Shao Kahn Crushes His Foes in Fantastical New Mortal Kombat Episode

You don’t need guns or cyborgs to take over a realm, not when you’ve got an army of blade-armed monsters.

The world of Mortal Kombat isn’t just cops and movies stars; heck, it isn’t even just one world. The latest episode of web series, Mortal Kombat: Legacy sloughs off the humdrum familiarity of Earthrealm, and instead heads to the picturesque realm of Edenia. Well, it starts off picturesque, but then Shao Kahn’s armies arrive and everything very quickly goes to hell.

This episode is the first proper foray into the more mystical and magical elements of Mortal Kombat. It shows both how Shao Kahn became ruler of Edenia, and reveals the back story for Kitana and Mileena. The episode clearly assumes that you have no prior knowledge of the Mortal Kombat lore – not a bad position to take when you’re rebooting a franchise – so is rather exposition heavy. Unfortunately for fisticuffs fans, it means that there’s a lot of talking and not a great deal of fighting. There’s also a few interesting changes, too: Shao Kahn – played by Alecks Paunovic – isn’t wearing his usual helmet, so you can’t tell who he is at first, and Baraka isn’t quite as toothy as he is in the game, presumably because actor Fraser Aitcheson doesn’t have a freakishly large mouth.

Mortal Kombat: Legacy is proving to be an interesting series, because there’s so much variety in the content. The first two episodes seemed to take the straight action movie route, but then the third episode went in a different direction with the documentary footage and the sharper focus on Johnny Cage’s character. Now, this new episode has done something different again, with animated sections and a focus on storytelling. What will be really interesting though, is how director – and often, writer – Kevin Tancharoen is going to bring all these different elements together at the end of the series.

Source: Machinima