The Prince of Edenia - Competitive History of Rain

[Music] rain is a prince of edenia a demigod and a traitor originally offering his allegiance to shao kahn rather than suffer at the hands of khan's extermination squads although his plot has taken a couple of turns across the years rain has maintained a common theme in Mortal Kombat and that his selfishness a direct descendant of royal Adeiny and blood rain has often stopped at nothing to realize his own power above all else this general story takes multiple forms across the various games he's featured in and this video is to highlight the higher level gameplay side of one of Mortal Kombat's most demanded characters and beloved combatants he's also among my favourite Mortal Kombat characters of all time and I've played him for many years growing an appreciation for his truly unique moveset and I know I'm not alone as a major fan of the character design join me as I take you through the high-level journey of one of Mortal Kombat's most unique combatants rain rain would be first scene but not playable this lies in the arcade attract mode of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 the attract mode essentially being the little movie that plays if no credits are in the machine to show the game off and make it look good to attract players to come and play it for a split second rain as seen on the u mk3 specific portal stage fighting Shao Kahn obviously this back in the day would create a lot of mystery and players trying to find or unlock him as Mortal Kombat has always been famous for its secrets but this one would forever be a wild goose chase he was not playable nor would you ever encounter him this would change with the 16-bit ports of ultimate mk3 that appeared on home systems most notably Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis this was the first time that rain was a fully playable character and introduced his moveset for all to see this is the introduction to what would become rains staple specials and signature attacks for years to come whether bull fires like any projectile and can control the opponent's movement on hit setting up for combos lightning bolt summon a single lightning bolt to pop up the opponent for a full combo Super Kick is a simple roundhouse input back and high kick with rain the roundhouse sends the opponent across the screen and appears on the other side once again allowing for combos his two combo strings were a simple punch string like so and more importantly a low crushing kick string to launch the opponent with the roundhouse ender in 16-bit ultimate mk3 reigns combo ability was pretty straightforward using roundhouse after his kick string would send the opponent away and that's it there were no extra combos here all in all 16-bit rein really wasn't much to write home about he was sometimes considered okay because he had a launching low crush and he had some pretty okay moves by themselves but with the parts of the world that did play ultimate mk3 on Super Nintendo competitively mostly South America I've been told outright that they don't really consider him to be a very strong character snez um k3 is famous for giving a lot of characters way bigger combo potential than they had in the arcade version and rain didn't have that so you have supercharged other characters versus a standard rain by himself now then rain would next be playable in Mortal Kombat trilogy this version keeps all of his moves from the 16-bit console days but visually he looks far more impressive thanks to the next generation systems at the time most people would just assume that's the end of it as his moves are the same so how could he possibly be different mechanically rain wouldn't be exactly the same this lies in his combo potential that utilizes a few high-level tricks that were a potential oversight when bringing rain into a more advanced system remember those simple combos I talked about in the 16-bit reign well that's not the case here in classic mortal combat most prominently the days of MK 3 and you MK 3 players can use another button after a high punch or low punch to cancel out some of the recovery frames this technique lets players perform certain juggles that are impossible without it rain takes full advantage of this after a round house and by performing a high punch cancel into walk forward roundhouse repeatedly roundhouse will infinite into a guaranteed big damage combo it's not easy by any means on some versions of trilogy but the fact is this is a lethal move to get hit by and it made him very dangerous there is no off-screen roundhouse limit like their seemingly was in his very first version of snez um k3 additionally the weather ball could be combo'd into more than once if it connected within the first four hits or so of the combo in question cashing out more damage before the roundhouse struggles that understandably come after it brillo jeer Aine was scary combine lots of launching potential with the insane damage the roundhouse loops bring to the table and he's an intimidating character to go up against worth mentioning the n64 and PlayStation trilogy are very different games mechanically with rain even looking visually different in both versions PlayStation rain has the Scorpion style pose with n64 featuring a reptile like pose but his moves functioned very similarly with both versions featuring the infinites big combos and excessive juggles for anybody interested in those differences I have an entire MK Mehta video about trilogy and I cover at length why the two versions were so different I'll link it in the description after trilogy many Mortal Kombat games would come and go the franchise took different turns and at this stage became 3d and it would be many years before we would ever see rain again in mortal kombat armageddon rain makes a return he has a larger bearing on arm and story ambushing Taven the game's main protagonist and half-brother of rain in a bid to prevent tavern and Aegon's quest from completing thus allowing him to conquer the final battle of armageddon all by himself now assuming Li there may have been some time limitations or perhaps some restrictions on the 3d engine due to the complexity of rains original move list some of his iconic specials were not present in his 3d appearance most notably the weather bull and its movement control mechanic and the superkick I do only assume here as I can't imagine how the roundhouse would even work in a 3d space if at all his two most famous attacks took a step back and introduced alternative moves that would leave rain feeling a little more basic but entirely focusing on his ability to control elements of the weather mainly in water and lightning the first special to be introduced in Armageddon was the teleport otherwise known as mystic vapors rain will simply disappear and reappear behind the opponent it's one of the fastest teleports in the entire game and due to the opponent having to turn around to face him it's one of the stronger mobility teleports due to the speed he's able to easily get himself out of an unfavorable position or set up for something else windy feat is a straightforward charge attack very unsafe on block but it covers a decent distance and is very fast on startup not something good you use all the time but can cause death traps and catch people off-guard thanks to the speed alone water blast is the projectile in this game and it sucks it's slow easy to sidestep and doesn't do much damage so it's not worth ending combos in either overall this is a move that looks cool but you'd never really use it against a human opponent because it's so easy to punish and work around lastly rains strongest move and the one attack that returns in all of its glory shocking bolt this bolt of lightning once again launches the opponent but in Armageddon it's fully unblockable the slower start up in this compared to his other appear answers with this move means that a skilled player can react to the startup and simply side step or jump but the fact is this move is always a threat and the opponent is always on their toes it's by far his strongest attack in this game and I explain why in a minute outside of specials reigns hand-to-hand stance was Z ran men it was basically just like every other simple hand-to-hand stance in the game he didn't have many attacks in hand-to-hand and a lot of the start isn't Armageddon suffered from poor frame data and making the player focus on a handful of decent moves in some cases building entire play styles around just one maybe two strings or buttons one one three launched for a combo but wasn't too good on block to forward to weapon was a better launcher thanks to the speed and faster recovery one one three could be used to end combos instead back three forward three hits twice as a low but again crazy unsafe outside of that it was simple low pokes his two low kicks in down three in down four were the low options particularly down for as it has range and advances rains weapon the storm soared once again featured some combo strings that varied in hits and some pokes for his sword stance was also pretty unsafe across the board but if you're bombarding the opponent with lows he did have back one which functioned as a mid launcher to catch them back to also launched and sported far better recovery making it better for launchers mid combo if you connected lightning bolt the two three hit strings in this stance in four four four and two two one were both unsafe and didn't really offer mix-up you'd think you can end combos in them but hand-to-hands one one three would often result in the same damage and it would give you hand-to-hand afterwards which was generally a bit faster and otherwise seen as the superior stance of the two rain was a character that only expanded in depth depending on the general rule set of the two players going head-to-head Armageddon is infamous for air combat infinite and crazy juggles but that's only possible if the two players allow it most of the time infinite sub and outright but one or two reps of the air cancels are considered to be okay rain needs at least one rep of air councils to have any combo variety at all without it it's just a string into another string that's the combo not very exciting but with cancels rains many launches combined with the unblockable lightning bolt just transformed his damage potential significantly fundamentally rain wasn't really written home about like most Armageddon characters he had some stuff but it generally didn't compete with the bloated out-of-this-world tools the top tiers had access to rains greatest moves were teleport lightning bolt and his hand-to-hand two forward two weapon string you would look at these moves as your foundations and constantly fish for air counsel damage once a launcher was obtained besides that his hand-to-hand low kicks were annoying to deal with because they were fast and had good range but at the end of the day this pretty much was Armageddon rain in a nutshell he's fun to play if people get hit by lightning but once they start dodging it you feel incredibly limited this character lived and died by whatever community rules were in place if nothing was in place great just hit an unblockable lightning and infinite them until the end if there are community rules he has emitted combos and if they dodged lightning he's hasn't got much tough Mortal Kombat 9 the big competitive debut of Mortal Kombat as a franchise with new mechanics more emphasis on death this game had so much that God so hungry for how far we could take the characters mechanically although not in the base roster rain returned as one of the games downloadable fighters and in my opinion which don't worry I won't make this an opinion piece was one of the game's most underrated characters the main thing that held the character back was the game's subpar netcode which I'll explain soon as a basic overview all of this classic specials return lightening launches again whether bull once again controls where the opponent goes and superkick will send the opponent to the other side of the screen but rain had some extra additions somewhat combining his Armageddon moves and his classic moves together with some new stuff to teleport comes back the enhanced version attacking on the other side this can also be done in the air the Aquajet of water also returns but this time it's much smaller and it acts as both a combo ender and a restart to brand-new specials debut for rain the h2o boost which disables blocking for you but grant to damage boost for a short time enhanced version of this amplifies the damage further finally the geyser kick which is especially useful in corner combos a massive damage x-rays made their debut in MK 9 with reins functioning as a high damage way to set up super kick combos although combos after x-ray were limited by design for this character whether bull and lightning will not juggle after an x-ray and assumingly it was to avoid the crazy damage that would come from it brain certainly didn't lack in the damage Department like the other games his moveset allows for a bunch of high damaging launcher combos he had some pretty cool combo strings as well like three three four one two four four back to three back to one plus two but the fact of the matter is rain was all about combos and his main buttons for those combos outside of special moves were standing four and four three reins whether ball lightning and super kick worked in harmony with one another the ideal rain combo involves all three of these if you can but at the very least every combo should be using whether ball and lightning as whether ball sets them up really high for easy extensions and lightning will always launch the same way regardless of combo gravity a simple rain combo which is as effortless as it gets uses just four three and read combo specials this combo right here does 34% and I didn't even have to try the thing is this video covers a higher level of these characters and a skilled rain player wasn't doing combos like these they would do combos like these [Music] if you had the execution to pull off combos that involved - in uppercuts rains damage potential exploded the corner combos aren't even that difficult the geyser kick is the skeleton key for that damage but mid screen the forward - uppercut combos were notoriously tricky you had to do standing for roundhouse into a very precisely timed forward - and an uppercut making sure they just fly enough over your head - - in forward 3 which was another crazy tight link but at competitive level these combos could be learned with enough practice which turns rain into a character that off most hits is dealing at least 40% damage 50% if you're in the corner the key factor to this damage is that all of it is metallus which brings me as to why not having to spend meter on combos this damaging is so important for rain in general first of all he's one of the only characters in the roster that can train your super meter by connecting an enhanced weather ball the opponent loses a bar of their meter essentially spending it by yourself so they lose one too often the weather ball connects at the start of combos or just about seeing as your combo doesn't cost any meter you would often spend 1 bar to make sure they can't break the 45 to 50% that's incoming when rain hits you there's a good chance it's damaged you can't stop secondly his super kick can be canceled introducing cancel pressure many councils aren't Plus on block but the super kick on block is only minus 3 so completely safe it's the threat that rain can pull the trigger on a super kick right as you try and interrupt if he does and you get hit incoming massive damage on top of meter drain into teleport into pressure the additional layer to super kick is the enhanced version of it has armor on startup but as it can be canceled rain can start the special absorb hits with the armor and cancel out of it for a full combo another character that has what we call a flash parry so with all these things going on why was he not considered a crazy strong carrot Veta drain insane damage cancels that if the opponent flinches cost them half life honestly it's because almost all players in the games prime only played online it was all a lot of us had back then massive input delay meant that the optimized drain combos that could delete a player became borderline impossible to perform if you are playing online there so reactionary that muscle memory alone will not allow his higher damage to come through consistently and the character didn't have much offline representation at all as offline mk9 players at the time definitely favored the lower maintenance already established god-tier characters which does make total sense people were playing to win but it left rain as a character that in my opinion was never really given the time of day he deserved there's a lot going on for this character and it's a shame that online hindered him as much as it did but i don't invent history it is what it is and during the games prime rain was not on many players radar I still to this day will consider him one of competitive MKS biggest hidden gems that marks all official MK titles with rain in the main roster but there's a couple of smaller things left to go over that is still worth showing to complete the rain package rain is seen and played against in the Mortal Kombat X story mode he's an NPC character which means we can't control him unless of course you have the PC version and use a simple offline mod to try them out in training mode just for fun I did that so let's check him out there isn't a huge amount to go over as far as normals and strings go he very much just has his MK 9 buttons a couple of inputs might be a little different but at its core he is MK 9 rain in mortal kombat x only in this game he of course has a sprint just like the rest of the cast the big thing about rain here is that even though he's never intended to be a playable character you can still do some pretty cool combos with him his launching properties are still the but a lot of his attacks use a lot more gravity than you'd expect so these crazy long juggles don't quite exist anymore although in these MKX style rain combos you can still see the remnants of what made his MK 9 stuff work he doesn't have h2o boost or the Aquajet but he keeps the teleport super kick geyser kick whether ball and lightning quite a few moves to keep for an NPC right all complete with me to burn too mostly for either more damage or armor something very prominent that Mortal Kombat X had across the board there are small details as to what strings work into his super kick and which ones don't which is why the combos that you can see here don't look fully identical to the MK 9 stuff I showed earlier certain attacks can't be canceled the same way or don't combo like they used to making this version of rain in a strange way feel like a pretty new character thanks to run and neutral jump punch the list goes on really the only thing as his lightning does not juggle anywhere near like it used to you use it to start combos or you don't use it at all gameplay wise whether ball cannot be controlled and acts as a simple time stun we can still combo from it but we don't have the freedom that we used to another factor is that super kick is a simple special here and it can't be canceled it is a means to launch and nothing more for an NPC character he's honestly really well made and with a few touch-ups to some of his buttons could have been released as a standalone DLC and I'd have been none the wiser besides the obvious emka me nine buttons anyway there honestly isn't much else to go over here as he was never meant to be played he doesn't have things like x-rays or fatalities just a regular move set from a past game that is impressively ported over for story purposes on top of the fact he looks fantastic visually it's a shame he never made the final cut I think this is my favorite costume he's ever had there are a couple of honourable mentions I want to get through before the very end of this video the first being rain superkick as an equippable shang tsung ability in MK 11 I would much rather rain be playable in Mk by himself but for now this is a cool early stir egg and it is nice to see ninja rain in MK 11 graphics finally and this is quite a curveball I do admit a group of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 community members came together and over the course of years started working on what they would imagine a next patch and next revision to Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 what would it look like what would it play like what if we could take some of the classic characters that didn't quite make it into base arcade Ultima MK 3 and place them into the game in all of their original glory well that brings me on to Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 plus I want a shout out to Jerusalem the ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 community for working with other community members to create what is known as ultimate mortal kombat 3 plus which is a community version of Ultima MK 3 that adds new content it's currently been played at a few North American events and has been received very well one of the big things about this version of the game is new characters within the u MK 3 engine one of them is rain completely constructed from the ground up within Arcade u MK 3 in all of his glory he plays exactly like MK trilogy rain only with some balance adjustments no more round house infinite as once you hit a certain damage threshold round house will no longer juggle he has the works one classic fatality and one completely brand-new fatality to replace his not so amazing original one a brutality which is a new addition to Plus and feels identical to what everybody remembers about the character only in the arcade version which makes him feel the most responsive of any of the classic iterations of this character now I'll admit this video was a lot longer than I thought it would be I wanted to try something new something that celebrates specific fighters from the law that people hold in high esteem and feel incredibly nostalgic over myself included rain felt like the perfect first entry to this series I'll call it for now and hopefully you all enjoyed this little history lesson on one of the biggest fan favorites Mortal Kombat has ever seen thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you next time take care as always thank you very much for watching this video and I want to remind everybody that I have an official patreon page open and ready to support if you want to take the YouTube support just that little bit further thank you so much to everyone that has backed me so far the content is not going to stop here and I'll see you all next time

Channel: PNDK&M

Views: 533,235

Keywords: MK, History, competitive, of, rain, prince, edenia, combo, combos, armageddon, tutorial, guide, the prince of edenia, competitive history, mk, meta, trilogy, mk trilogy, tournament, tournaments, meter drain, drain, high level, high, level, rank, ranked, pnd, K&M, ketchup, mustard, PNDK&M, vs, best

Id: EH8qMfKPWes

Length: 26min 26sec (1586 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020