"Onaga, Blaze, Taven, Daegon, Kano, Li Mei, Noob Saibot, Nitara, Bo Rai Cho, Johnny Cage, Shang Tsung, Jade, Cassie Cage, Jacqui Briggs, Frost, Kenshi, Kotal Kahn, Jax."
So, going forward with the presumption that 11 will be to MKD and MKA what XL was to 4 and MKDA...yeah, Raiden would HAVE to be the big bad this time.
Take into account the three MAJOR stories converging at the same time in the MK9 opening on top of the Pyramid: Shujinko's quest to stop Onaga, Taven and Daegon's path to Blaze, and everything else going on that brought about the need for the Pyramid of Argus to rise in the first place. Think of them like the three roads that lead to the Pyramid.
What Raiden did by sending the message back to himself, AT FIRST, only directly affects one of those roads. Nothing that happened during Shujinko's journey or while Taven was stuck in that bigass rock that I can think of would have changed that drastically because of it.
However...by avoiding the "He Must Win" outcome where Shao Kahn is ultimately the one who defeats Blaze, you've now created a vacuum in that space where armageddon was supposed to go, which was presumably the entire endgame of the Pyramid and Blaze to begin with. Someone has to beat Blaze, otherwise existence itself could collapse. And Raiden, now having gone Dark and likely believing he alone could bear such a burden, will turn himself into something worse than Shao Kahn in order to win and keep anyone else from claiming that power, thereby coming full circle and becoming the very monster he started this entire chain of events to destroy...which almost guarantees Liu Kang will return and be the last chapter of Story mode.
What makes me REALLY happy are the presence of Nitara and Jade.
Because if that's legit, it means:
1. Cyrax -THE REAL CYRAX - might not be far behind.
Smoke became Enenra (and I think is going to team up with Noob again, but that's just me), Sektor (presumably) became Triborg and as a result there's no Tekunin uprising, but Cyrax himself was as far as I know never accounted for, which to me means that if Nitara's coming back, it's to revive Onaga, a task for which she's going to need a cyborg to get the egg out of the volcano.
2. Ashrah is either the woman from MK9 Jade/MKX Kitana's endings or she's been empowered by her, and Jade got a soul cleanse, which is going to really complicate the new first family of Hell when Kitana finds out she's of relevance again.
So many possibilities.
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