This has been bothering me for quite some time, but the entire premise of this game is known to go about because Raiden sends his past self a message from the future to avert Armageddon.

This is problematic for several reasons (besides obvious storyline plotholes).

1) Raiden has this power, yet has never used it before (or has he)?
So Raiden has the power to bend time and space to a degree to alter events in the past to suit his needs and desires. That's quite a nifty ability to have, and one that most certainly could've and would've come in handy during all those times Earthrealm and the heroes were being wiped out and the odds were stacked against them. Hell, the intro to Deception is basically the same as this game, with most of the good guys dead and Raiden buying it in the end. So why didn't he use this power in Deception to stop Shujinko from unleashing Onaga... or stopping Blaze in Armageddon... or prevent Shinnok's release in MK4.... or letting Kahn cheat in MK3?

Of course... maybe Raiden DID use his powers. Perhaps the MK games we've played are the result of Raiden's trial and error, over and over. In many instances, Kahn won in MK3, Shinnok won in MK4, and Onaga won in Deception, and it was only through a similar series of time travel shenanigans that Armageddon came about, perhaps from Raiden's own time meddling.

2) Raiden uses his powers to alter time itself... and the Elder Gods are okay with this?
One of the entire reasons Argus built the pyramid of power, and to wipe out all these powerful fighters, was to keep the universe itself from destroying itself. And yet there was bound to be a winner, a sole survivor, fated to endure and prosper through the carnage. The winner was Kahn. Good or bad, he was the ultimate champion of Argus's test, winner of the right to rule the realms even as they were spared from ultimate destruction. That was FATE, as preordained by the gods themselves.

And Raiden cheated and deprived Kahn of his admittedly fairly won victory. Sometimes evil wins, and the gods allow this in Mortal Kombat (as they had for several Kombat tournaments), but Raiden undermined their power and authority and has now begun to undo their carefully ordained plan. Kahn won fair and square, and Raiden as a sore loser breaks the very fabric of time and space to undo Kahn's victory. Why would the gods tolerate and allow this? Or will they become aware of Raiden's meddling and seek to intervene and correct his errant ways?

3) Raiden's time powers negate the stakes of battle and abilities of every single other warrior on the battlefied.
It's problematic to give Raiden the ability to alter history, even to a degree. While it's known he's going to muck things up (in many cases for the worse), this ability still upsettingly destroys the struggles of so many other characters lacking this ability. Kitana's battle for freedom is undermined in one instant and Edenia's liberation reversed. Sub-Zero's epic journey to power and wisdom is regressed in one magic reset. The long-developed wars that arose and were settled between races and realms become meaningless battles where the thousands who died for a grand or dark cause have all their sacrifices, hard-fought victories, and painful loses revoked in one ex machina moment. Why bother worrying about losing that last Mortal Kombat tournament and having the fates of billions rely upon a select few when you can just go back and try and change things again and again until you get it right?

4) Do other Elder Gods have the ability to warp time?
Like, say, FUJIN? It's even been said Raiden is no longer the Elder God he once was, lacking much of his grand, infinite power, while Fujin actually ascending to Raiden's position in MK4, which would imply he's the stronger god. Or what about Argus? Would he be so willing to let Raiden meddle in his grand design when he, a god himself, could alter the fabric of reality back to the way it was designed to be? And what of Shinnok, fallen Elder God? Could he not have sent messages to his past self to undermine Raiden just as Raiden is currently doing to undermine his foes? Why does Raiden have this ability and others don't, or if they do, why wouldn't they use these powers to even the playing field?

5) Is Raiden manipulating time in the past even a good idea to begin with?
Yes, it sucks for RAIDEN that he and his friends are defeated. But even if Raiden were to be killed (it's happened before), he'd just resurrect, as it was said ALL gods do if their physical form is destroyed. But perhaps that's the way things were supposed to be. Kahn is a conqueror, not a BUTCHER. He rules with an iron fist, but he wouldn't actively seek to kill every living creature. He desires power and respect, and if Earthrealm becomes his, or Edenia, or Orderrealm, or the Netherrealm itself, he would preserve and protect what was now "his territory". Ideal solution? No. But that's the very nature of war, conquest, and defeat, as Edenia learned centuries ago. As this game debates, perhaps a future under Kahn would be the better alternative to the destruction of all existence, or under the rule of a sociopath like Quan Chi or vengeful deity like Shinnok. Would Raiden gamble all of reality itself when, as an immortal, he is free to spend as long as needed to garner support and launch a resistance against Kahn once his forces are strong enough (like, you know, he did in the first Mortal Kombat after losing 9 tournaments in a row)?

6) Would altering the past give those in the future a fate WORSE than death?
You could argue that the future that Dark Raiden is in is beyond redemption, and it's merely his way of saving an alternative universe version of his past (much like Terminator and even Dragon Ball Z implied that changing the past was utterly pointless for those that were struggling in the future/their present). If so, though, why change things at all? It wouldn't fix anything in Raiden's "present". But let's say that it did, and as Raiden retroactively changed things in the past, the future around them shifted to accommodate those changes, with bodies vanishing from the battlefield or becoming healthy in an instant; but the people around him would cease to exist as the people they once were. It's the butterfly effect, altering the very core of these individuals. Raiden would literally be crushing their identities out of existences or even wiping them off the plane of existence entirely, a fate FAR worse than death (especially in the MK universe where everybody, it seems, can come back, or at least EXIST in the Netherrealm).

7) Why did Raiden send a message over 10 YEARS into the past to change the outcome of an event that happened less than a few moments ago?
It's like saying I failed a college exam, had a car accident, or, heck, just stubbed my toe, and instead of rewinding time to right before everything went to hell, I instead send a cryptic message to myself over 10 years into the past, at a point that's so far disconnected from what ultimately was the cause of my problems in the first place that my past self can't help but get confused. Raiden just needed to prevent Armageddon? Well, all he had to do was stop a) Argus, b) Daegon, c) Blaze, d) Taven, and he could probably have stopped Shujinko from unleashing Onaga while he was at it. But he goes way back to the events of MK1, long before ANY of those characters were even remotely related to the plot of Armageddon. Huh... was his time message just that inaccurate? Did he not have enough power? Quick! He needs 1.21 Jigawatts!


Wait a second... he's a god of Lightning and energy! He already HAS 1.21 jigawatts!

8) The Causality Loop
The whole thing about time travel is ultimately people tend to get stuck in a loop, the causality loop, where they cause something in the past that causes them in the future to send a message to the past that cause them in the future to send a message to the past that causes them.... you get the idea. By altering time, Raiden hopes to alter time itself, but time, at least in every medium known to mankind from Terminator to Back to the Future to Donnie Darko, tends to get itself stuck in that little loop of pre-destined paradoxes where the events of the future are shaped by events in the past that could only happen due to events from the future. Does your brain hurt yet? With Raiden's little time-powers, and his apparently inability to comprehend how to use them, it almost appears as if the MK universe is going to get stuck in a series of Armageddons (oh gawd, no!) where Raiden mucks things up, makes things worse, then sends his visions back into the past and promising to fix it "this time", without realizing he said the same thing in the past/future and he's doing the same things again and again because his past self hasn't learned from the mistakes of his future self. I'm fully expecting that by the time someone slaps some sense into him, we'll have half the cast dead/transgendered/turned into robots, monkeys will rule the earth, and the only person happy about it all will be Havik.

And yet, at the end of the day, all of this boils down to the fact that our great and noble hero, Raiden, is a dirty cheater, a sore loser, and an incompetent time traveler that hasn't watched a single time travel movie in his entire existence of immortality. (man, Tgrant's gonna hate me for that one).

So, whatcha think about all this mess? Do you think Raiden can possibly pull us out of the muck, or has Armageddon just become completely sane and comprehensible by comparison?