I remembered back then the frustration of fighting Motaro. He's a huge Centaur making him the most irregularly shaped fighter for the game. It was something new to have him as a non-playable character (except for Mortal Kombat Trilogy) and he was probably the hardest character to defeat. He couldn't be harmed by projectiles where they automatically bounce back at the opponent. He was an irregularly shaped fighter so by Armageddon, they turned him into a Minotaur. A lot of his attributes like immunity to throws and projectiles got removed for a reason. I guess they wanted fans the chance to have their revenge on him.
Mortal Kombat (2011) was a 2.5D fighting game, not a 3D fighting game. Motaro could have been integrated as a non-playable character in Arcade Mode. Why I think he wasn't included was because of his shape. The X-Ray moves were meant to hit humanoid characters and a lot of them were impossible to implement on him. They could have made him a special and unique boss character but I guess the developers wanted a more balanced game in some way. I think that while they wanted Goro, Kintaro, and Shao Kahn to be immune to throws - they wanted them not to be immune to X-Ray attacks. Motaro's body is that HUGE and irregular-shaped that it would be hard to keep adjusting the game JUST FOR HIM. At least, it wasn't that hard to adjust the game for the non-playable bosses or the hidden characters. Goro and Kintaro had four arms so it's not much of a deal in contrast to Motaro's horse-like lower half.
Just like the use of digitized graphics - I guess Motaro's concept has become quite obsolete for Netherrealm. So like anything that doesn't work, it ends up getting scraped off. For me, the remake did the right thing by NOT including Motaro. Sure, one can argue that Motaro could be made a little less difficult but as said - Goro and Kintaro are much cooler. Perhaps, I'd still the Shokans over the Centaurs to do the job better in carrying out my plans for conquest if I were Shao Kahn. In fact, the Centaurs started showing their decline during post-MK3 games.
Besides, Tekken 6 came out before MK (2011) which also had two infamous moments. One is the oddly-shaped bonus boss NANCY-MI847J and the other was Azazel. I guess to many Tekken fans probably found them unwelcome. Azazel wasn't that oddly shaped. Did Ed Boon actually try and check Tekken 6 and found himself unable to beat NANCY-MI847J? Probably he wanted to do the same thing for Motaro but found it really painful. I guess he probably decided to pull out Motaro out of the roster because it'd probably end up like that. Instead, Motaro became The Unfought probably as a result of that experience. Motaro could be made immune to X-Ray attacks aside from projectiles. Then again, such an experience may greatly spike the difficulty more than the designers intended to.
I thought that Motaro could've been used as a finisher of sorts. Shang Tsung had his infamously difficult Kintaro fatality. I think Shang Tsung should've had his identity theft fatality as his first fatality and reserved a morphing fatality for the hidden one. I think Shang Tsung could've transformed into Motaro and done a brutal fatality such as impaling the opponent with that metallic tail and headbutting the helpless opponent. Maybe, some people at Netherrealm wanted to do that but Boon probably hates Motaro too. So, maybe, that's why Motaro was never used in that regard either.
For one, not having Motaro was a relief actually. He was quite the nightmare. Maybe, Boon while playing Tekken 6 thought of what if NANCY-MI847J could be an inspiration. Boon was aiming for a 2.5D game not a 3D game. Also, the bonus boss was mostly immobile while Motaro had to move around. It's possible that they did experiment on Motaro a couple of times until they realized he'd be too much of a nightmare. With that, they wisely disposed of Motaro for good.
Comments
Post a Comment