I agree, Shujinko is a very interesting character, plus we've seen a *long* character development from being a young deceived fool into a wise old man, plus the whole MKD story was played through his eyes, and I like the different variations of other people's moves... The move stealing is part of Shujinko's character, so he should have some shamanistic moves taught from Nightwolf and other variations from other characters as well as maybe his own... He's a well thought out new character that fit well into the story and he deserves a spot in this game (atleast DLC)

Too bad, the fans don't like him for 1) not being in MK1-MKT and 2) move stealing...

I'm a big fan of Shujinko. I wish his design wasn't so bland, but other than that, he was a fun protagonist. Since I do want this game to stay true to the original canon, I'm not wild about the idea of Raiden encountering Shujinko in this timeline, especially in a negative sense.

On the otherhand, if he aquired Shujinko as an ally prematurely, that could be pretty interesting.

YES DAMASHI I WILL DO AS YOU ASK :D

That said,I like Jinko. :3 If Raiden really is trying to prevent Armageddon,intercepting Shujinko before he collects the Kamidogu is top fucking priority. I can't even imagine that he won't be at least mentioned,and if we're lucky,we may even see a cameo.

I can understand him being a cameo but playable no. He's really just a naive, old man version of Chameleon(granted he does have a story) and I've personally never really liked him. If he does make it in, however, it's not like im going to complain about it or be mad

He would fit storywise, but not game-wise. I just really can't see anyone post-MKT (minus Quan) being in this game. Especially anyone from MKD.

I'm not really a fan of Shujinko. I hated how he was forced on us as the protagonist of the game, and his overall naivety didn't help either. However, I do like his look, and I feel that his story in MK: Armageddon was solid. I thought of an idea that for a reboot, Shujinko could be this antagonistic rival to Liu Kang and the Shaolin but would be someone that genuinely cares about saving Earth. With that said, it could be interesting to have him be this threat that is misguidedly trying to save the realms.

I was wondering what they'd do with Shujinko. IIRC Shang Tsung even invited him to the first MK tournament in MKDs Konquest. I suppose he makes sense from a storyline perspective and he'd be a nice surprise in the roster.

Jinko for 2011!!

Beautiful fan art of Shujinko, Chrome.

I think he is one of those few characters post MK3 that would make total sense to include in this game's storyline.

I actually like Shujinko and I kind of feel for him. I thought his story/role in MKA was really really cool, but, I honestly don't see him as a playable character in the game.

I think that (as much sense as it makes to have him running around) he would be better making cameo appearances during the story mode or "behind the scenes" of some characters stories. I like your ideas regarding Raiden's vision and linking Shujinko to that main event. Could be very interesting (and sad for poor Jinko 'cause he might get killed).

If he had a chance to be playable then he really needs a huge move set update (that was the lamest concept about him) and an updated look.

Just say, I would happily accept Shujinko

With all the things me and shujinko went through I think he should make it I mean the guy grew on me after a while. He'd probably still be young than old though.

Um, no... I definitely don't want Shujinko in the game. He was good for Deception, not in this storyline.

That's actually a valid point. The story in MKD's Konquest,as charming as it was,was sloppy as all hell,and with all the timeskip bullshit,it would be pretty hard to pinpoint how old Shujinko would be circa the first tournament. But if were to assume that Deception takes place around 10 years later,it's a pretty safe bet to say that he'd look the same way he normally does.

Deception, Shujinko, Onaga, and the One Being didn't have anything to do with causing Armageddon.

Argus being a dipshit several thousand years ago, and Shinnok exploiting it did. So stopping the Kamidogu quest doesn't really make sense as being on Raiden's docket of things to change, if he even HAS one. It's an unfounded assumption that Raiden will learn anything about the future from the message beyond "Kahn's gonna conquer the realms and kill me. Therefore, Shao Kahn must die."

But anyway, Shujinko COULD theoretically be around at this time. I don't see him doing anything relevant or being playable, but a little background cameo wouldn't hurt.
Oh, and Age-wise, he'd be like 60 instead of 70. Big deal.

Well,one could argue that the conflict escalation caused by Onaga's reincarnation reached a point where the total intra-realm concentration of powerful warriors approached critical mass,causing Blaze to sound Code Red and summon the pyramid.

And even if the threat of the One Being was somehow averted,intercepting Shujinko before he gathers all the Kamidogu and brings back Onaga is still top priority,because nothing good can possibly come from that.

One would be wrong, because that was all coincidence.

Blaze's exact job description was to count how many superpowered warriors there are fighting in the realms and sound the call when it gets to be too many, and he had been unable to keep track for a very long time as a result of his enslavement to the dragon egg.

He sounded the call right after he woke up, not because of Shujinko or Onaga or the One Being. If he had been conscious and able to count during previous games, like Trilogy when a war between like 30 dudes was being fought, or during MK4 when Heaven itself was at war with Hell, who knows when we would've hit "too many fighters" or if those events would've been enough for Blaze. The One Being was not the trigger.



All 6 Kamidogu were destroyed as a direct result of Shujinko's quest. The realms are probably much safer with them gone, since even one alone is a powerful weapon that villains like Shao Kahn were also searching for. Stopping Shujinko from finishing the quest, on the other hand, would only delay Onaga's return, not prevent it.

Earthrealm's invasion of Earthrealm was just that - one realm invading another. There's nothing really out of the ordinary about that - Kahn's been invading and annexing realms ever since Argus' days. Same with Shinnok - it was still inter-realm warfare,even if it did raise the stakes a bit by getting Edenia directly involved.
Summoning the One Being,however,threatened all of existence itself as we know it. This is a potential cataclysm of a completely different caliber than anything seen previously.
So no,it wasn't a coincidence. If there's anything that Delia should've been having premonitions reaching thousands of years into the future about,it's this fucking thing.

Were they? I mean,they most likely were,but I don't recall Armageddon mentioning anything about that.
Whatever the case,if they actually were destroyed,I actually hope they retcon that. These things are parts of the One Being's consciousness,they hold the fucking realms apart. Destroying them does not seem like a good idea. At all.

Besides,if they could have been destroyed with no consequences,why didn't the Elder Gods just do so?


I thought Konquest established that a Kamidogu just by itself doesn't contain any actual powers and is pretty useless on its own?

Speaking of Kahn,I think it was it implied that the whole reason he was trying to invade Edenia and Earthrealm was so that he could obtain their respective Kamidogu.

That's kinda stupid,considering that all Onaga had to do was find some fucking kid and make him into a Raider of the Lost Kamidogu,completely bypassing the whole actual "invasion" part.


That's still very good. Onaga will have to search pretty hard to find another guy who's just as ambitious and gullible,but also holds as much potential as Shujinko.

And yet, that's NOT what her vision was of. Her vision was of 64 people with superpowers fighting at once and it's stated out loud multiple times in Armageddon that using chi taps into the energies that hold the realms together and that many people doing it at once would tear apart the fabric of reality.

So it was the number of people using powers at once alone that was the problem Argus and Delia were trying to solve.

Not once in all of Armageddon does the One Being's name even come up! (Except for Kai's ending, which is irrelevant to the plot)

Blaze sounded the call because he woke up, counted characters, and there were too many. That is exactly what his bios in Unchained and Armageddon both goddamn say. His job is COUNTING. It didn't have a damn thing to do with Onaga other than his egg hatching setting Blaze free. I brought up Trllogy just as an example because if Blaze had been free then, who knows, 30 guys might be just as bad as 60? That's the only other time in an MK game there were that many people in the game, so that's the only other example I can think of, of a time Blaze could have sounded the call, but he was stuck guarding the egg back then, so we've no way of knowing unless he appears in MK9 and it somehow comes up. Point is, it's all about the number of powered fighters going at it at once, and nothing else. MKA is repeatedly very straightforward about that.



Of course they were, it's in Shujinko's bio which repeats what happened in his Deception ending. The Kamidogu were indeed smashed after he absorbed the powers of everyone he gathered at once. The only difference is he didn't kill Onaga, he just beat him up until Nightwolf forced his soul to unpossess Reptile and return to Hell.



Obviously that's not the case or the One Being would have awakened as soon as they were shattered.

His consciousness is spread all across the realms, and portions of it MAY have been attached to the kamidogu to explain why recombining them into one would awaken him, but that just created an EASY way to wake him up, so now that those portions can no longer be recombined, the MK universe is apparently better off.



Perhaps Shujinko with the powers of 20-some characters at once is actually more power than an Elder God has? Perhaps the Elder Gods are idiots, never foresaw a mortal exploiting or rejoining them, and thought it better to keep them around just in case they might need them for something? It's canon that Shinnok's Amulet is indestructible, even by the gods, and it's an unofficial seventh Kamidogu, so I'm gonna go with the first answer, they can't be broken but Shujinko with that much power could do it.



Shujinko thought they didn't do anything. But Shujinko never actually tried to use them for anything, he just assumed they'd magically combine or travel to the Elder Gods all on their own when he finished the collection, and was surprised that they didn't. Then Onaga showed up to tell him that's cause they were missing the trigger - Shinnok's Amulet.

Who knows what you can make them do if you have the amulet, 'cause even without it, having the Kamidogu made Onaga completely immune to even the most powerful magic, like, y'know, Quan Chi, Shang Tsung, and Raiden shooting him all at once or a god's essence exploding in his face.



Yes, Kahn was trying to find the Outworld Kamidogu at least for certain. And there was a lot of research lying around Edenia about how to merge them that it's implied belonged to Kahn before Tanya led Onaga to it, but since his search parties never found any of them, Kahn was taking the long way 'round and just going to merge every realm in the universe instead.



It's still far easier and more beneficial to gather and destroy the god damned things, which as I said, obviously did not have any detrimental effect on the One Being's sleep. If smashing them was bad for the MK universe, in any way, at all, ever, Vogel would have written that fucking somewhere. But nope, smashing them seems to be a good thing.

But like I said, the reasons given IN Armageddon for why Armageddon happens have NOTHING to do with the events of Deception. It is a WHOLLY independent story.

Nice artwork, looks pretty good... But oh god no! Shujinko shouldn't come back

If that's the case,then the premise of Armageddon becomes remarkably stupid because it's essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. The whole reason there are 64 superpowered warriors fighting each other all at once is because Argus' Pyramid appeared. If that factor wasn't introduced in the first place,they would have no reason to fight over it.

Or maybe it's the MK take on dramatic irony. =|

In any case,I still think that the reality just ending because the realms fused into the One Being is way more of a tangible threat than some vague unbalancing of the furies. So if they have a chance to rewrite that,they probably should.


If that's the case,then what was the whole point of creating them in the first place?

Although I suppose it could work if the Kamidogu were like the bare atoms of the One Being's consciousness,in a sense that it was impossible to break them down any further,so the only thing that could be done was anchoring them in reality by giving them a physical form.



I gotta admit,you just made Shujinko suddenly seem way more awesome than he was probably intended to be.

And the Elder Gods are inept assholes. It's canon,Vogel said so.

Actually,I just had an idea.

If the Elder Gods were somehow unable to destroy the Kamidogu,but were aware that a mortal could do it,maybe that's what they recruited Monster for? I mean,they're fucking retards for not doing it thousands of years earlier,but it'd make sense.

I always imagined that the Nexus was never there originally and was just a kind of a pocket realm created by the Elder Gods just so their Champion could traverse the realms easily in his search for the Kamidogu. I imagine he was always one step right behind Shujinko. It's a surprise they didn't run into one another earlier.

And speaking of trans-realm travel and going way the fuck offtopic,but from what I understand,the portals in the MK universe are generally one-directional in the sense that a portal only leads to one specific place and back from that place. They aren't Star Gates is what I'm trying to say. You can't just tweak the settings a bit and emerge somewhere else. In that case,the Nexus would an example of something different - something resembling an actual network. Then there's also Shinnok's network of portals,then ones that require the Amulet to operate. As far as I understand,these actually might be a much more advanced network,since as long as you have the Amulet and the compatible gate,you can open a portal to any other realm,which is what Quan Chi was apparently doing.


Point.

But then again,we also need to consider that Onaga is apparently ludicrously powerful just on his own. Kahn was at one point implied to be a Guardian of Outworld,just like Raiden is to Earthrealm,and he was merely Onaga's advisor. What does that tell you?

That's not even mentioning his hideously broken power to resurrect people at will.





It's funny because that definitely sounds like something he would decide to do.


True.

But to smash them,they'd have to be collected first. And as of the time of the first tournament,Shujinko has at the very least 4 of them. So intercepting him is still a priority.

Yes, Armageddon WAS a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Or rather, a prophecy Shinnok deliberately fulfilled because he wanted Blaze's power...but the point is, Delia's actions to prevent her dream caused it to come true, if she'd just ignored it, there'd never have been an Armageddon.)

I point out all the time that Argus and Delia are god damned idiots who caused the very event they were trying to avoid and none of it would happen if Raiden were to find and kill Blaze early.



Somewhere in Deception or Armageddon, I remember reading that the Elder Gods hired a bunch of sorcerers at the beginning of history to create portals that would network the realms together, presumably referring to either the creation of the Nexus, the creation of DA's Amulet-Portals, or both, as well as giving an origin story for that sorcerers' town that all the NPCs live in in the Netherealm in Konquest.

So apparently, they've had a real Champion of the Elder Gods long before "Damashi" ever fake-gave the job to Shujinko, and the champion's job was always to find the lost Kamidogu and return them to the Elder Gods for safekeeping, which is why that pedestal in the Nexus existed ahead of time for Shujinko to use. It's just that the real champions must have sucked at the job hardcore and Shujinko really was the first one to find them all.



It only tells me that gods have no political authority and advise the kings of the realms they protect.

For instance, Argus was clearly not the ruler of Edenia, but an ally to King Jerrod. That doesn't mean Jerrod was awesome. Kahn's killing him and conquering Edenia isn't exactly made out to sound like an epic feat, they usually tell it like Edenia fell pitifully easily because Kahn is a badass.

There's really no reason to believe Onaga would be particularly special if he hadn't had the invulnerability of the Kamidogu.

Besides the bullshit resurrecting power, of course.



Like I said, I wouldn't be against a Shujinko cameo. I just don't think he's on Raiden's hitlist or will be important to the plot. MK1, 2, and 3 have so much material to cover all by themselves, a long diversion to hunt down and kill an old man who's not involved in Earth vs Outworld might be too much to expect.

Nice artwork Chrome.

I’ve been gradually appreciating Shujinko more. I remember enjoying Deception’s konquest very much.

Story wasn’t so much Shujinko’s problem as it was moves. The having other fighter’s moves fits his story, but actually playing him feels repetitive.



That’s the way to go^

Different variations or even combinations of several powers in one.


Picture

- Raiden’s Superman charge with hellfire (Scorpion), ice (Sub-Zero) and green chi (Johnny Cage) surrounding and spiraling around Shujinko.

- Some crazy bicycle kick flying move where every kick hits the opponent with a different power Shujinko learned.

- A fucked up fireball that has just about every power in itself and when it hits, it’s a painful rainbow explosion lol

A special showing insanely skilled martial arts, with all the styles he’s mastered, it should just be a flurry of arms and legs.

Would be interesting if he did take a detour from his Kamidogu quest and competed in the tournament. I'd like to see it.

If there is ever an MKvsSF game Shujinko should be in it as Gan's MK rival. The characters look quite a bit alike to me.

Which begs the question of what the fuck were the Elder Gods doing to manage the Kamidogu? Seriously,what was going through their heads?

I don't think they created the Nexus for the purpose of housing the Kamidogu. If that were the case,it would be a pocket dimension in and of itself,with no way in or out. That way,the Kamidogu would be completely safe. But the whole point of the Kamidogu was that they should never,ever be brought back together again.

I think that they were deliberately spread across the realms,as far from one another as possible. I actually thought they anchored the realms in reality,and removing them would have catastrophic consequences,but since Shujinko could just take them,shove them in his pocket and walk out,I guess that's not the case.

It kinda puzzles me to think that the Elder Gods would just let them sit there pretty much unguarded without ever trying to secure them in some kind of temples or hiding them in completely unreachable place like underneath volcanoes or something. Maybe they decided that if these things needed to be lost,there was no better way to go about it than just entrusting it to mortals.

Well,apparently they hid them so well that they themselves can't fucking find them,because Shujinko was always one step ahead of Monster and every other Champion that came before him,and he was just randomly poking around with a floating,talking disco ball to guide him.

On a sidenote,I still think it's more likely that the Amulet-Portals were something that Shinnok personally made sure to create,possibly around the time of his original war with Raiden as a kind of a backup plan. I mean,they have what appears to be his personal insignia on them and everything.



Fix'd.

Well,I guess he just wanted to be the very best. Like no one ever was.

And now I'm envisioning Shujinko in a red baseball cap. And the Kamidogu are now gym badges.

SOMEBODY HAS TO DRAW THIS NOW