Viser Wrote:
ohh J-R i've read some of your posts hehe, but i think it was an insult to make him cyber, but thats my thoughts on it. I really liked his scenes in the story, especially when he finally defeats Scorpion 1on 1 fianlly after always getting beaten by him in every story, and promotional art. Sub got some vengeance.

Jaded-Raven Wrote:


Don't get me wrong, I liked Subbie's past storyline in the original timeline, but I just like this one better. I find Cyborg Subbie alot more fun to play as and more interesting as well. Plus he got the coolest look of the the cyborgs. ^^

mkwhopper Wrote:

Cyber Sub-Zero is awesome! Don't know why people hate him so much

toasty85 Wrote:
I would like to see sub-zero mythologies remake.

Garlador Wrote:
Sub-Zero is my favorite character, so allow me to go into my little tirade about him in this game, both the really good and the really bad.

APPEARANCE

Sub-Zero's Deadly Alliance alternate was and remains the best look he has ever had. I remember when it first came out people were legitimately asking if he was going to be a BOSS. He just looked deadly, powerful, and unbelievably cool.


This is one of my favorite looks for him... but there's a few things I don't like. Actually, the concept art, vignette, and ending for him I think are perfect. He has the tattered ribbons flowing off his body and mask that really look cool. He has glowing eyes that show his hidden power within. In-game those are disappointingly missing, and the lack of both his signature eye scar (which we STILL never discover how he obtains) and his icy arms seems to make him seem less powerful and deadly. But it's still a good design.

MOVES
I'm pretty pleased that Sub-Zero has MOST of his staple moves. Of course he has the ice ball and the slide, but the ice clone is one of my favorites, and I'm extremely pleased he even pulls out his ice sword for combos and grabs. I'm actually disappointed his ice puddle doesn't cause opponents to slip and stagger (it's currently no different than a normal freeze, just on the ground), and I miss his ice shower too. And I REALLY wish this version of Sub-Zero had his ice shaker or ice parry move, rather than them dumping it off on Cyber Sub-Zero. But he has his essentials.

Combat-wise, Sub-Zero is great if you can get around some problems. I'm still surprised he's so slow. His moves and movement make him feel very heavy, especially compared to the likes of super-speed teleporting opponents like Smoke, Sektor, and Scorpion. Even Sheeva has many moves that are faster than his. But he's got great combo potential and does heavy damage, so it's easy to get high damage with him if you can set-up the opponent, which his moves are almost exclusively designed to do. It's just a shame Sub-Zero is so dependent on his specials instead of being able to handle himself well with his basic moves. It can be done, but it's far more difficult than with many other characters.

FATALITIES
I'll start off by saying that both of Sub-Zero's fatalities in Deception remain his absolute best finishers ever and nothing he's done since has come close, even in this game.

But they aren't bad by any means. Sub-Zero's iced torso-rip fatality is visceral and gruesome, but his iconic head rip was more memorable and satisfying. His spine-head-smash fatality is also a good spectacle, and an obvious throwback to his spine-rip proper, but it just didn't wow me like some of his others have. It suffers from the same problem many of the other fatalities have, which is the overkill. Sub-Zero killed the victim in the first second, then spends the next five seconds freezing and smashing their already dead body. Seems rather inefficient.

Personally, I wish he'd use his ice powers in a more upfront way to kill his opponents, such as shattering them or their limbs properly in some capacity, and I'm still begging for a fatality where he rams his hand into their body causing ice cycles to burst out of their opponent's body from the inside out, but these suffice. I don't love them, but they're far from the worst.

STORY
Strangely enough, this is one of the appearances from Sub-Zero I've enjoyed the LEAST, and I was very eager to see what they would do with him, even knowing about his Cyber self running around.

I'll get the good out of the way first. For starters, his friendship with Smoke is extremely well done, and they obviously have a very strong bond. Secondly, Sub-Zero obviously loved his brother very much, and the game goes out of its way to show that he intentionally wore the colors and assumed the code name of his brother to honor his memory and keep his legacy alive.

But I had some big issues with how he was presented too.

In the original games, Sub-Zero was sent to finish his brother's failed mission, which became the very reason Scorpion was even at the second tournament after hearing his killer was some how still alive and competing. In this game, Sub-Zero actually ignored his clan's demand to stay out of it and he actively hunted Scorpion down ruthlessly to get revenge on the man who got revenge on his brother, creating a rather unneeded and disappointing cycle of petty revenge back and forth. In the original storyline, Scorpion is alarmed to discover Sub-Zero sparring the life of an opponent, which shows him that this new Sub-Zero is different from his brother. In this game, when we first see Sub-Zero in action, he is mercilessly killing someone off-screen for not telling him what he wanted to know, and then spends his entire chapter ignoring the plight of others (Jax and Sonya), harming those who get in his way (Reptile), and ultimately beating Scorpion senseless without ever knowing WHY Scorpion killed his brother in the first place (his brother was kind of a dick and Scorpion was being lied to). And then Sub-Zero gets taken away by some generic robots (I still think SOMEBODY could have saved him, or he could have fought them all off), and he returns as the dreaded Cyber Sub-Zero.

And I surprisingly enjoyed the Cyber Sub-Zero chapter far more. Not because it was Cyber Sub-Zero, but because Sub-Zero acted more like the OLD Sub-Zero: a good man, a selfless hero, and a deadly but reliable warrior. He spent the first half of his story doing selfish and harmful actions, but in his second chapter he develops a conscience, rebels against his clan, saves innocent soldiers from certain death, and battles and comes to terms with what kind of monster his brother truly was and has become. It's great stuff that his cyber shell can't diminish, but ultimately would have worked just as well had he stayed human (maybe even more so), but it was a far more consistent second-half than the rather disappointing introduction.

FATE
And here's where things sort of fall apart.

Naturally, anybody who's a fan of a certain character doesn't like it when they get screwed over or stepped on. I dare say that nobody had it worse this game than Sub-Zero. His brother gets killed and becomes an amoral monster. He loses his body and soul in a painful and irreversible process. And he regains his humanity only to get killed immediately after. It was not a good day to be Sub-Zero.

The issue I have is how unnecessary most of these things were. Sub-Zero's robotization is scene-for-scene the same as what Smoke went through, and he just sort of adopts Smoke's abandoned storyline instead of branching off on his own. It's a retread of old ground.

Oh well, I figured. Maybe they'll do something really unique with it, prove that this is a good change and not just a pointless change for shock value. He'll adjust and grow and become a better character in the end because of this experience.

But, oh yeah, he dies like a punk from one punch to the face, negating any future development of this tangent, which utterly does prove it was a needless and unnecessary change that led to a creatively bankrupt dead-end before he could even make it to a follow-up game. And now he's an undead slave in hell serving the man who basically got his brother killed to begin with. It's a sad and rather pathetic fate for one of the greatest and most iconic heroes MK has ever produced.

It's an extremely odd and unfair feeling having a game where Sub-Zero is violated, killed, and turned into Quan Chi's bitch-boy while Hsu Hao, Shujinko, Meat, Mokap, Jarek, Kobra, Darrius, Drahmin, and Daegon are still quite alive, healthy, and happy going about their day-to-day business.

Even more so than that, the two men responsible for every bad thing that happens to him, Quan Chi and Raiden, get away scott free without a single bit of comeuppance. It's like watching someone you love get beaten up and the assailant winds up back on the streets after a technicality in court. It's a rather poor aftertaste to an otherwise epic story.

FUTURE
I have no idea what they're going to do with Sub-Zero, but I know two things.

1) He'll be back. He'll always be back. He's Sub-Zero, routinely vying with Scorpion as the most popular character in the entire franchise's 20-year history.

2) He can't possibly fall any lower. If this game was an enormous fall from grace after his extremely magnanimous storyline during the Deadly Alliance era, then any follow-up would likely showcase his rise from the ashes, regaining his strength, his soul, his body, and his honor. But right now, he's basically as low as anybody can get, even more than the other heroes because at least THEY didn't get their guts and organs scooped out and replaced with oil and antifreeze before they died.

CONCLUSION
Sub-Zero is still my favorite character, but this is the first game I've walked away going "I'm glad I'm not him" instead of "Man, I wish I was him". He ultimately became a casualty of Raiden's tampering and Quan Chi's manipulation, and unlike the prior games that had him overcome his challenges, meet his adversaries head on, and emerge triumphant even in the darkest of situations, in this game he basically became a walking "Worf Effect", a badass NRS knew people loved and they intentionally had him beaten and broken to make the badguys look better and Raiden's desperation more palpable.

I only hope he can return to the high note that he was at during Deadly Alliance, which instilled a great degree of respect and admiration in me for him. As it is now, Sub-Zero in this game is sort of a shell of his former self, with bits and pieces of his former glory, but whether by fate or design, he falls far short of the potential we already know he can achieve (and in prior games has already fulfilled).

And I STILL wanted to see Sub-Zero get his famous scar! Now we may never know (and, like others, I refuse to believe Kung Lao gave it to him. That was really lame and I don't buy it for a second.)

Viser Wrote:
@J-R

I loved Subbies previous storyline, and i really hope he becomes leader of the LK again. Like i said before as soon as MK DA came out his persona changed to a wise master, and i really liked that about him! i may be one of the few, but i actually very much liked Frost, and thought she had some great potenial. Even though she hates SUb-Zero XD.

im just very glad that they showed him beating scorpion in kombat, im tired of seeing sub-zero always lose to him.

one thing i wish happened that never did was seeing sub-zero of the mk:da era fight scorpion of that era, seeing as sub got so much stronger it would be interesting to see how that would go down

Jaded-Raven Wrote:


Well, Sub-Zero's storyline can still turn out to be like the original timeline's... except for the fact he is now a cyborg. He can still become the Grandmaster of Lin Kuei, though he will probably fight with Sektor over it. And he can still train Frost, find out about his Cryomancer heritage and so on and so forth.

He will just be a cyborg while doing all this.