How About That Thing?

The thought occurs to me that I may have given the impression I hate Motaro. In all honesty, I don’t. I think he’s a neat idea… On paper. In execution, maybe not so much. And in the long run, a lot of it isn’t even his fault.

For those who don’t know, Motaro got his start in Mortal Kombat 3: the least fondly remembered of the original Mortal Kombat Trilogy. There were a lot of bad decisions made in MK3. So much so, they literally had to release Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 just to appease the fanbase. But Motaro, in my opinion at least, wasn’t one of those bad decisions. Not COMPLETELY, anyway.

Motaro is, as you guessed by the picture, a centaur. Or, in Mortal Kombat lore, a “centaurian”. I guess that means he’s a centaur with a scorpion tail and horns? Either way, he was definitely a change of pace as far as sub bosses go. At least it wasn’t another shokan. Hell, they were already reusing Shao Kahn, so they probably thought reusing Goro or Kintaro would’ve been the easy way out. They could’ve also made Sheeva the sub boss, but instead, they felt like the first female shokan to appear onscreen should be playable. If this game were coming out today, feminist Twitter would probably be having a fit, and incel Twitter would also be having a fit, but it’d be a completely different fit from the fit feminist Twitter is having. But I digress.

So this time, we have a centaurian. And when I first saw this guy… I remember having mixed feelings.

On one hand, it’s like I said above: thank god they didn’t rehash Goro. On the other hand, I admit to not really being all that in to centaurs at the time. I don’t know, maybe I was hoping for something a little more Kung Fu, and a little less Ancient Greece.

Then I had to fight the bastard, and let’s just say, respect was earned that day. And Motaro isn’t even the hard one!

Unique to Motaro was that, among his own various attacks, he could actually reflect projectiles right back at the player! Bad enough he can teleport, and deliver blows so powerful that they send you flying across the screen and take a very generous chunk of health away in the process, but now you can’t even spam him with projectiles. Not that that strategy ever worked with sub bosses in the past, but at least projectiles actually did damage against Goro and Kintaro. Here? It’s a whole new ball game.

As time passed, and the lore was expanded upon, I kind of suspected, and even hoped that the centaurians would be a much bigger part of the Mortal Kombat universe. After all, when MK3 was still relatively new, I remember reading somewhere that the centaurians and the shokan were basically enemies, and Shao Kahn choosing to favor the centaurians after Goro and Kintaro alike failed to gain him Earthrealm seemed to cause a uproar.

Unfortunately, we didn’t really hear much about that side of the story. Shao Kahn’s plot to use Sindel as an excuse to enter Earthrealm despite being forbidden after losing in Mortal Kombat 2 failed, Sindel became a good guy, and… Well, that’s basically it. The centaurians and the shokan never really had much attention paid to them after that.

Mortal Kombat 4 used Goro as a sub boss, which probably fit since Goro was now serving Shinnok: the fallen eldergod. Deadly Alliance didn’t bother with the shokan OR the centaurians, giving us an oni as a sub boss.

It wouldn’t be until Mortal Kombat: Armageddon when we finally heard the latest on the shokan vs Centaurian feud. And apparently, the shokan had decided at some point to inflict a curse on the centaurians that transformed them into minotairs. Which… Sucks? I guess.

I mean yeah, if you’re used to walking on four legs, then suddenly had to walk on two, I’m sure there’s a bit of a learning curve. Not to mention Motaro in particular lost his ability to reflect projectiles, which is probably the worst the curse ever got. However, I got to say, being transformed from a centaur to a minotaur… I don’t know, just seems like kind of a lame curse.

Of course, outside of the MK lore, Motaro was made a minotaur for one obvious reason: nobody in Midway was looking forward to the prospect of programming a fully 3D centaur into the MK game engine they’d been using for the last six years. There was even talk about excluding him from the game altogether. The minotaur story, and the redesign was basically a compromise between the studio, and the people who liked Motaro enough to demand he be in the game.

In the process of transforming him into a minotaur, Motaro ended up getting nerfed pretty good. Not only did he lose his reflect ability, as previously mentioned, but he ended up becoming the easiest sub boss in the game. Seriously, when you suck so much that even Moloch is better than you, I think it’s time to take a step back and reevaluate a couple things.

From that point onward, Motaro would make cameos as his former centaur self, but he’d never get the respect he got in MK3. He got a cameo in MK 2011: IE, the one where Raiden rebooted time and space and made things worse. He’s a cameo fighter in the brand new (as of this writing) MK1, but compared to being a sub boss, being the guy who hops into frame and fires off a well-timed projectile or whatever just isn’t the same.

The poor guy just can’t get a break, it seems. Hell, even in the saturday morning cartoon, he got punked.

I may cover the actual episode as a whole one day, but for now, let’s keep it short. In the episode in question, Motaro makes hsi debut against Liu Kang in a fight that is the picture perfect definition of throw-away. Instead of getting a grand introduction like someone of sub boss status probably deserves, he just shows up as one of the main villain’s random henchmen. Hell, technically, he doesn’t even lose the fight so much as he just jumps into a hole completely at random, and is forgotten about until the series finale. It’s a pretty lame way to be debuted, and it’s an equally lame way to go out.

He did appear in the movie, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation… But we generally don’t like to talk about Mortal Kombat: annihilation around here on the grounds talking about it validates the fact it exists. I mean yeah, it was still a better MK movie than that Marvel-flavored atrocity that came out in 2021, but that’s not saying as much as you think.

Motaro is, in summation, an example of how the mighty have fallen. The poor guy just couldn’t get a break after MK3. They’ll bring Goro and Kintaro back until the entire fanbase is sick of it, and they’ll even pull something like oni out of their ass, but no Motaro. And at the end of the day, the only reason for why is that he’s a centaur.

Let’s be real, a centaur is a hard thing to animate. You’re dealing with something that’s human-shaped on one half, but also horse-shaped on the bottom. A lot of fatalities aimed at the legs, like Quan Chi’s signature leg rip, would hurt like hell, but wouldn’t be as debilitating to something with four legs.

Also, in a way, Motaro might have been a bit overpowered. They’ve retconned the reflect ability in MK1, turning it into a forcefield ability that’s only temporary, but it’s honestly a case of too little too late.

Motaro is, unfortunately, an example of style over substance. True, centaurs are pretty cool, but in the grand scheme of things, it was probably a mistake to bring them into the fighting game world. Still, I can appreciate the effort.