A playthrough of the DLC character Rain in the Steam port of Netherrealm’s Mortal Kombat 9/MK9.

Rain was a joke, non-existent character introduced in the intro in the arcade version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, where he briefly appeared in the attract screen of the game. He was a hoax wholly constructed by Ed Boon’s development team, because goddamn did Ed Boon and his team love trolling the MK fanbase ever since the start. They even include fake statistics in the configurations screen for the arcade version of MKII, such as “Kano transformations”, to imply that Shang Tsung could turn into Kano somehow. Even the MK rip-off Street Fighter The Movie tried this with its “Blanka Appearances”, or whatever they were called.

Anyone with a level head could tell this was a hoax, however. For a start…Rain is purple. Purple Rain. Ya know, like the Prince song. When Rain was eventually added to the series proper, they even established that he was a prince, just to make the joke even more meta. And poor old Rain was the only ninja not to return in the base game, so I’m glad they implemented him as DLC. He’s given a brilliant redesign here which justifies his inclusion alone, quite frankly.

That said…eh, I did not get this moveset. I actually felt myself zoning out when practicing with Rain, as well as when recording this video, because the amount of shifting between moves you have to do to play as Rain was honestly a little overwhelming after a while. There’s also the fact that his moves have some of the strangest timing in the entire game; that lighting move of his makes the opponent so floaty that I could barely consistently follow it up with an attack, I couldn’t get much use out of his water ball attack, his water spray attack was a bit useless, and that roundhouse special of his where he knocks the opponent to the other side of the screen can be useful but I could never get the timing down for follow-ups.

I wanted to like Rain here but I didn’t really “get” his moveset, basically. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of looking at so many series and never really having the time to specialise in them in the way that others do, and it’s something which doesn’t usually matter in the case of bosses, hence why I typically stick with them and don’t bother with DLC characters, who are made first and foremost nowadays to be competitive more than anything else. Still, that’s really just to state that I found Rain a bit more difficult to learn than other characters, but I’m sure there’s something to him. We will be seeing him again, and funnily enough I'll actually have more positive things to say about that experience.

Next up, the first guest character for this series.