Rain (Mortal Kombat)

Rain is a fictional character in the Mortal Kombat fighting game franchise by Midway Games and NetherRealm Studios. He debuted as a playable character in home ports of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (1995) after appearing in the arcade version's attract mode. Rain is a royal demigod from the fictional realm of Edenia whose desire for power leads to him aligning with the franchise's villains. As implied by his name, his powers center around water manipulation. Originally depicted as a purple palette swap of the series' male ninjas, the character is a homage to American musician Prince. Reception to the character has been mixed.
History and creation
Rain makes his first appearance in the Mortal Kombat series in the attract mode of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (1995), in which he attacks Shao Kahn on the Portal stage. Similar to Ermac in the , players attempted to hunt him down to no avail, and speculation regarding his existence was spurred by a cryptic message inserted by the developers that read "Rain can be found in the Graveyard", in reference to a stage in the game where the character was never actually seen.
Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon explained in 2011 that Rain's conception "was me being a jerk, basically." A fan of Prince, Boon's inspiration for the character was the 1984 track Purple Rain, coupled with his jokingly wondering what color palette had not yet been used in the games. By the time Boon had decided to include Rain as a selectable in UMK3, the game was already completed, which caused him to hack into the attract mode to insert a snippet of the character as an unplayable red herring who was a purple palette swap of Scorpion, and created his name from scratch to display in his power bar, thus it is the only one in the game that is not italicized.
Appearances
Mortal Kombat games
As a child, Rain was smuggled away from his homeland of Edenia in the midst of the realm's takeover by Outworld emperor Shao Kahn, while his father stayed behind to perform his duties as general of Edenia's armies, but he was killed and his armies crushed in the invasion. Thousands of years later, during the events of MK Trilogy, Rain resurfaced during Kahn's invasion of Earthrealm prior to the third Mortal Kombat tournament, and was attacked by Kahn's extermination squads; not wanting to suffer at their hand, he elected to turn his back on his homeland and side with Kahn, who trained him as an assassin alongside fellow Edenians Kitana and Jade before enlisting them in the fight against the Earth warriors. However, Kahn's would-be domination of Earthrealm is unsuccessful and Rain is absent from the series until the training mode of Mortal Kombat: Deception (2004), where he asks Shujinko to find a dagger belonging to Goro, which he in turn keeps for himself until he is knocked out by Jade.
Mortal Kombat: Armageddon (2006) marks Rain's return as a playable character after a decade, as he is selectable along with the series' then-entire roster. As one of only seventeen characters in the game to receive an official biography, he plays his largest role in the original series continuity by learning of his true Edenian heritage from evil Outworld sorcerer Quan Chi, who informs Rain that he is a direct descendant of Argus, the protector god of Edenia, as well as the half-sibling of the game's protagonist Taven and his brother Daegon, both of whom were favored by their father to assume his mantle of Edenia's protectors. Rain consequently starts to refer to himself as a prince of the realm, as seen in Armageddon's training mode, but he still chooses to independently fight on the side of evil. He confronts Taven in the fictional location of Arctika but is defeated in battle and flees into a portal.
His storyline is altered in the 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot, which makes no mention of his father or siblings, instead simply describing him as having been orphaned at a young age by Kahn's conquest of Edenia and raised under the protection of Edenian resistance fighters. As he gained a reputation as an exceptional warrior, his level of arrogance followed suit, and when he was refused leadership of the resistance, he betrayed them to their (unidentified) sworn enemy. This caught the attention of Kahn, who offered the power-hungry Rain an army of his own in exchange for his services. However, in Rain's ending, Kahn had no intention of fulfilling his end of the bargain. Rain, therefore, kills him in combat and ends up saving Earthrealm in the process, for which he is thanked by Raiden, who also informs him that Rain is the son of an Edenian god. Rain, consequently drunk with power to which he felt he was entitled, coupled with a sense of superiority from being the offspring of a god, takes over Kahn's armies to rule all realms, starting, to Raiden's horror, with Earthrealm.
Rain is not playable in Mortal Kombat X (2015), but appears in the game's story mode. He serves as Mileena's advisor and tries to help her reclaim the Outworld throne from the warlord Kotal Kahn in the midst of a civil war. Rain plans to take the throne for himself when the war is over but is stopped by . He is featured in Tanya's non-canonical arcade ending, in which he and Tanya flee Kotal Kahn's forces in Outworld but are captured. She turns him over to Kahn in exchange for clemency, resulting in Rain being burned at the stake.
Rain returns in Mortal Kombat 11 as part of the Kombat Pack 2 DLC, where it is revealed that he manage to escape Kotal's capture, but Tanya did not make it and was killed. His past is further explained in his arcade ending that Argus lied to Rain's birth mother Amara on the day after Rain was born and faked his death from her, leaving her to commit suicide out of a heartbreak while Rain was callously sold to another family without her knowledge. By the time Rain learned not only his heritage, but also he had a birth mother, Rain was furious at the revelation and swore vengeance against Argus, including his half-brothers Dagon and Taven, but leaves his step-mother Delia live to suffer a similar fate as Amara had. Prior to being announced as a downloadable playable fighter, he was initially started out as one of the non-playable classic trilogy ninjas as whom Shang Tsung assumed for his move list, reusing the assets from Mortal Kombat (2011) rather than the assets from Rain's last known appearance in Mortal Kombat X.
After the events of Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath, in which the invasion of Earth is stopped, Rain turns his Allegiance back to the Lin Kuei Clan to work alongside Sub-Zero and Bi-Han once more.
Character design and gameplay
Rain was the tenth palette-swapped human ninja character introduced into the Mortal Kombat series. His offense drew on the power of weather as he was able to harness water and lightning, while he shared Reptile's victory pose and the stance for Ermac's Telekinetic Slam for his lightning strike, which caused opponents to bounce into the air and thus set them up for a juggle combo. His roundhouse kick was unique to the series as it sent opponents flying onto the opposite side of the screen, while his Animality turned him into a pygmy elephant that trumpets the skin of his opponent. Bryan Dawson of Prima Games named Rain in MK Trilogy as one of the series' "cheapest" characters, citing his specials therein that led to lengthy combos.
For his reemergence in Armageddon, Rain was given a new, distinct identity like the other ninjas from the two-dimensional games, with less emphasis on purple for his uniform and more on black and gold, giving him a more regal appearance that now included a back-length cape, while he still concealed his identity behind a mask that itself was a standalone entity as he was now shown as having long, black hair tied up in a topknot. In his official Armageddon render, he is seen brandishing a pair of curved knives but never actually uses them in the game; instead, his weapon is a sword. He was given more water-based special moves for Armageddon and the 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot, the latter in which he was later added as a downloadable character. The character's live-media incarnations were portrayed by African-American actors.
He was played by stuntman Tyrone Cortez Wiggins in a minor role in the 1997 film Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, in which he serves as the general of Shao Kahn's extermination squads but is killed by Kahn after sparing the lives of Kabal and Stryker (both unseen) after capturing them.
Rain makes a brief appearance in one episode of the 1998 television series Mortal Kombat: Conquest and is played by Percy "Spitfire" Brown. He has no dialogue and is sent by Kahn to kill Kung Lao before the next tournament, but is unsuccessful after being forced to flee when Taja intervenes.
In DC Comics' 2015 weekly Mortal Kombat X: Blood Ties prequel miniseries, Rain debuts in the eighth chapter as he joins Reiko and Mileena in their war against Kotal Kahn, manipulating the weather to block out the sun and therefore deny Kahn his primary power source, but he is severely burned by Kahn in retaliation. He is not seen again until the twenty-first chapter, in which he is disfigured and recuperating under Mileena's care after being recovered by the Red Dragon clan. He informs Mileena of a conversation he overheard among Red Dragon clansmen regarding her former comrade Reiko's loyalty to Havik, resulting in Mileena planning an invasion of Shang Tsung's island to hunt down Reiko, Havik and the Red Dragon.
Mortal Kombat director Simon McQuoid revealed to Collider that Rain was originally going to be in the reboot but was cut from the story.
Merchandise and promotion
Rain was included as an "exclusive" in a "Klassic Ninja" six-pack of 4" action figures released in 2011 by Jazwares, while a polystone statue of the character was released by Syco Collectibles in 2012.
Reception
Rain is one of the Mortal Kombat series' more negatively received characters from the first generation of games, mainly due to his origins. Topless Robot, in 2009, ranked him fourth in their list "The 9 Most Pathetic Fighting Game Characters" for the same reasons, adding: "It's not that Rain is an untalented fighter. It's just that you can't help but feel like you've seen this guy somewhere before." Den of Geek's Gavin Jasper criticized Rain's UMK3 attract-mode appearance as "false advertising", but also ranked Rain 36th in his 2015 rating of the 64 series characters due to his MK2011 ending and the expansion of his backstory in Armageddon as "a power-hungry jerk who believed that he was owed everything." UGO ranked him 28th out of the series' top 50 characters in 2012. "Most Mortal Kombat characters don't get their start as an inside joke, but Rain proves to be a rare exception." Elijah Watson of Complex named Rain as one of the series' most brutal characters in 2013.
Rain's "Upside Down Uppercut" Fatality from Trilogy, in which he punches his opponent apart into four separate segments that fly vertically offscreen and then drop back down to perfectly reform their upended corpse, placed on 1UP.com's list of Mortal Kombat's fifteen worst Fatalities and made Game Informer's selection of the series' seven worst finishers: "Rain was one of the many palette-swap clones in Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and he easily had the worst Fatality." His Animality tied with that of Scorpion as the eighth-worst Fatality in the series from GamePro. Robert Workman of Prima Games ranked his "Bubble Burst" Fatality 41st in his 2014 list of the series' fifty best Fatalities.

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