Group 1: Blizzard
Group 2: Neuros
Group 3: Ekimaru
Group 4: Kira
legoslayer10 Wrote:
OK. I'm ready to have my head clobbered in then slammed back out as my big boss-esque character.
Well I hope you like unbearable agony, 'cause here comes a
Full-Kontact Character Beatdown! PHANTOM Name: Alas! What grim creature is this "Phantom," this dark and enigmatic silhouette that strikes when you least suspect? You feel an ominous disturbance in the air, and as you pause you catch a fleeting glimpse from the corner of your eye -- but too late! Before you realize what has happened, you have become the next victim of a hideous murder-Fatality. Was it a vengeful apparition? A Shadow Priest? A wraith of the Netherrealm? Who is this mysterious stranger, this...
Appearance: ... seven-foot, fiery orange goliath with a robot scorpion tail twice the length of his body, wielding an enormous blade the likes of which we haven't seen since we totally spotted it a mile away?
Okay, so Phantom isn't very good at being phantom-like. Now that our "dark and mysterious phantom" expectation has been
repeatedly beaten to death with its own leg, should we
dare make a guess on the story behind this monstrous ninja scorpion?
Story: Oh. He is, in fact, a monstrous version of the ninja, Scorpion. Maybe we should have expected that.
Phantom's saga begins immediately after MKDA, when Scorpion passes through the Soulnado into the Void. Scorpion's hellfire is given life of its own, and takes the form of an actual scorpion-boy. (By this logic, had Johnny
Cage fallen through the Soulnado instead, his green magic crap would have come to life as a giant humanoid chain-link fence.) Living amongst the Elder Gods, the boy sits in the Void watching Mortal Kombat unfold on their TV, and somehow learns to be an expert fighter by doing nothing but watch a lot of kung fu movies. After years of squatting on their couch, the Elder Gods
finally notice this seven-foot monstrosity blocking their view and are all like, "Hey kid! Quit mooching off our cable, punk!" and they ship him off to Armageddon the way dads ship off lazy teenagers to boot camp.
The kid shows up in Edenia at the absolute least helpful time, and survives Shao Kahn's infinite beatdown through sheer, improbable luck. A metal shard lodged in his brain gives him godly intelligence, and the first thought that crosses his mind is that holy shit,
he's been naked all this time and nobody told him! So he jacks some clothes off his father's corpse and dives through a portal in time, embarking on an epic journey to save himself some embarassment in the past.
This is the story of that journey. Phantom lands in Japan many years earlier. Because this giant scorpion monster is wearing a ninja uniform that's six sizes too small, an arms dealer mistakes him for a ninja and gives him a free ninja weapon. Sweet! Later, in the forests of Japan, he comes across the body of a dead Spartan warrior (from the famous
Spartan clans of Hokkaido, no doubt) and plunders his corpse helmet even though it doesn't fit, because as we learned at the weapon shop he can't resist a bargain. Then he fights some ninjas with his mad kung fu movie skills, killing them
so hard that the head ninja invites the giant clan-slaying horror to join his clan. But before he goes, he steals the clothes off one of the ninjas' bodies. By this point we realize that Phantom has a problem, because Gods help him, he just can't resist undressing a corpse.
Let's pause for an intermission here. Go ahead and grab a snack. Everybody back? Okay....
The
very moment that he joins the Lin Kuei, he narrowly escapes being turned into a giant ninja scorpion
cyborg, then crosses the forest from Japan into China. (We now know he traveled as far back as the Ice Ages, before the Japanese islands were cut off by the Pacific Ocean.) In China, he kills a bunch of Tarkatans with some kind of burning, goopy discharge. Tarkatans don't wear much clothing, so he goes internal and corpse-plunders some arm blades instead, making him a giant ninja scorpion
with blades for arms.
Because of his recent fit of goopy discharge, he needs some new clothing
now. So he kung fu's some animals and strips
their corpses, beats up Reptile, then heads for "the main town of Earthrealm" (we hereby nominate
Fucking, Austria to be the main town of planet Earth) and jumps through a portal to the Nexus. There, he looks into a floaty... webby... something and sees Hotaru messing with Shujinko.
Nobody fucking messes with Shujinko, so Phantom bursts out of reality like Kool-Aid Man and tail-whips Hotaru so hard it changes his backstory from Seidan to Edenian. This change in MK canon saves the realms from Hotaru's orderly douchetitude, so Shujinko congratulates him saying, "Thank you, strange warrior. You have saved the realms." And Phantom is all like, "I know." (He totally should have put on sunglasses while speaking that line.)
But Phantom's journey is far from over! He goes on to time-split himself into two separate timelines, killing Raiden and Onaga in one and the Tekunin and already-dead Shirai-Ryu in the other, thus committing
extra genocide against his father's own people. And then, finally, he makes it back to Armageddon to kick some ass and give his naked past self some freaking clothes, thus bringing his epic adventure through space and time to a satisfying close.
The End. Gameplay: All the jokes were used up for the Story section, so here's the Gameplay short and simple. He has a decent array of special moves, but if he's going to have two projectiles then one of them should have a different effect. For example, one high and one low; one normal fireball and one that does something special. If there is no difference between the two moves besides looks, then one of them is kind of useless.
Personality: Aside from punching everything he sees in the face and denuding their dead bodies, we really don't see much of Phantom's personality. Based on what we do know, maybe it's better this way....
Conclusion: Here are some story tips for the future:
1) A character doesn't have to meet every single guy in Mortal Kombat in order to fit in. Just one or two
meaningful connections is plenty, and it works a lot better that way.
2) A character doesn't have to save the universe to be important. Even Liu Kang, the Champion of Mortal Kombat, is only a piece of the big puzzle of many heroes doing their own small things. (And even winning the tournament is still just a small thing) We're not necessarily looking for the next megastar of Mortal Kombat, a new Shujinko or Taven. We're looking for a new character who adds richness and variety to the story and roster without taking them over, like Kenshi and Havik did.
3) A character doesn't have to be the ultimate badass to be powerful. We have seen every character in Mortal Kombat
lose a fight, and that's what makes their stories dramatic. Liu Kang, the undefeated champion, had one of the most uninteresting stories in the whole roster until he had to
die to get some respect.
You know you're going in the right direction if the character's story sounds like an actual in-game bio.
Beatdown Lineup: Dead Soul, Blizzard, Eastwind, Ekimaru
I certainly think her outfit is too fan servicey, almost unjustifiably so, but this is MK! Hehehe.... Female characters are tits with fists! I guess that's the one and only justification... But her shirt is really stealing Mileena's thunder, no?
big thanks to flameshang for the sig. 
art by fear-sAs
