User blog comment:Registered contributor/Unneeded Characters in Mortal Kombat/@comment-1085174-20101011175654

Many answers don't make any sense! Hotaru, Havik, Kobra, Dairou, Darrius, Taven... You basically consider unnecessary the new characters! That's stupid! It would be more wise to consider useless the palette swap characters, because they're basically the same! Gameplay is different, but than give me new characters with their moves! A new specter instead of Scorpion, a new cryomancer instead of Sub-Zero, a new saurian instead of Reptile and so on! Yeah, yeah, I know palette swap characters are one of the things that made MK famous, and there's no MK without them or without fatalieties, but that's the point: the true MK was the first one. The second was a little bit different and had new characters, and so the third, and so the fourth... Every game is different from the previous one, so every new thing is something that distances the series from its original form, but that's natural.

True unneeded characters are those uninspired! I think Kobra is one of them. His story could be interesting, but he's just a Ken Master clone. Sheeva and Frost are funny characters, but are not really needed, as they're just female versions of male characters. Shang Tsung is absoluteley useless, if he's not able to morph. JOHNNY CAGE is unneeded! "What? How could you... Johnny is my favourite character!" Ok, but once again that's just because he was there from the beginning. He's an uninspired stereothypical character, and while he's supposed to be the funny character, he's not so funny! (A punch in the nuts, oh, that's comedy!) He gets better in every game and his personality gets more deep every time, but they keep placing him in, just because people remember him. Hotaru, Havik, Darrius and Dairou are instead quite good characters (Havik being one of my all-time favourites): they added the chaos-order stuff. You may not like it, but that's something fresh and interesting to the series that expandes its universe. I hope thay make new chaosrealmer characters, as to me they got great potential.