and story.

i dont see how people want drahmin back. good to see different opinions though.

I liked Drahmin's ending in MKDA,
His alt costume was cool and creepy with the whole rotting corpse thing.
He had some decent moves but played a bit stiffly so if he was revamped he could be awesome.
I am intrigued to see what he will do in the future.

STAY!

It's so true. All of the new characters look so different than the old ones. The old character designs were, simple, and they generally had a martial arts theme to them. A lot of the new characters have way to much detail, and they look like there from other genres.

Deman and JB

I don't know if it's the level of detail that's bad. I mean, throwing a pair of sun glasses on a guy and saying "he's famous!" wouldn't exactly go over quite as well now as it did back then. Would it?

Would Cage, as campy as he can be with the crotch punch, the autograph friendship, the winning poses etc, be looked upon as a cool new character in the more recent MK games? Or would he be seen as more of a joke character like Bo Rai Cho (aka Farty McGee)?

So that's character detail. I'm not sure if you meant overall design detail in terms of appearance.

I do whole heartedly agree though that a LOT of characters in the MK universe wouldn't have made sense in the first MK game. About the entire cast from MK3 would've looked really out of place.

The rest of the games? Quan Chi? Reiko? Hsu Hao? Havik? I think there's a fairly large list of characters that would look odd when put in with the cast of MK1. It's just a different art style, a different plotline, with different, set arenas that were cohesive in terms of look and the feel they conveyed.

Not to over analyze, of course.

Personally, if you guys are saying that you'd want to go back to that style, then I'm in TOTAL agreement with you.

I'd love to see MK go back to that style, with the tournament, the asian themed, sort of ancient martial arts look, with the palace gates, the court yard, the throne room, the warrior shrine, heck, even the pit looked to be in the right place with the rest of these backdrops.

I'm not saying bring back those arenas specifically, but the style that comes from those arenas. Other levels in later games capture that look in 3D. The Wu Shi Academy, Lung Hai Temple, House of Pekara are a few examples that sort of get it right.

But I really hope the MK team returns to the tournament, returns to that style of Enter the Dragon plus a touch of darnkess and even more mystery and intrigue.

However, if the MK team doesn't decide to go in that direction, and they continue on with this idea of such a wide variety of characters (robots, ninjas, centaurs, sorcerers, etc etc etc) then in this back drop, where seemingly everything goes, I think that there's a good place for Drahmin in Mortal Kombat.

Would I prefer the old style like you guys? Absolutely. 100%. But in terms of potential, I still like what Drahmin brings, even if he doesn't go with the concepts or ideas brought forth in my MK1 or MK2. If the new style still prevails, I'd like to see him again over a LOT of other MK characters.

It's definitely interesting to see the difference of opinion on Drahmin. Some posters, even some really intelligent ones who I greatly admire, are saying he should stay -- whereas I could never really see much to like about the character, unless you squinted. He's like Meat with more subtlety, to me.

If they were going to bring him back, I would build him up with some references over the next few games. Use Drahmin as an analogy for pain and suffering. "I'm going to send you to Drahmin." Sounds cheesy, but basically the point would be to make Drahmin this feared name, so when he does pop up and start killing shit -- there's a reason to be afraid.

One positive to Drahmin returning, is that the detail they could show with the rotting corpse stuff could be genuinely terrifying.

I would love a Drahmin comeback so long as he keeps his various combo setups.

Saying "This character wouldn't have fit in MK1" is ridiculous because the tone shifted in MK2, which is the game that for most people defined the series. "Enter the Dragon" was a one time thing. The series changed and moved beyond that right away.

Don't compare Drahmin to Johnny Cage and Kano, compare him to other monsters like Baraka. Or better yet, compare him to the characters in MK Mythologies and MK4 because that's when the Netherealm was introduced. Demons can't be wearing karate gis like everybody in MK1 did as if they're living humans and there's nothing wrong with them, man. Down there, you only got three wardrobe choices: bondage gear, rotting flesh wounds, or being a big hulking monster with weird colored skin.

Each realm has a different feel and SHOULD have a different feel. Earthrealm is our world, if not a little superhero comic booky with the advanced tech and weapons, Edenia is based on fairy tales, Outworld is half medieval asian, half horror, Hell is, of course, all horror, etc. Characters should fit the realm they came from.
Y'know what you get when you say "let's go back to the MK1 feel"? You get Kobra. Everyone HATED Kobra! Why? Because he didn't fit. He was a throwback to MK1 and the time for throwbacks to MK1 is long since over. Oh, and you get Darrius's alt costume, and we all spent a whole day complaining about how Darrius didn't make sense! So how the hell does that make sense that all of a sudden more Kobras and Darrius Alts is what you want? You can't have it both ways. Either Mortal Kombat is humans in gis or it's horror-fantasy. And guess what? It was karate gis for ONE game and horror-fantasy for EVERY OTHER game. So horror-fantasy wins.
If the writers ever bring back the tournament, for the record, I'm not against returning to tournament rules. It has it's place and makes for interesting stories. But it will never again be like MK1 was. It'll be like MK2 was. (and MK4 was and DA was and Deception was and Armageddon was) It'll be strange worlds with old broken castles and skulls carved into things and dragons flying through a red sky, and some of the bad guys will be monsters and demons. It's been that way since 1993 for fuck's sake, and in case you haven't heard, it's 2010 now.

I definitely agree about the tone of MK1 being different from all of the other MK games. But I think that the first 3 games each had their own style, because they each had a story that continued logically from the last game.

MK2 was sort of an escalation of MK1. We beat the underling sorcerer in MK1, so then we had to travel to the home world of that underling's boss and beat him. Then he revived his dead queen, or someone's queen, or whatever, in Earth and skirted the rules.

MK1 had the very asian, Enter the Dragon feel to it. MK2 had the dark, desolate world, almost medieval look to it and MK3 had a very urban look to it. By that I mean you had the subway, the bridge, the belltower, the street, the bank, even the graveyard looked city-ish etc...

Now at this point, they also started blending ideas, because then you also had the soul chamber and other, more distinctly outworld-ish backgrounds. This made sense though in the context of the game, since Outworld was merging with Earthrealm.

Then MK4 came along and basically just did whatever the hell it felt like. Maybe that conversation went like this:

Ed: "Let's throw in a level with the Elder Gods, and they're big and blue... And Reptiles Lair, yeah that's good. He needs a lair that's all, you know, green and Reptile-ish... With dude's struggling in some green haze."
Not Ed: "The Shaolin Temple, the Ice Pit, A Prison Stage, A balcony that's rainy and windy... Those kind of go together, right?"
Ed: "Eh, sort of. C'mon people, ideas please!"
Not Ed: "Umm, the Well!"
Ed: "What is the Well?"
Not Ed: "Umm, it has fire and umm, yeah... Oh! The Living Forest! People loved that level!"
Ed: "From MK2?"
Not Ed: "Yeah, then we'll have Goro's Lair!
Ed: "But that was on Shang Tsung's island..."
Not Ed: "Who cares! The Living Forest is in Outworld! So what!? Okay, A Tomb..."
Ed: "What's the Tomb for?"
Not Ed: "Who knows..."
Ed: "Wait, did you say a Prison Stage before?"
Not Ed: "Yeah, with a FAN and everything!"
Ed (sighs)

So yeah, MK4, for me at least, kind of marked the turning point where the story began to fall off the tracks and it just sort of became a "villain of the game" type of a deal and all of the backgrounds were just sort of ideas that were thrown together, taken off of the drawing board and made real because the concept was cool.

MK:D is a PRIME example of this in action. MK:DA was slightly more cohesive, but I don't think that each game has had a full semblence of identity since MK3.

To me, this problem (and I see it as a problem) is due to the fact that we HAVE such a wide variety of characters from such a wide variety of realms. Oni from the netherealm, Gods, warriors from Order realm, Havik from Chaosrealm, Reptile, Shokans, Centaurs, Tarkatans, Vampires, the list goes on...

I really think that the next game should CLOSE THE PORTALS TO ALL REALMS. Just say in the story that after Armageddon, the portals to all other realms were closed by the Elder gods so that Earth realm could once rebuild itself and hold a tournament to determine its' champion.

That's it.

For me, the look and feel of MK1 was the best in the whole series. MK2 is probably 2nd and MK:DA is third, but there are still aspects of this latter game (backgrounds, characters etc) that I'm not a fan of because while it's somewhat cohesive, there's still stuff that's kind of mish mashed together.

As for what you're saying about Darrius and Kobra... There were a few things preventing me from liking them. For one thing, the whole batch of MK:D characters were too wide in variety and overall just uninteresting.

People didn't like Kobra because A) He had no story, he was just a guy that wanted to hurt people and be in the Black Dragon, that's it B) His moves were average, but nothing special and C) He looked like Ken from Street Fighter.

He was just a boring, average character that was basically a henchmen for Kabal, a trainee and nothing more. There was no mystery to him, there was nothing unique about him. Maaaaaybe this type of character might have flourished if he'd been introduced back then, but I think that people expect more now.

As for Darrius' second outfit, I didn't mind it, but I think that people hated it because it ran so contrary to his first costume and his story. Is he a freedom fighter in Seido or a Blacksploitation character from 1970's Harlem, New York? The two don't really go together, ya know?

I agree that MK1's look is dead in the series in terms of being the COMPLETE look for a whole game as far as where the series has gone through the last several games right up to where it is now.

But I do believe that the events of Armageddon really provide for that reboot of the series that's been talked about for so long and I really think that a return to the tournament, the asian theme, the mystery etc of the first game is the way to go. As I said, just kill off the nonhuman characters in Armageddon and close the portals.

Will it happen?

Eh, probably not

What I'm trying to say is from a design only perspective the MK1 characters all fit by being simple, and they had a martial arts/oriental theme to them. Even Goro had a yin yang on his sash to give him an oriental feel. It seems like a lot of the new character designs have a bunch of crap all over them. It reminds of how the old star wars scenes where sublte with effects, but the new star wars films have this CGI crap scattered through out the whole scene. Even though Dhramin has less clothes than most he still looks out of place. He's this weird mutilated monster with a green mask, and a club hand. He looks like something from Silent Hill or Resident evil. I like monsters in MK, but I like them to be more subtle like Baraka or Goro. Dhramin just seems like a cry for attention. Like the game designers wanted the most eccentric character they've ever made regardless of how he looked in comparison with the rest of the game. Even though he isn't in the first game, a lot of the characters from the first game are in deadly alliance, and a lot of the characters just don't mesh well with him. It's not always the monsters that bother me but also some humans. Like Hotaro. Yes I know he's from orderealm, but he looks like a Soul Calibur character. If I'm playing MK I want them to all feel like they belong in the game. Ninjas fighting monks looks right. An mk ninja fighting a Soul Calibur bastardation looks dumb.

I'm not completely opposed to all new character designs, such as Kenshi, but it seemed like the originals were the best, because they were simple, and they shared the same theme. I just think the theory of less is more works best with the MK characters, and it's all right to have monsters, and different races, but try to make them fit.

Baraka, you're completely wrong about the stages in MK4. Most of the ones you complained about did fit in the story, you just don't seem to know what the damn story was. That's your problem, not the game's. For instance, the prison with the giant fan was completely established in MK Mythologies: Because Shinnok wants to rule Earth so bad, he tried to make Hell look more like Earth. So the damned are kept in a prison that looks very industrial and modern like an Earth penitentiary except twisted and evil because it's Hell. Sure, they had stages from old games in there that didn't make sense, but that practice started in Trilogy, not in 4. The only new stages that didn't make sense were Reptile's Lair and the Tomb (and that's only because the Tomb was SUPPOSED to be for Shao Kahn, but then they decided Kahn wasn't dead yet in Deadly Alliance.)
Also, none of your ideas make cohesive sense. First you say "close off the portals and have an Earth-only tournament" but the only reason the MK tournament exists is to settle wars between realms! You can't HAVE an Earth-only Mortal Kombat. There is no such thing. There's no reason to name a champion if we're not under attack!
And THEN you say do a reboot...but you're still not talking about a reboot, you're talking about a sequel! A Reboot would be retelling MK1, not telling what happened after Armageddon. So which do you really want? An MK1 remake or a completely new game? Because I'll tell you right now, if the next game IS a sequel and not a restart, you better get used to dragons flying on a red sky. Outworld and the Netherealm ain't going nowhere.
Besides, this topic really isn't for reboot supporters. How can you be in here saying "I want this guy to come back, I want that guy gone" if you want to go back in time to before most of them were even introduced yet? It doesn't work that way. If you're waiting on a reboot, you don't get a choice. Your roster is automatically Cage, Kano, Raiden, Kang, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Sonya, Goro, Shang, and Reptile. Discussion over.
And Thrash, everything you say just sounds like you don't understand that 3D lets them have more detail on their costumes than 2D did. It's not copying Soul Calibur, it's just making use of the resources they have at their disposal. Welcome to the future. Won't you please join us in embracing it, instead of living in bitterness with nostalgia as a security blanket?

Moving on...Ermac is one of my favorite characters, has been ever since Deception gave him the hive mind and echo voice, and I hope he continues on for a long time and becomes a hero and defender of Outworld the way Liu, Sonya, Sub-Zero, Raiden, etc. are defenders of Earth. Lord knows Outworld could use SOMEBODY to clean the place up.

One of the very few pre-Trilogy characters I think should stay.

Ermac got a very good revamp in Deception and I think he has good potential to really go somewhere. He has an interesting mystique about him and I like his "We are Ermac" thing. I can see him set himself up as Outworld's defender, fighting to make sure the realm is never threatened or becomes a threat again. I don't have many ideas for him beyond that, but I can see him as kind of the next Sub-Zero in a way. Starting out as a mid-level character and gradually developing into one of the main protagonists and heroes.

Far as looks and gameplay goes, I think he's okay. Obviously they can touch some things up, but overall there's not much I would change.
The only thing I would say is I believe he should keep his face covered. He's supposed to be an enigmatic, weird, mystical character and, in my opinion, showing his face would take that away from him. Ermac should stay masked or at least keep his face covered. Not so much because he's a ninja...but because he's a freak.

But anyway, I think Ermac is a definite stay.

Hate to double-post, but Razor, I think Baraka401 is saying reboot in the sense of...
Say a comic series ends with issue 356, but then a month or two later starts again with a new issue 1 and a whole new creative team. That would be considered a reboot. The characters and story continues, it's just an "all new direction."
Not reboot in the sense that Batman Begins was a reboot.

I guess the way to say it is one is a "soft reboot" and one is a "total reboot."
Aside from that, I pretty much agree with what you're saying about the direction of the series. MK1 was fine for it's time as a simplistic pastiche. A Bruce Lee, a Jean Claude Van Damme, a Cynthia Rothrock, a couple of ninja, and a few guys from Big Trouble in Little China get together to play Enter the Dragon.
Since then, Mortal Kombat has come into it's own and personally, I prefer it that way.

Ahh...so he's saying Mortal Kombat is like Aquaman, it needs to be relaunched with a beard and hook hand to become cool again?

Yeah, I don't agree with that either. As far as I'm concerned, DA and Deception were the strongest the series' story and artistic direction has ever been and they should continue to pursue that aesthetic.

Actually, I guess if you think about it, the 3D era IS the beard and hook hand and what he wants is, metaphorically speaking, to bring back the Superfriends version with the orange shirt. Eww.

Well obviously, none of them are true ninjas except Scorpion. (And the Lin Kuei characters if you accept that they're the prototype ninjutsu was based on)

But Ermac was a spy when he worked for Kahn, so he did practice "the art of stealth" in a manner of speaking.

I can respect all of what you just said. I also liked the simple outfits and looks of each character, but I think that alot of that was also the product of the fact that the technology back then was way simpler than it is now. Obviously you know that, of course, but I'm just not convinced that it's the complexity that makes for bad character designs.

As you said, there are more modern designs that you like and I'm right there with you. I think that Kenshi's main attire is great, even if his 2nd outfit from MK:DA looks like he ripped it right off of MK1 Kano's back.

I really dug Movado's look from MK:DA, with the black trench coat (again, his alt costume was dumb and made no sense. Why a member of the Red Dragon that lives in modern times needs armor and chain mail is beyond me). The original outfit would've looked even better if MK:DA's graphical technology allowed it to flow more and not look like a big piece of frozen plastic that was stuck to his body.

But those characters are few and far between. To me, it's not that the characters are too complex in appearance, it's that they're simply not as well designed in general.

All of the characters after MK2, in my opinion, have some sort of flaw. Either they look plain (Tanya), or they look stupid (Hsu Hao), they have a plain story (Kai) or a stupid story (Havik) or they have plain special moves (Kobra) or stupid special moves (Drahmin). I have one name listed here, but the list would be a lot longer.

MK1 and MK2 had cool characters with fun moves and good story, even if they weren't super complex back then (Baraka, I'm looking at you), you could overlook any shortcomings because the games themselves were great and the characters made up for their issues in one area by being strong in others.

MK characters just don't seem to do that as much any more. They're more flawed in general and the gameplay, story etc can't make up for those flaws because the 3D gameplay simply hasn't been as good as the 2D gameplay was back in the day.

That's just my opinion, of course.

But to me, it's not a matter of complexity, it's a matter of quality. I think that characters should be more detailed, with facial expressions, ornate outfits or outfits that fit them to a T, with more individual win poses, more gray area personalities (no super hero like Liu Kang or big bad villain or slobbering henchmen monster etc), more drama in the plotlines, more themes than simply revenge or lust for power.

I'm not 12 years old any more. The themes and plotlines and character depth that I thought was awesome back then needs to be fleshed out on a much higher level now. The challenge is being able to meet those more modern standards.

That's where MK has fallen a bit short I think. The newer characters are still a bit on the 90's side in terms of complexity, but graphically they look more modern. The combination that creates often doesn't work well together. Havik is a very cool looking character in terms of being graphically modern, but his plot of simply "wanting chaos" and his silly moves are very outdated in my mind.

I like Drahmin because I think that of the newer characters, he has the potential for more, especially given the fact that we never saw what he looked like when he came out of the inner sanctom. Sure, he was rotting flesh and brown underoos before, but what if he came back with more of a human, warlord look from back when he was alive? It might look out of place time-wise, but plot wise it could make sense and actually provide some good variety.

I just hope that in the next MK game, they can learn from their past mistakes and really try to develop a game that's not only an extension from the best efforts of the past, but a modernization of those efforts as well. It can be complex, and I think it should be both in terms of character outfits, and overall character design, but it's the ideas themselves as far as characters, plot etc that need a serious uptick in the quality department.

Who's the next character Icebaby?

Ahh, thank you for clearing that up. This was the only thing that was bothering me with the whole Ermac/ninja situation.

Baraka...you seem to have screwed up your quote tags there so I'm not sure which words are yours and which aren't...But it's clear that SOMEBODY is looking at MK1 and 2 with rose colored glasses.

That part about "everyone created afterward has one flaw"? ____ has good moves but a bad story, _____ has a good story but looks stupid, ect? And how that's not true for anyone in MK1 and 2, they're all supposedly perfect?

I call bullshit.

Kano has always had lame moves and a lame story. Baraka has zero personality and looks stupid. Jax didn't get cool until he gained the arms in 3. NONE of the games have a "perfect" roster.

And trying to recapture the magic of the first two games...you say they should do that as though it's not something they already constantly ARE trying to do. MKDA and Deception are clearly heavily influenced by 1 and 2. Whatever they make next is going to be no different. Except they've been doing it in a GOOD way that constantly evolves the story and keeps it moving forward, where as the suggestions I'm hearing from you and Thrash all sound like backwards steps and de-evolution.
And just BTW: if Havik as a guy who just wants chaos is so shallow, how come it worked so well for Heath Ledger's Joker, hmm? Havik and TDK Joker have almost the exact same goddamn personalities and character motivations.

So, your argument is basically that I don't know what I'm talking about? Let's review, Reptiles Lair, the Tomb, the Living Forest and Goro's Lair don't fit. Right? That's already 4 backgrounds!! There's only 10 in the game to begin with. You've already ceded the fact that 40% of the games backgrounds don't make sense.

Okay, you're right, I forgot that the significance of the prison stage has more to do with that mediocre platforming spin off. I still wish that I could go back in time and unplay that game. The FMV... shudder...

Anyways, the fact that MK Trilogy started the repeat appearance of levels is irrelevant. MK4 had some arenas that made sense in terms of why they were there, but then they just seemed to throw arenas in there and some of them didn't fit with the rest of the game, that's really all I was getting at.

The cohesion, to me at least, didn't fragment in Trilogy because that's what Trilogy was, a culmination of the first three games, done in the style of MK3. That's why you had classic looks for some characters brought back and classic arenas etc. To me, that fits. So while maybe it started the tradtion of old areans in MKT, it was done for the first time in a numbered sequel in the 4th game.

But really, now we're just splitting hairs.

Also, I've NEVER, not once, advocated for a reboot of the series in the sense that you're talking about. I never wanted a remake of MK1. I've never wanted that and I've posted in threads where people have advocated that for the next MK game that I don't want to see MK1 modernized for a new audience. Leave MK1 as it is. It's still a fun game that doesn't need to be bastardized by putting MK:DA or MK:D controls on it.

What I'm saying I'd like to see, is a return of the tournament format from MK1. Let me explain:

I want to see the next MK game hold a tournament to determine the next champion and defender of Earthrealm. That's the PREMISE, the reason to invite warriors from all over the world. Of course, something will go wrong, something that leads in to the next MK game will be the threat, something will arise that wasn't planned.

Yes, another realm would be involved. Personally, I think it would be cool to have a sort of Heaven vs Hell battle take place where Earth is caught in the middle and the MK Earth characters are fighting to keep both sides at bay. But that's just me.

But I never explained all that before, so I don't expect you to know that. I don't just want to see a repeat of MK1 with Kano, Sonya, Cage, Liu Kang etc. I just think that a return to the tournament, with the asian look and the overall vibe that the first game had would be a great place to start in order to relaunch the MK series in to it's next plot line and the story that would play out over the next several games.

I'm actually more in favor of scrapping 95% of the roster and starting fresh like Boon said back before MKvsDC came out. BUT... I like this thread, and since I'm just looking at each character and weighing whether I'd ever be cool with seeing them return again, I'm separating my ideal vision of MK from what I think of each individual character and their future potential.

Those are my ideas. Do I honestly think we'll see my ideal vision of MK? Of course not. So yeah, I'm definitely prepared to see dragons flying across red skies, as you put it. It's where MK is now, and I've accpeted that. I still think that they could walk all the portals and creatures etc back if they wanted to and that Armageddon gives them a good method of doing so. Of course, I don't see that happening. I'd just like to see it is all.