i'm sure many of you have noticed something strange about drahmin. that being the way he looks during a fight. in his default costume, he looks like he is missing his skin and is not really wearing much clothing. he also has a mask. in his alternate costume, he is wrapped up much like a zombie, has a shrunken head dangling from some part of him, and has no mask. now, during an actual fight, from certain angles while using his alternate costume, you will see the mask back on him, but then he may change position or do something else and the mask will be gone, like it should be. for some reason, i find this really annoying, because i prefer him without the mask, as he looks more evil. this actually makes it more difficult to like fighting with drahmin because i just can't help but notice and be irritated by this. he's a weird character in general though. he's the only one in the game that has no combos at all, only juggles, which makes playing well with him a process which requires a lot of practice. he's also fucking expensive, which seems a little strange to me. especially considering frost is i think a much more exciting fighter and is the cheapest of all the hidden characters.

this actually brings up one particular idea of mine that i have about the game in general. there are definitely a couple schools of thought on playing this game. one method of playing is to mash buttons, which certainly works well enough at first, and can actually be pretty effective. i'm sure i'm not the only one out there that is pretty good at this game but has had a complete beginner beat the piss out of them on their first try just by hitting buttons. then there's the combo method. this is where you just memorize the longest combos and try to achieve the longest and most damaging combo possible during a real match. this seems to be what is currently accepted as the mark of a really advanced player of mkda. then there is the much more time-consuming approach of really learning the intricacy of each character, including the speed and effectiveness of all of their individual attacks and moves for each style and learning which ones hit on which part of the body and require a specific kind of block. i think that with games like this which lend themselves to being played various ways, it would not even be inappropriate to reach an understanding before the match as to what way it would be fought. that is to say, it's really annoying sometimes to fight someone who is waiting for their first opening and pulling a huge combo on you to finish the match in essentially one move. not that fighting someone like this can't be a good way to learn how to fight the 3rd way, which i actually think is the mark of a master kombatant.

i tend to aspire to the 3rd way, in that i think it's where this game really excels, namely that it is much more realistic in terms of the physics of the fight. this is particularly evident in things like jump kicking, a technique that in the first three mortal kombats looked like it was performed on a planet with less gravity. with the introduction of distinct fighting styles for all the characters, it's very apparent to me that the developers are looking to make the actual fighting much more realistic, and i tend to think that, in the real world, you couldn't pull an 85% combo on someone if they didn't block one particular strike. you'd have to really work the fight and chip away at them. i am not the best blocker in the world. it takes me a while before i can learn when to block low in defending a particular combo, but i try to avoid resorting to long string combos to win a match. i like to use a diverse range of attacks to nibble away at their energy bar and explode on them with a couple of really strong combos at key times, especially after just having defended a long onslaught of theirs.

anyways, how this relates to drahmin, is that it seems he's a really popular character because you don't really have the option of relying on combos like with the other characters. players who really want to get good at the game and master it are attracted to drahmin because he keeps them honest, so to speak. in this respect, i think drahmin is overrated, because i don't think players should need a character to lack combos in order to promote thorough knowledge of the game and fluent technique. so drahmin is cool enough, certainly better than bo rai cho and hsu hao (the only two characters in the game that i'm not so fond of), but i think his merits are very much exaggerated by players who want to avoid thinking of themselves as combo junkies.