When the 12th Mortal Kombat game was revealed as Mortal Kombat 1, I rolled my eyes a little but didn’t let it get to me too much. This isn’t a series that takes itself too seriously, but it’s also proven in the past that it doesn’t give a Fujin about its naming conventions.

Not only do most of the games in the series not even have numbers, but we went from Mortal Kombat (that’s the 2011 reboot to be clear) to Mortal Kombat X suddenly using a Roman numeral, and then back to Mortal Kombat 11 shrugging its shoulders and going right back to the norm. The latest game cheekily using “1” in its title felt like it was in on the joke and self-aware of how little it has mattered up until now. Don’t even get me started on how it's technically Mortal 1 Kombat…

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If the big “1” in the title and endless talk of timeline resets and reinvented versions of characters had you thinking that this was the perfect time to jump into Mortal Kombat, then you might want to rethink that, as Mortal Kombat 1 is more reliant on your knowledge of both the overall series and the past few games than any other MK before it.

This is made clear from the first five minutes of the campaign mode, which focuses on Shang Tsung’s place in this new timeline. Not only is this a direct continuation of the events of Mortal Kombat 11’s Aftermath DLC but it also relies on you knowing how important Shang Tsung is in the series and how powerful he used to be to understand how far he’s fallen now at the hands of Liu Kang.

Things get even more complicated when Tsung is approached by an unnamed figure resembling Kronika, one of the more recent characters in the series and arguably the most important from Mortal Kombat 11, who tells him that his fate has been messed with and that he’s supposed to be something more, again hammering it home that this isn’t the fresh start that you might think and that knowing the lore here is key to understanding what’s happening.

I know this for a fact because my roommate was sat next to me watching the opening hour and had no idea what was going on, who everyone was, and why Liu Kang would ever pick a washed-up actor like Johnny Cage to defend Earthrealm next to literal ninjas and yakuza members. I might know that he’s doing it because he knows Johnny Cage’s true power, but that’s because I’ve followed the series for as long as it’s been putting “K” in front of everything.

The choice to go for Mortal Kombat 1 instead of MK12 only gets more confusing as you get further into the campaign. Watching characters either defy the fate we know they once had or live up to it is a big part of what makes the story mode so interesting here, but if you’re going in blind, seeing Johnny Cage slowly become the hero he’s supposed to be isn’t going to hit the same.

I won’t talk too much about the latter half of the story mode, but it completely throws out any notion of being a reboot and goes all in on being an amalgamation of everything that’s happened in the series so far across multiple different timelines and eras. It can be a lot to take in all at once even for someone who’s played every game in the series to date, let alone someone waltzing in expecting a reboot.

To be clear, I’m glad that Mortal Kombat 1 continues MK9’s tradition of rebooting while also technically carrying on the same story, but it feels a little silly and gimmicky to try and get away with marketing itself as a timeline reset and soft reboot when so much of the story mode’s appeal comes from seeing characters we know with the knowledge of who they might eventually end up being. Just don’t make this the first Mortal Kombat game you play. Or, if you do, don’t expect to understand it.

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