I know I've got other things on my plate, but yesterday for some reason I took screen captures of Mortal Kombat characters. Then I remembered my desire to palette-swap the ones that were missing from the rainbow of ninjas. Then I started fiddling with it, and the next thing I know, I used up a big chunk of yesterday to assemble this:
Unmasked male ninjas:Unmasked Ermac, Unmasked Scorpion, Unmasked Sub-Zero (2P variant), Unmasked Sub-Zero, Reiko?, Unmasked Human Smoke, Unmasked Noob Saibot
Male ninjas:Ermac, Scorpion, Reptile, Sub-Zero, Rain, Human Smoke, Noob Saibot
Cyborg ninjas:Sektor, Cyrax, "Relish"?, ?, Smoke (purple), Smoke (grey), ?
Female ninjas:Skarlett?, ?, Jade, Kitana, Mileena, Khameleon, ?
The graphics are from the Super NES version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. (In Mortal Kombat Trilogy, the graphics are better (>_<), some of the basic ninjas have a different pose, and Kitana holds a fan.) Though I couldn't get Human Smoke or Khameleon, I'm very happy with the palette swaps I made to resemble them, which look like they probably would be - I even confirmed Smoke's colour from a screenshot in Mortal Kombat Trilogy and I got it incredibly close. Strangely, Smoke (the cyborg one) appears purple instead of grey here, so I used him for the purple cyborg.
In fact, I'm still missing Tremor (a brown male ninja from one of the side-story games) and Chameleon (a Mortal Kombat Trilogy (except N64) hidden character who cycles through the male ninjas, who wears all colours or is transparent).
I've created some colour swaps that might have names already. Ruby is a non-canonical red female ninja from the cartoon (I hear she should be black, not Asian). Or perhaps that's like Skarlett (a rumoured character much like how Ermac was created from a rumour about ERror MACros). The purple unmasked male ninja looks a lot like Reiko (who appeared in MK4), without his facepaint or face tattoos or whatever. One that I made but not shown here is a black-clad male human ninja (which would probably be the closest to a real typical ninja) because Noob Saibot is kind of freaky in his wraith form - however I chose to stick with the game's version. Since Sektor and Cyrax were originally known as Ketchup and Mustard respectively, I imagined that my green and white cyborg ninjas might have been called Relish and Mayonnaise. I created a couple green unmasked male ninjas (one turned out lime, eeew) but then it turns out that if two people select unmasked Sub-Zero, one would become green so I ended up using the official one instead. Yes, there are 2P variants to everybody which I'm not going to do.
One of the rejects is a pink-clad unmasked male ninja. Ick.
I am aware of some minor errors in there and some things I could do differently (WTF is with the blue cyborg ninja?). And I might find a way to add the brown and transparent ninjas. I've wasted enough time on this as it is, though, but for now this is fairly good, wouldn't you say?
Go, ninja, go ninja, go!
If you've been following Mortal Kombat this generation, you'll know that eventually all of the ninjas now have unique looks. But this was still a neat experiment.
