Ed Boon breaks down the newcomers in the next bloody Mortal Kombat entry.
By Mitchell Saltzman
The first eight characters in Mortal Kombat 11 have been officially confirmed, plus a few others that we can pretty safely reserve a space on the character select screen for. And while the current roster is mostly made up of familiar faces, there are two mysterious characters that are brand new to the series. One, Geras, is a confirmed playable character, but the other, named Kronika, has only been seen in cinematic trailers. To learn more about these two newcomers, we went straight to the source, the godfather of Kombat, Ed Boon.
“Kronika is the boss of bosses. All the Mortal Kombat events that have happened, since MK1, she’s the one kind of architecting everything that’s happened,” said Boon. “Everything that’s happened has occurred according to her plan, with the goal of having Shinnok be the final victor.”
Of course, for those who are familiar with the end of Mortal Kombat X, that’s not quite how things played out. Shinnok’s plans to corrupt the Jinsei chamber were thwarted thanks to the efforts of Cassie Cage and Raiden, thus throwing a wrench into Kronika’s plans, which seems to be the thrust of Mortal Kombat 11’s story.
As Kronika says in the recently released cutscene of Mortal Kombat 11: “Once again the Thunder God has upset the balance of history. But know this, the arc of the universe bends to my will. It is only a matter of time.”
Boon says that Kronika’s goal is to restart everything from the beginning, and as a result of that, there’s a big phenomenon that introduces characters from the past into the existing Mortal Kombat universe, which leads to some Back to the Future-esque moments of characters meeting their younger selves.
As for Geras, Boon was a little vaguer on details, outside of him being a minion of Kronika.
“Geras was born out of the story that we were [writing], and because he works with Kronika, he has control over time,” said Boon. “Our designers took that idea and said ‘okay, let’s add some time element where he can rewind where he was two seconds or three seconds before the fight, and that’s kind of his unique ability that no one else has.”
Having played a few rounds with Geras myself, he not only plays unlike any other Mortal Kombat character, but he totally breaks the rules of conventional fighting game characters with some of his moves. One allows him to manipulate the round timer to subtract or add 30 seconds, another allows him to resurrect once if he takes lethal damage (similar to the unstoppable variation of Jason in MKX,) and another one even allows him to rewind his time four seconds, setting his position and his health back to what they were four seconds ago. He can even use this move while he’s getting comboed.
Obviously, these moves have significant caveats, with them each taking multiple slots in the customizable variation system, with the four-second rewind move taking up all three slots.
Still, both Geras and Kronika are exciting characters, both from a gameplay and story perspective, and we can’t wait to see how their inclusion affects the universe of Mortal Kombat.
Mitchell Saltzman is a live producer at IGN and is one of the resident fighting game aficionados. You can find him on Twitter @JurassicRabbit
