If the Arcade endings are anything to go by (some are, some aren't imo) then Ermac will join the heroes. As we saw in his Deception ending, he took on five characters, three of whom are currently dead (Kung Lao, Kitana, and Jax) and two (Johnny & Sonya) who you've stated are inferior fighters. Having someone on your side who can take care of business in a 1 on 5 scenario is a pretty good equalizer. Is it enough to defeat Shinnok? Probably not, since the God of Blunder will probably fuck it all up. Just remember that the good guys don't have to win; it wouldn't be the first time in the series.

That's a fine philosophy if you're planning to sit alone in a room and not talk to anybody else, but it doesn't work in a discussion of what's going to happen in a sequel to MK9's story mode though, does it?

See, you'd THINK "Ermac is a powerful dude" would make sense, because it did in the old timeline...but Ermac lost every 1-on-1 fight he had in MK9, and one of them was against fucking Stryker.

The only time they didn't have to win was MKDA, 'cuz the stakes were low. Who cares what a couple of sorcerers who only want to be kings of Outworld do, Onaga showed up to get rid of them anyway.
They absolutely do have to win against Shinnok or else it's the end of the god damned universe. He's kinda the top rung of the "oh shit" ladder.
Besides, remember what happened when the good guys didn't win MKA? That's how time travel copouts became part of this series in the first place.

I blame NRS ditching logic in favor of giving every good guy, no matter how little chance they have in an actual fight, the spotlight for a chapter.

There were a few things in MK9's storyline I did not agree with, but saying that NRS "messed it all up" is JUST AN OPINION, and one I definately don't agree with either.

I think they handled the Kitana/Mileena situation bad, and I think the way Quan Chi was forced in was bad as well, and the cutscene with Sindel killing everyone could have been done better, but overall the story was well told, in my opinion. The best Story Mode ever made for any fighting game.

I want NRS to continue the story from MK9 and NOT reboot it all one more time.

I expect it because it's a video game. You think their going to release an MK with zombie kang versions of half the cast? It's MK they will find a way... Ughh this is such a mess lol.

NOW SUD ZEROES IS KILL FUG :DD
ZMOGER TOO XDDDDD

I want fractures in time, with combatants getting misplaced in time. For only one reason. I want future Scorpion to approach his past self, and kick his own ass for still following Quan Chi.

Let's find out how many members of the MK Trilogy and/or MK9 cast are better characters now, and/or left in a better place after MK9 than they were after MK3:

Johnny Cage - Didn't die, might have more powers. That's ONE.

Kano - Pretty much the same, if not slightly worse because he became General of Outworld in the old one.

Raiden - Personally caused the deaths of most of his fighters and most of the fanbase including even casuals think he's flatout retarded now. His reputation might seriously never recover.

Liu Kang - Lost all faith in his religion and burned to death, probably a Hellslave.

Scorpion - Has less freedom, never showed any inclination to be a goodguy unlike in MK2/3

Sub-Zero - Lost EVERY SINGLE BIT of character development he EVER had to become a robot instead. Now a dead Hellslave.

Sonya - Grieving, has no Jax to create the OIA for her (she can't do it, he was the brains), might lose her mind and quit the army to follow (a possible hallucination of) her dad's ghost.

Reptile - Pretty much the same

Goro - Repeatedly embarrassed, no better now as a henchman character than Baraka or Reptile.

Shang Tsung - Dead, possibly still merged with Sindel?

Baraka - Same as he was.

Jax - Dead Hellslave.

Kitana - After having her story of being an independent heroine who discovered her heritage for herself and willingly spied on Kahn, fed intel to the heroes, and killed her evil clone replaced with a story about her being a ditz who has everything told to her and becomes a damsel in distress, she ended up a dead Hellslave.

Mileena - Has roughly the intellect of a child now...but might be the only person who can rule Outworld? I guess that's better than being a Dead Hellslave. That's TWO.

Kung Lao - Dead Hellslave

Smoke - Dead Hellslave. Sure, he was a dead robot at the end of MK3, but he was a dead robot who'd gotten some character development. The only characters in 9 more shallow than Smoke were Baraka, Reptile, and Kintaro.

Jade - Dead Hellslave

Noob Saibot - Soul was torn to pieces and spread across the sky, so possibly Permadead. (Sure you can theorize he was sent somewhere else instead, but that's not for sure. Him being permadead would justify bringing a different Bi-Han from a world where he's still Sub-Zero in, like some people think the MKX teasers like that dialogue Ed posted on twitter means)

Kintaro - About the same, except fans used to actually give a shit about him.

Shao Kahn - Presumably permadead or else it was all for nothing.

Sektor - Exactly the same. Possibly slightly better in that there's no one to stop him from turning the Lin Kuei into a Tekunin by another name.

Cyrax - Still enslaved to programming & working for Sektor. In the old timeline, he'd be lost in the desert about this time, which led to getting rescued and mind-freed by Jax.

Kabal - Dead Hellslave

Nightwolf - Dead Hellslave

Stryker - Oh sure, they made him look cool for the first time ever...too bad being a Dead Hellslave makes anything he did before that irrelevant.

Sindel - Dead Hellslave who never even got freed from mind control during the invasion.

Sheeva - Still alive, but matters even less than she did then because there was no Centaur/Shokan subplot, and looks like more of an incompetent henchman than she used to.

Motaro - Dead. Was never really in the game at all.

Ermac - The same place as before except came across like a jobber and might have his fan-favorite personality replaced by Kitana's dad.

Rain - Wasn't in the story.

Kenshi - Wasn't in the story, and with Shang and Sindel both dead, his character motivation is in limbo.

Chameleon and Khameleon - Not even in the game.

Quan Chi - Well I guess he got everything he wanted and is certainly WAY better prepared to conquer the realms for Shinnok than he ever was in the original MK4 when the only fighters he'd stolen from the enemy side were Baraka, Reptile, Mileena, Scorpion, and Noob. Pretty neat trick considering he WAS NEVER THERE in the old timeline except for helping Shang rez Sindel.

Skarlet - Well...she exists now. Not that she has a real story or personality to speak of. Let's call this one a wash.

So there you go, only three characters, Johnny, Mileena, and Quan Chi (Okay, I'll even say 4 and give you Sektor just to be nice), weren't...whatever the antonym of "improved" is, in some way or another, by the MK9 timeline.

Man, so many characters were fucked over in the last game. I hope they do a better job with the story and the characterization in MKX.

My one hope is that Boon and Vogel considered the story of MKX ahead of time, and are not working on it now.

That's how shit happens, and by shit, I mean shit.

I hope they use this game to pull a DC New 52 and fix a ton of stuff. MK9 was a fun game, but they really destroyed years of character development with that game.

Voice acting lines were clearly recorded long ago given Keifer talked about his work on the game in the past tense.

They did the story long before the game actually came out with MK9 too, though. We had a leaked casting sheet at least a year, maybe two, before the game was released. And look how that turned out.

If their ideas are shit and/or their writers are shit, all the time in the world can't cure that.

If only WB could lend them a few writers. I think whoever worked on Arkham Origins, could probably do a great job with MK.

I want MK9s story to be treated as canon and I want MKXs story to be a continuation of it. It took real balls to kill off that much of the cast. I don't want NRS to cop out to fanboy bitches who can't accept that their favorite character is currently taking a dirt nap.

I want Shinnok to be seen as the threat that he is. Have people forgotten that he's a fallen elder god? He's "The Man" for a reason.

I want more characters to die and stay dead! New characters will be created and new favorites will be found.

Lastly, I want some really dark and underhanded shit to happen in this story. I want bonds broken. I want the most basic understandings of the MK universe turned upside down. Blur the lines between good and evil. Have more than just the two factions. Introduce the order and chaosrealms to muddy the waters a little bit. Fuck with our minds!!!

I get that the heroes are worse off, but I'm still not certain what you're advocating for yet.

Do you want Raiden, while getting godsmacked by Shinnok, to say "oh crap, without Liu Kang, we're screwed! I have to change everything!" and he blows on his magic talisman or whatever and sends brainwaves to MK1 Raiden again?

We've been through MK1-3 twice now (more or less). Are you saying that you want to go through a 3rd time?

I personally don't want to do that. If Liu Kang was killed by Raiden, then theoretically Raiden should be strong enough to fight Shinnok.

As for the dead characters Quan Chi has behind him, if the good guys and characters like Ermac are lessened in your eyes, then all of the characters that got destroyed by Shang Sindel have to be considered less than they were as well, so how much worse off would the good guys really be?

Plus, Boon's already said that there will be new characters. Who's to say that one if them isn't the new chosen one or some amazing badass that everyone likes right away? After what they put in to the last MK game, I actually have faith in this possibility.

The only inroad between revisiting the past again for timeline hijinks and moving forward is two living timelines existing side by side? One with Liu Kang alive and one with him dead. Is that what you're in favor of? I'm starting to wonder if that's the route they'll take if they're talking about multiple versions of characters.

Still not a fan of that though, as it leaves too much room for paradoxes, plot holes, logic errors etc. If people think that we already have those issues now and hate how messy MK9's story made things, imagine how much worse it could get if they go this route?

You make quite a few good points in this post, and such is why I elect to take the "wait and see" approach to the story of this game. I've already stated what my best case scenario of sorts will be, but I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of it.

They should definitely continue the story of MK9, but there'd still be a way to fix everything. We have the new timeline in which most Earth Warriors are dead. With the old timeline apparently erased. But what if that wasn't the case?

As a result of Raiden changing the past, there could be now fissures in time. The flow of time would be damaged, and warriors from different times and realities get misplaced.

At the end they'd somehow managed to repair the timeline, resetting everything and returning it to normal, before Raiden changed the timeline during the events of MK9. But even though the flow of time normalized and we're back to a singular reality, things would still be different.

Kinda similar to the Flashpoint event in the DC comics. Flash saved his mother from being murdered, but that change caused a time boom. Sending small ripples through time, which affected everything so slightly, creating an entirely new reality. Flash eventually stopped himself from preventing his mother's murder, resetting the timeline again, but things still changed. And that's how we got the New 52.

So, once the timeline has been reset in MKX, instead of starting from the very beginning again and finding ourselves at the first tournament, we could be in the final battle of Armageddon. But this time, not everyone would have been killed, and the survivors join forces, to take down Shao Kahn. And actually succeed this time.

Who's to say they won't do another time-travel copout? They've already showed us the lack of regard for the story once, I'd bet they'd do it again.

In hindsight, this is nothing new. Same shit happened when MK Trilogy rolled around. Classic Sub anyone? Great Kung lao background in MK4? Changing the Netherrealm into hell? MK1 Raiden? Kano being Japanese?

It is because there are so many games now in the library that the apparent amount of care towards an actual coherent narrative or corpus. In simpler words: they never cared enough to write the story you wish it were.


It tells a lot about video game stories that MK9 is STILL the best told story among fighting games. At the very worst, the best acted.

That's exactly what I'm arguing in favor of.

My whole premise is "They can't win in a fair fight, so they're gonna HAVE to resort to Sliders or Back to the Future shenanigans."

But honestly, since I was asked how I would do it?

I don't want Raiden or someone to DELIBERATELY pull people from out of their native timelines or go back and change things.

I want it to be happening all on its own by accident because what Raiden did in MK9 caused a paradox and broke the fabric of reality or something like that.

That kind of chaos has the potential to bring WAY more versions of WAY more characters into the roster. I wouldn't mind seeing, like, Movie Liu and Legacy Scorpion and VsDCU Jax and crazy shit like that. Like how Injustice had an Arrow alt costume and Man of Steel, Arkham City, and Red Son alt costumes...except incorporated into Story Mode.

To be truthful... Raiden can revive ...remember him healing Jax early in MK9. So i think Raiden can revive/resurrect people. He is just a major prick who is picky about who he should help because he is too dumb to figure it out on his own, But of course i blame the writers for that one.

In Johnny Cage Bio in MK4
"After Shao Kahn's defeat, Cage's soul is free to leave to a higher place. From the heavens, he observes his friends engaged in battle. With the heavens in disarray, he learns of the war waged against the Elder Gods by Shinnok. Cage seeks out Raiden to help him restore his deceased soul and join Liu Kang in his quest. Once again, Johnny Cage finds himself fighting alongside Earths greatest warriors."

Johnny was in Heaven. Raiden can rez people who are in Heaven, and probably needs the Elder Gods' permission to do so. He can't do SHIT for you if you're in Hell. if he had any power at all over the souls that fall under Shinnok's domain, then Shinnok wouldn't be a threat, would he? Raiden wouldn't have even bothered to mourn the dead in MK9 if he could wish them all back.

Raiden flatout tells Scorpion in MK9 that, if he does what Raiden wants, he'll "ask the Elder Gods" to rez the Shirai Ryu.

ASK the Elder Gods. That doesn't even guarantee they'll say yes!

Ah yes, the convenience yes and no that the Elder Gods represent.

Here is a thought - > what if the MKverse operates on a stable loop and Raiden sends a message back because he always does and did? Or perhaps it is preordained that Kahn actually succeeds and the heroes cannot actually do jack shit about it either way?

Would be actually funny. They began to show preferance towards letting the bad guys win since MKDA.

I also want to point out that we're all assuming Shinnok is the endboss and if there are time-displaced alternates of characters in the story, then Raiden brought them there to replace the dead.

What if the new chick from Jade's ending is the one causing the temporal disturbance? She wanted to "reimagine" Kahn's death, after all, which implies access to time powers.

Heh, it's like the new 52 all over again.