The thread really should've been created with a spoiler warning in the title, there's not much way to discuss the topic of Raiden's time message withOUT spoiling tons of stuff in MK9. To be honest, I thought there WAS one when I posted that Quan Chi ending comment, I didn't notice there's not until just now. So...my bad.

Honestly, fair enough. I'll go edit a spoiler tag into the thread title. It's not like Quan is one of my favorite characters, much less the fact that I could do without him anyway.

I could reply to a lot of stuff in this, but I just wanted to get this out.


Is it possible that it could've just been the Houan magic Raiden learned? Those incantations at the beginning sounded pretty...sorcerer-esque.

That thought crossed my mind too as soon as I saw him chanting magic words.

Raiden, you fucked up big time.

Raiden is a dong. It took us 8 games to realize it.

I assume those 8 games leave MKvsDC out, then. lol

This topic is filled with some interesting information but I'm only going to reply to the original post, reading the other posts afterwards, to avoid any extra spoilers.

1) Raiden has this power, yet has never used it before (or has he)?

It is entirely possible that he has done this in the past too seeing how long he has lived, we have only seen roughly a decade of his life now. He didn't likely bend time in the intro of Deception because he wasn't Dark Raiden by then thus he had a different philosophy.

2) Raiden uses his powers to alter time itself... and the Elder Gods are okay with this?

I don't think Raiden asked much of a permission to do that under those circumstances.

3) Raiden's time powers negate the stakes of battle and abilities of every single other warrior on the battlefied.

It is Dark Raiden we are talking about now. The restraining of time travel is often explained in science fiction by that you can't time travel merely for preventing a death of somebody important. We are now preventing the judgment day plus Dark Raiden was a little twisted too.

4) Do other Elder Gods have the ability to warp time?

I've always explained the time travel by the fact that Raiden is the thunder god and according to a scheme of Einstein, you can alter time if you'll go over light speed and Raiden if anyone is able to do that. And again, Raiden was twisted and evil when he done it.

5) Is Raiden manipulating time in the past even a good idea to begin with?

Raiden had no other choice when he was about to die, he was a little twisted and seeing how Shao Kahn had amended the rules of war and Mortal Kombat already in Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3, Raiden saw his gift of manipulating time as a good idea.

Now that you mentioned of other series, Smallville was a funny thing. Brainiac (Brain Inter-Active Construct) traveled through time to the day when Krypton was about to explode in pieces and when Kal-El aka Clark Kent was about to be sent to Earth, to wipe him out of existence. Now, Clark Kent traveled time to the same existence with Brainiac, preventing the wipe out, and the adult Clark Kent actually sent his baby self to Earth when Brainiac supposedly killed his father Jor-El from doing that originally. But the time travel is something that makes Smallville more interesting, it's giving them new plot twists, making Smallville somewhat novel and also possibly retconning Superman.

6) Would altering the past give those in the future a fate WORSE than death?

Raiden's only goal in the long run was only to lead the forces of light to victory. It wouldn't be worse than death. You are right in the alternative universe - current universe dilemma but as Raiden saw nothing else to do by then he decided to create a new universe (parallel universe) by altering time. The effect? Maybe some realms and locations, such as the Heavens and the Void, are connected to each universe making it worth trying for some reason.

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?

Maybe he was outrageous of the victory of Shao Kahn more than the Armageddon when he decided to send the message after finding out that Shao Kahn will be the victor. Now he can show Shao Kahn and also prevent the Armageddon. Also, the post-MK1 time is when Shao Kahn started to cheat in the rules of war and Mortal Kombat so it makes sense for Raiden to cheat during that period of time as well. But the real answer is: NRS is in need of money so they went back to the classic 2d era.

8) The Causality Loop

You should watch Twelve Monkeys for a causality loop. It's a paradox. Raiden is not a dirty cheater, he is a twisted god who desires for justice. He went as down to turn into Dark Raiden and even deeper when he sent the mental message but he has only followed Shao Kahn's footsteps in breaking the laws.

Neither Shao Kahn nor Raiden shall then be victorious when they both break the laws. Is there a third participant? The good, the bad, and... the ugly? As for our new time line, I really hope that One Being from the original time line will incarnate in the new time line.

That's the first person besides me to mention Twelve Monkeys.
Honestly, I think NRS is comprised of Bruce Willis fans due to all the references to his movies in the game, not that that's a bad thing, haha.

Twelve Monkeys was a real master piece. Bruce Willis is indeed a good actor, I got some laughs from the more recently developed Die Hard 4.0, where there was a F-35 jet fighter that isn't even finished yet in reality; John McClane destroyed the future weapon of destruction i.e. F-35 on foot, alone. The jet fighter pilot was a bit reckless and silly though when he levitated close to McClane using every weapon the F-35 got.

As for causality loop, Raiden's time travel wasn't a causality loop from what I can tell. The one you can see in Twelve Monkeys is. This is hard to explain but after Raiden sent the mental message to the parallel universe, the parallel universe will move on, possibly sending another mental message to another parallel universe but it will move on too, creating new events and possibly not sending another mental message.

None of the parallel universes of MK can become a causality loop by the mental message because the (supposedly) original universe was not looping from an earlier universe from what we can tell (it would've been told in the classic MK's) thus it was continuous and so will all the future universes continue to new events as well. The chain of universes cannot end in a causality loop universe if the earlier universes were continuous.

Before everyone says Raiden is an idiot, you have to consider many of the shit surrounding his decision and what leads to it.

Raiden did not have much more power than many other Kombatants. Dark Raiden did, and he didn't give a fuck about anything other than protecting Earthrealm no matter what the cost was. The new powers granted to him as Dark Raiden may have been what allowed him to send messages back in time.


Now, as for poor old past Raiden, he's getting weird visions of the future that he can barely make out, and he has no fucking clue what kind of shit is going to happen, other than the fact that it will be bad, and he has to take some pretty extreme measures to prevent it.

Sure it may have seemed that in the old MK games, Liu Kang just whooped ass and nobody died but Kahn and his goons, but those games were never really as in depth as this one, all we got were biographies and endings, most of which weren't even canon.

Time dickery is a sensitive subject, where much is to be thought about and considered, calling someone a "dong"(can we please use a better word, or at least a funnier one?) isn't very accurate.

Dong, where is my automobile?!
JK, how about dodo, then? Acceptable funny word?

Oh you rascal.

I blame Family Guy.

The thread starter is saying what I've been saying for months. The plot of MK(2011) makes no sense at all. I've seen half of the story mode online and it is just as bad as I thought it would be. There are plenty of continuity errors, stuff that wasn’t true such as Jax .So far it’s as bad as I knew it would be. Yeah, Raiden is very dumb. The characters in this game, fixes the stereotypes of their character, for example Johnny Cage is now a cartoon like fool.
Also, how is Raiden dumb enough, not to understand that he sent a mental message to himself? After all, he did do it, so he must have had a understanding of how it worked. I refuse to believe that the "younger" Raiden didn't know how to send a mental message or even the concept of it, after all he has been around for thousands of years, I doubt he just discovered it during his final moments.