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Today is the day of the big Mortal Kombat 11 reveal event, and as part of the blood-soaked festivities we've got a pile of new trailers to look at. There's the obligatory fatality montage, of course, MMA star Ronda Rousey talks about voicing (and being face scanned for) fighter Sonya Blade, and in one video you can see a man get punched in the back of the head so hard that his brain ejects through his face.
We'll begin with Rousey, a longtime Mortal Kombat fan who also happens to be pretty good at fighting in real life. She seems genuinely enthusiastic about the role, although the trailer only shows two lines, for a total of 12 words, of actual in-game speech.
Next up is the "gameplay reveal" video, which is a fairly straightforward presentation of oddly-dressed people fighting and dying in horrifically violent ways. Watch all the way to the end and you'll see what appears to be a spike of frozen blood, tipped with an eyeball, driven through the back of somebody's skull. This is full-on Mortal Kombat territory.
Number three on the list is the "story prologue" trailer. Despite not featuring any fights, it manages to be possibly the most disturbing video of the bunch. What happens when you decapitate a man who cannot die? I can tell you this much: Immortality is not all it's cracked up to be.
Fourth is the introduction of Geras, "a powerful and loyal servant of Kronika" who has the power to manipulate time, and also to literally smack your brain out of your skull by way of your face. Kronika, the goddess of time, is also a newcomer: She appears in the story prologue trailer above, and apparently has some kind of beef with Raiden.
Last but certainly not least: Fatalities. This is just a series of gratuitously violent deaths, the sort of thing where you freeze a man's skull and then smash it into a thousand pieces after you've chopped it off his body, because that's how things are done in the Netherrealm. If you haven't bailed out on this ridiculous bloodfest yet, be warned that the aforementioned decapi-smash is probably the least graphic murder in the bunch.
It's amusing to remember, while swimming through all this blood and broken bone, that there was a time when Mortal Kombat was viewed as legitimately dangerous: It was one of the games at the center of Congressional hearings on videogames in the early '90s that ultimately fueled the creation of the ESRB. Mortal Kombat controversies even have their own, surprisingly in-depth page on Wikipedia.
It currently makes no mention of brain ejections.
