How About That Thing?

When you’ve been a fighting game franchise like Mortal Kombat, a franchise that’s lasted about three decades as of this writing, some of your attempts at new characters probably aren’t going to work out. Maybe they sounded cool in concept, but ended up being terrible in execution. Maybe something happened in the community, and the character became an unpopular choice as a result. Or maybe you just farted the idea out, and hoped it’d be good enough to fill a spot in the roster. Whatever the reason may be, not all characters are going to be fan favorites.

And speaking of farting one out, there’s one Mortal Kombat character that earns a lot of disrespect, a lot of hatred, and if I’m being entirely honest… Well, I’m not sure he deserves a lot of it. I mean yeah, he’s probably not the one all the fanboys and fangirls flock to the moment a new game comes out, but I still think he’s not as bad as everybody says he is.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, you either didn’t read the title, or you aren’t a fan of the series. The character I speak of is none other than Master Bo Rai Cho.

This fat sack of lard is, in short, Mortal Kombat’s attempt at a drunken master sort of character. Where as the likes of Sub-Zero use ice powers, Mileena uses twin sai, and Shang Tsung steals souls, Bo Rai Cho is a fat drunk with a serious case of gas. He drinks, he farts, he belly flops, he stumbles around drunkenly, and it pisses a lot of people in the fandom off, apparently.

He made his first in-game appearance in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. MKDA was a game that was considered the shot of adrenaline the series needed as it jumped into full 3D battles in 2002. These days, though, MKDA, as well as its sequels on the PS2 and Xbox, are considered a relic of their time. There are many complaints the generation after mine made about MKDA, and its sequels on that era of consoles, and Bo Rai Cho is definitely one of them.

As the years have gone by, Fatty Mcdrunkerton has definitely not won anyone over. Whether it be his ill-timed farts whenever he backdashes away from an opponent, the fact that most of his attacks are basically just belly flops and puking, or or even the fact his voice overs in Mortal Kombat: Deception were clearly done by a white guy doing the worst drunken Asian voice (which is apparently a huge no-no in the modern day), who can say?

And, of course, he wouldn’t be a Mortal Kombat character if he didn’t have some memorable fatalities. And… Well, we definitely didn’t forget this one..

I am so not making that up. That right there is an actual fatality in an actual Mortal Kombat game. I’ll give him credit: it takes talent to turn one’s own anus into a flame thrower. Especially without the flames from the match turning around, and lighting your own drunken dumb ass on fire somewhere in the middle. Not to mention it’s pretty humiliating having to arrive in the spirit realm, and telling all of your noble ancestors who died via swordplay or by blows to the head in glorious battle that your death came at the hands of the fat drunk at Frank’s Tavern who figured out how to weaponize his own farts.

While someone in development got a kick out of ol’ Beer-Fart Sanchez over here, plenty of fans have expressed their disgust. In particular, Mortal Kombat YouTubers such as MrGstar, and 616 Entertainment have made it perfectly clear that this guy is the single worst character in the history of the series. Keeping in mind this series has also given us Rain: a purple ninja who’s existence is literally to justify a Prince joke, Motaro: a centaur who frequently finds himself becoming a minotaur because centaurs are hard to make, and Shujinko: an old man whose attacks and fatalities have to be purchased in The Krypt before they can even be used, just to name a few of the more bizarre choices in the franchise’s history.

I don’t know, I just don’t have it in my heart to hate Bo Rai Cho like a lot of people. I know he’s basically what you get when a drunken master stereotype and a fart joke have a baby, but there’s something about ol’ Drunky Von Fartenshire that I just can’t bring myself to hate. Hell, if nothing else, I’ve been having fun coming up with silly alternate names for him in this article. That’s more than most haters would probably spend energy on, right?

Also, weird as it sounds, Bo Rai Cho is one of the characters I got really good at playing as in MKX. I forget the name of the three variations off hand, but it’s the one that emphasizes his staff. I got pretty good at the game with that variation of him.

Plus, as I said earlier, there are other characters who have earned much more deserved spite for existing. Maybe I’m in the minority about Rain, but there’s definitely others we can all agree on. Movado and his razorblade shoes, Hsu Hao and his chest laser, Kobra basically being a rip off of Ken from Street Fighter, Kira for basically being a Sonya reskin, Darrius for being a Jax reskin, D’vora for being responsible for the canonical death of fan favorite characters, Jacquolin Briggs for… Some reason. And those are the ones I can think of right out the gate. If I sit here and think about it for a while, I bet I can think of others.

In any case, as of Mortal Kombat 1, Liu Kang has rebuilt the timeline, and I’m pretty sure that Bo Rai Cho has been retconned out of existance for the more pleasant Madame Bo.

At the time of this writing, it hasn’t really been confirmed, but Madame Bo is currently believed to be an alternate version of Bo Rai Cho that became part of the main timeline following Liu Kang’s rebuilding of time and space after the events of MK11. Instead of being a fat fuck who spends his downtime drinking rice wine and farting up his own hut to the point the entire property has been declared a toxic waste dump, Madame Bo is the proud owner of a tea house that serves “special tea”. She’s also capable of surviving getting put through a table by the Lin Kuei like it’s nobody’s business. [INSERT Jim Cornette caliber commentary on AEW Women’s wrestling here]

The fact she’s not playable, and relatively scarce in the story mode probably factors into her being the more endearing version of the drunken master as well.

While I had no problems with Bo Rai Cho, I won’t be heartbroken if this is the path they continue down from this point onward. Although I have a bad feeling that if this version of the character ends up being just as farty as the original, I’m probably going to want to avoid the comment sections of any montage videos. Just sayin’.

Still, I really felt like Bo Rai Cho didn’t deserve a lot of the hate he got. Yeah, he was fat, drunk, and stupid, and my mom always insisted that this was no way to go through life. However, there was just something about the guy that made it impossible for me to hate. Granted, I didn’t exactly play as him every chance I got or anything, but I never felt the anger that a lot of people seem to have for this character existing. Then again, I ALSO didn’t leave death threats on developers’ Twitter accounts because Mileena wasn’t part of MK11’s base roster, or annoy people with petitions to make Shaggy from Scooby fucking Doo a playable character for some reason, so maybe I’m not the guy to talk to about things like this.