Mortal Kombat 1 was announced on Thursday in a bombastic trailer showcasing Fire God Liu Kang's ascension to the supreme guardian of Earthrealm. This seemed to confirm the canonical ending of Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath where Liu Kang defeats Shang Tsung. However, the trailer also revealed Shang Tsung will return through a fiery portal and start killing people with reckless abandon until an angry Fire God violently stops him. This has some fans wondering if perhaps both endings of Aftermath are canonical.
As a brief recap, Aftermath begins with Shang Tsung and Liu Kang teaming up to help restore the Mortal Kombat timeline. They need the Crown of Souls to control Kronika's Hourglass, so Shang Tsung goes off into history to find it. Along the way, he betrays everyone and steals a bunch of souls, ultimately battling Liu Kang for the Hourglass.
Here's where the player gets to decide Aftermath's ending. If Shang Tsung wins, he takes Liu Kang's godly soul to achieve ultimate power and begin his conquest of the realms. If Liu Kang wins, he erases Shang Tsung from history and uses the Crown of Souls and Hourglass to forge his new era of peace.
Most of the trailer seems to support the Liu Kang ending, but then if Shang Tsung has been erased from history, how does he reappear in a fiery portal?
Reddit user some-kind-of-no-name theorizes that both Aftermath endings are canonical. "Both Lui Kang and Shang Tsung kill their nemesis in their ending, but here they are both present," they wrote. "Plus, Shang Tsung from the portal looks similar to his ending in MK11. His being a pre-order bonus also implies he'll be present in the story. I think Netherrealm did a Daggerfall here and made both canonical. Fire God Liu Kang and Time Lord Shang Tsung will fight again."
However, other Redditors refute this theory in the comments. For starters, Shang Tsung has a new face, so perhaps he's a different Shang Tsung than the one in MK11. Further, if Shang Tsung had defeated Liu Kang, he'd still have the Crown of Souls, and the Shang Tsung in the trailer had some wicked claws but no Crown.
Still others point out that this is only a trailer and might not be indicative of MK1's entire story. "Dark Raiden was in the MK11 CGI trailer and was dropped almost immediately in story, so who knows what it could be," another Redditor wrote. "The beginning could be about Fire God Liu and Shang fighting only to have them immediately clash and permanently reset the timeline, with Chapter 2 starting with the first or second tournament and going from there."
We'll certainly find out more as we get closer to Mortal Kombat 1's Sept 19 release date.