Group A: Remnant
Group B: Neuros
Group C: Mizrath
Group D: Ameerah
DJ_DEATH_TRAP Wrote:
When you think about it, WHAT OTHER ARENA can you rightfully do this with that you can think of right now??
Off the top of my head? Living Forest. Maybe the Slaughterhouse from MKD. Hell's Foundry? Some living armor could've been crafted there. The Desert perhaps, considering my character kind of does something like that. But Dead Pool and Living Forest would make the best.
DJ_DEATH_TRAP Wrote:
ANYWAY, I may be asking for it...
You're
totally asking for it. Take a faceful of
Full-Kontact Character Beatdown! KIRA Name: It goes without saying, but we're going to say it again anyway: there has been a Kira in Mortal Kombat for eight years before this contest began, which is plenty of time to come up with (and learn to love) a different name. But let's not beat a dead horse, cut off his back legs and bring him back as a Minotaur. That argument is done. There's a bigger problem with the name, and that is the sheer bigness of all the names she has. "Kira Sherry 'Dead Pool' Motoaki [aka; Dissolutia]" is not only far more names than one character needs (it's seriously enough to name at least three entire characters) but it's four more names than she ever seems to use. And "Sherry" doesn't even look Japanese... where did that come from?
Considering that Kira already exists, the Dead Pool arena is kind of her thing, and MK loves names derived from words, it might be better to just call her "Dead Pool." Or if you want to avoid confusion with
that other Deadpool, you could probably even go with her other alias Dissolutia. Just about anything would be better than using the name of another playable character in MK.
Appearance: MK is in no way an anime fighting game, so Kira's style starts out looking very out of place. Now we're not talking about the artwork here -- it's her stereotypical anime hairstyle, which when rendered through MK's more realistic shapes and textures would end up looking like a bizarre cosplay wig. While it's true that MKA's Kreate-a-Fighter featured some anime hairstyles as options, that doesn't mean that the developers would actually include an anime character in the game. MK is founded on Western aesthetics, and even its Eastern influences are filtered through Western stereotypes. Anime just doesn't fit the MK brand. That's more of a BlazBlue thing.
Let's move on for now and look at what else she's wearing. The rest of the outfit would look great in MK, though she'll certainly be accused of raiding Jade's closet for choosing a skimpy green outfit as her signature look -- even the glowing purple highlights immediately remind us of Jade's glowing purple staff and weapon trails. She's basically a paler Jade with ridiculously white anime hair, which is a sentence we never thought we'd see in writing.
So how does one make an appropriate costume for a Dead Pool character without using green? One solution would be to make it less of a sleek and shiny Jade green and more of a mucky, brownish, rancid, vomity Dead Pool green. It's not sexy, but neither is centuries-old stagnant bowel juice.
As for her alternate costume... it is
the same outfit as her primary with the same top, leggings, gauntlets and sash. The big difference is she threw on some shoulder pads and a pair of purple-tinted secretary glasses. This is the alt-costume equivalent of Mileena taking her same old outfit and putting on a bandana and a wristwatch -- it doesn't exactly make a very inspired alternate costume, and the change has nothing to do with her defining character traits. When we think of melting the skin off of victims in the dingy, festering murk of the Dead Pool, purple eyeglasses rank somewhere around -20 on the Top 10 List of costume elements we'd associate with that.
Story: In some bizarre twist of anti-science a trace of genetic material manages to survive the rapid flesh-dissolving goop of the Dead Pool. A clearly mad and very lonely geneticist takes a bucket of this random protein slurry culled from the liquefied bodies of thousands of tortured creatures, and infuses it with zombie magic to fashion himself a sexy, bikini-clad woman. This is the kind of opening that, in any other story, would lead to the tragic scientist getting eaten alive from the inside out while crying to the heavens, "Oh God, what have I done?
What have I done?! I was a fool to tamper with your inviolable laws! What a fitting end, to be destroyed by my own unholy creation!" And the audience would learn a powerful and important lesson about not doing science while tripping on acid.
... But in
this story, our deranged doctor marries his daughter/corpse monster, and presumably engages in husband-wifey activities with it, thus committing at least two of the most atrocious "-philias" we wish we didn't need to have a name for. All with no regard for catching any dong-dissolving Dead Pool diseases or voodoo curses from her befouled nether regions. We've seen some fairly disturbing Japanese fetishes crawl out from the bowels of the Internet, but this is by far one of the most bizarre.
Yeeeaaaah... so let's move on.
It turns out that stealing toxic sewer sludge from Outworld is as bad as
taking lava rocks out of Hawaii, and similarly comes with a terrible price. The doctor and his wife-like thing are now being hunted down by Outworld forces, and wind up getting involved in the war with Earthrealm.
They join the Earthrealm warriors against Kahn, but unfortunately the combination of deadly corrosive slime and diabolical magic in Kira's body makes her kind of emotionally unstable, and when her father/husband seemingly dies at Shao Kahn's hand she totally snaps. Trapped in a world where growing genetically modified corn is considered an irredeemable sin against nature, the bio-monstrosity loses her one chance at love and acceptance... so she finally drops the good-girl façade, lets her hair down, embraces her Dead Pool-ish nature and starts to acid-murder everything in sight.
Fortunately, whatever horrific
tearing-you-in-half injury Shao Kahn inflicted on her husband that made him appear stone dead, did not actually kill him. He's right as rain, in fact, and strong enough to stop Kira in her acid-spewing psychotic frenzy, even though her madness was powerful enough to defeat Shao Kahn and turn on her allies. It goes kind of like a Rock-Paper-Scissors fight: Kahn splatters Doc, Kira dissolves Kahn, Doc gets better and restrains Kira.
So Kira comes to her senses, Raiden heals the Doc of his
just-a-scratch wounds, and all the Earth warriors are friends again. But before the Doc and his wife share a passionate heroes-saved-the-day kiss, Nightwolf takes it upon himself to intervene, probably saying something like, "Wait, you don't want to stick your tongue in that! That thing came out of the Dead Pool! At least let me give it a cleansing ritual first!" And so he does, and Kira is purified. Good job, Nightwolf! You don't know it yet, but you probably just ruined the entire foundation of their marriage.
Gameplay: Yes! Dead Pool chains! Hell yes! We've been waiting and begging and praying to see wristbound chain hooks used as a weapon since Zombie Kang's appearance in MKD. And now the Gods have answered, and our eight years of goat sacrifices at the quarter moon didn't go to waste.
Unfortunately, her use of these chains (and her acid abilities also) seems a tad mediocre. Her branching Hook Snag attacks seem to add a decent bit of variety to one move -- but if you can already drag an opponent toward you with Snag'n Pull, then the Snag'n Spin
needlessly requires you to chase after the dazed opponent. It may be useful if you want to keep the victim against the wall for a wall juggle instead of dragging them away, but otherwise it's pretty inefficient and pointless compared to Pull. Furthermore, Snag'n Pull is almost an exact replica of Scorpion's spear, Reptile already has an acid slide, and Smoke already has virtually the same teleport punch. It would really help to mix up the effects of these attacks, or at least change up the animations, to make them seem less like copies. For example, maybe the Hook Snag could just be one attack that does a
reverse Scorpion spear, pulling herself toward the opponent rather than the opponent toward her. No one else has a move like that, and it would fit well for her.
Considering how highly anticipated the chain weapons are with fans, and the fact that they tie in with her Dead Pool origins, the chains are probably her biggest selling point. And in that light they seem tragically underutilized. Even in her fighting style description a sectional staff takes priority over them -- a staff that isn't even shown in her pictures. Her X-ray makes use of the
hooks, but not the chains, which is a striking missed opportunity... especially since the hooks-to-the-shoulder blades part is
Kabal's signature anyway. At the very least she could entangle the opponent's limbs and viciously snap the bones. Or something.
Anything, which actually uses those chains.
Use those chains, Kira, or you'll just be another disappointment like Liu Kang.
Her "Reactive Burst" Fatality seems to require a lot of action that we can't see (changing the pH of stomach acid) and even if we could see it (X-ray view shows organs, but not inside of organs) how would we even know what we're looking at? It's not a bad Fatality, but maybe she should just vomit some goop down their throats, then their abdomen heaves and swells until they explode in half. Much more straightforward, and gets the same point across.
The "Tear and Dissolve" Fatality is appropriately eww-worthy. But her ending pose leaves us conflicted: supposedly this is a married woman we're looking at, who is supposed to be in a loving and devoted relationship, and yet she's trying to seduce the audience
Mileena style with an upskirt camera angle (since she wears no skirt, it's really just a full-on anime bikini crotch-shot) while she leers at us suggestively and covers her shamelessness with a human head. Before this moment we assumed that the mad doctor was the twisted one of the two, and Kira was just his naïve and unfortunate slave-bride who knew no better than to follow her master's whims. It was a pretty sympathetic character angle for Kira. But now we know that Kira is just as much of a psycho-killing sexually depraved maniac as he is, and it's now impossible to imagine the two of them as heroes in this story.
Personality: The fact that these are the good guys worries us on a profound, existential level. The way the characters are
written makes them seem like a sweet and dedicated couple who are overcoming the odds and fighting for the cause of good. When we meet these guys, we
like them. We'd give them shelter from Kahn's extermination squads in our own home, because we want to protect this true and enduring love and the promise of redemption for all.
But lurking beneath this exterior is a horror that can only be imagined when the ghosts of their previous victims warn you in your dreams. "No! Get them out of your house!" they cry, their melted faces twisted in a
Van Gogh image of terror. But it's too late. Just outside your bedroom door, you hear the jangling chains. And when the bikini-clad vixen slips into your room with a sadistic, sultry smile on her face, you'll know this wasn't the kind of adulterous late-night visit you were expecting....
Conclusion: Using the Dead Pool as a basis for a character was a fantastic idea. But even though close personal relationships are pretty much entirely absent in the singles-fest that is MK, the Dead Pool
was not the place to introduce one. Especially one that sounds like the plot of a Japanese horror movie. We're all for innovative stories in MK, but in this case a more conventional approach like "Shang Tsung experiment" would be
so much better.
Reinvent that story with something new, teach her some skills with those chains, and send her to a salon to get rid of that anime hair, and this character could seriously kick ass. It'll be like Mortal Kombat: Extreme Makeover. And what would be the best way to celebrate this totally new Kira?
By having her change her name. Beatdown Lineup: Empty!
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