Motaro

Motaro
Mortal Kombat character
Motaro character sketch for Mortal Kombat Trilogy (1996), by John Tobias
First game	Mortal Kombat 3 (1995)
Created by	John Tobias
Portrayed by	Stop-motion (MK3/UMK3/MKT) Deron McBee (Annihilation)
Fictional profile
Origin	Outworld
Fighting styles	Horse (MKA)

Motaro is a fictional character in the Mortal Kombat fighting game series. He made his first appearance as a sub-boss character in Mortal Kombat 3, where he has the legs of a horse and the torso of a man. In Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, Motaro has become a bipedal humanoid and a playable character.

Motaro is from a race of Centaurians (a race of centaur-like creatures with ram-like horns and a long metallic rat-like tail). Motaro's kind have come into conflict with the Shokan, a the four-armed race to which Goro, Kintaro and Sheeva belong, as Kahn favors the Centaurians and aids them in the defeat and subjugation of the Shokan race. As a Centaurian, Motaro possesses a great strength as well as a razor-sharp tail that fires energy blasts from its tip, and the power of teleportation. He also has an absolute immunity to projectile attacks, as Motaro's skin appears to have some sort of reflective surface that automatically repels long range attacks to the point of sending them right back at opponents.

In Mortal Kombat 3, Kahn appoints Motaro to head extermination squads dispatched to Earthrealm to vanquish Earth's chosen warriors. When Sonya Blade defeats Kano, throwing him from a skyscraper to the streets below, Motaro recovers the severely injured Kano and brings him back to Shao Kahn's fortress, where Kano is first revived and then imprisoned so he could later be punished by Kahn for failing to defeat Sonya. It is at this point that Motaro was assaulted and supposedly mortally wounded by Sheeva.

Motaro makes a cameo appearance in the "Konquest" mode of Mortal Kombat: Deception. He returns in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, but since then the Centaurians have been put under a curse by the Shokan, turning him and the rest of his race into bipedal Minotaurs; the curse has also relieved him of his most powerful abilities, his skin no longer possessing reflective properties. Ultimately, as with nearly every character of the franchise, Motaro is killed at the end of Armageddon.