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My thoughts on Mortal Kombat X's story and design (long)

posted 3 years ago by sati_84 (441)
6 replies | jump to latest

I absolutely loved MK9 and consider it the best in the series (MK2 is a very-very close second), but I missed playing MKX when it was new. I picked it up in a gamestore recently for ~$8, and I figured now is the time to play the story mode and the arcade towers with my fave characters.

Warning: this will be a wall of text, so feel free to skip to the TLDR at the end of the post.

Let me divide this post into two parts: first will be about the story, the second will be about the character/environment designs and the gameplay.

STORY MODE (MK9 and MKX spoilers!!!)

OK, so the plot of MKX's story was confusing, too simple and badly exceuted. The confusion stemmed from the fact that many plot developments were not explained at all. Case in point: Raiden gets Shinnok's amulet in a flashback sequence, so in the present, you'd think the good guys have it, but somehow it's in Mileena's possession, and it's never explained how it got to her. Oh, was I supposed to read a comic to understand what exactly happened between MK9 and the start of MKX? I wasn't aware, and I don't think this was a good idea.

For starters, any story should be understandable as it is presented without needing to read/watch supplemental material. It's ok for a comic to enhance the experience and give additional interesting plot details, but it cannot be a pre-requisite for the player to even understand what's going on. But even if I accept this, it's ridiculous that NRS could not be bothered to at least provide a 3 minute long skippable recap of the comic for the uninitiated players. As it stands, at several points in the story I had zero information about basic stuff, and that hurt my experience tremendously.

The other thing that hurt my experience tremendously was how utterly bland and uninteresting the story really is. I normally don't mind simple plots, but the effort they put into this one was so low, I have to mention it. This "bad guy gets a macguffin, almost takes over Earth(realm), all seems lost when a hero comes and defeats him" is sooooooo basic, it's bordering on self-parody. Seriously they could not come up with anything better? Disappointing.

I have things that tremendously hurt my experience in abundance, so let me mention the most crucial one: the presentation of the story was both incompetent and incredibly bland. Incompetent in the sense that they obviously wanted the player to care about the fates of the characters throughout, but for the new characters, they offered minimal characterization (or for some of them, no characterization at all!). With the old characters, they did a decent job most of the time, but since I was missing vital information about what happened to them, their behavior was oftentimes alienating. I can accept Mileena wanting to be the queen of Outworld, but nothing else is revealed about her intentions. Johnny Cage and Sonya have a daughter now, but they also have a grudge against each other, and we don't get any explanation about what went down. Which would be fine, if the writing was sophisticated and hinted at certain events, but all we get is one line from Johnny about how Sonya was always working and never had time for Cassie... which is a tired, bland cliché, and on top of that, it's never revealed why Sonya is mad at Johnny all the time. I lost interest in the interactions of these two very early on.

The new good characters are the daughters and sons of classic characters. I mentioned Cassie already, who is a special forces tough girl. Then there is Jacqui Briggs, the daughter of Jax, who is... also a special forces tough girl, but black. And then there is Takeda and Kung Jin, son of Kenshi and cousin of Kung Lao respectively, who are... generic martial artists. I can't think of anyhing more specific about them. Remember how MK2 had interesting, eerie atmosphere and mysterious new characters who were recognizable and intriguing? Well, MKX has... these guys, and what's worse, their storyline is also boring, but this could be chalked up to the fact that the overall plot is weak.

For the next gen characters, sure, the writers are trying to provide characterization through flashbacks, but these are incredibly clichéd, and not explaining their motivations at all. And then there are some new additions on the evil side as well: D'Vorah has interesting design, but she's just there to execute her hidden agenda, and we don't know why exactly she is working with Quan Chi to release Shinnok. We have Erron Black, who is intriguing for maybe two minutes, and then you realize that you won't get a backstory on him either, and then there is Ferra/Torr, a nice concept and design, and I'd have wanted to learn what their deal is, but you guessed it, they're just there for a grand total of 2 fights in the story, getting maybe 3 lines of dialogue, and none of those could be tied to any actual events of the plot.

Continued in the next post due to character limit

[–] sati_84 (441) 3 years ago

I almost forgot Kotal Kahn, who at the beginning of the game is on the throne of Outworld, and I have to commend NRS on their brilliance: no Sun God was ever this bland in any media, ever. He is just a generic "I'll kill all my enemies" kind of ruler, no finesse, no deception, no thinking... and no charisma. At all.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to have all the origin stories spelled out and have a 18 hour long fighting game campaign, but 8-9 hours would have been nice to get more information about why anyone does anything in this game. The full story is however 4-5 hours long, and even for a fighting game that's pretty disappointing and objectively only enough to provide meaningful arc to a handful of characters - and we don't even have that...

Without overanalyzing the actual plot, I have to take mention of how the creators disrespected long time fan favorite characters. In particular, Mileena got horrible treatment - the fact that she died not even halfway through the story is not the issue, but in this game, she wasn't established as a credible threat. Case in point: she caused nothing more than a mild inconvenience to Kotal (if even that), she did not kill or even wound anyone from Kotal's team, and did not really do... anything remarkable. Then she is executed by D'Vorah - the fatality was great, but the execution is really stupid: Mileena could have chomped her face off before she could release her insects, so the only character who had the chance to fight back was Mileena. No comment.

Some more perplexing details include the complete youth squad getting beaten by Sub Zero at one point of the story then at the end the same characters are suddenly hyper-competent, beating the evil characters left and right, and then Cassie beats Shinnok himself... the power levels are seriously messed up.

Continued in the next post due to character limit

[–] sati_84 (441) 3 years ago

A million different ways they could have wrote the story to have a meaningful Sub Zero appearance without completely ruining the offspring characters' reputation right out of the gate. This was a very weird choice. What was also weird is the very end of the campaign: Cassie beats Shinnok, and since this was at around the 4 hour mark, I thought this was the first half of the story and now we are going on an epic quest to get back the souls of the revenant characters... but no, it ends. And the fan favorite revenant characters are still revenants, with not even a mention how it would be nice to have them back (OK, Raiden mentions Liu Kang and Kung Lao once, but no love for Kabal and Kitana)... again, a very baffling decision by the writers.

In summary, don't get me wrong: MK9's story was far from perfect, it had many stupid and contrived plot developments, it treated some of the characters horribly (Shang Tsung was blamed for everything, even when it made no sense, and almost the entire cast on the good side was at one point eliminated by Sindel, which is stupid and disrespectful), but the voice acting, the flow of the cutscenes and the fights and the overall scope and execution of the story was competent, and it resulted ultimately in a good experience. Not brilliant, but good nonetheless.

MK9 failed to tell a good story, but it failed entertainingly, so its story mode was OK in many areas (excluding the plot itself).

Continued in the next post due to character limit

[–] sati_84 (441) 3 years ago

In contrast, in MKX the voice acting (with the exception of D'Vorah, Kano and maybe Raiden) is atrociuos, the characterization of the new characters is nonexistent, the flow of the cutscenes and the fights is beyond awkward (in Takeda's flashback, he beats Kenshi, his father into a bloody pulp, and then they settle their differences and team up; in Kung Jin's flashback KJ is beating Raiden into a bloody pulp, then they converse some more and KJ sees the error of his ways... these are all ridiculous situations between characters that are on the same side, and yet they decide to settle their differences in Mortal Kombat, and multiple times the characters are saying "I mean you no harm" before or after beating each other brutally... sigh), and all in all we can say that MKX failed to tell a good story, but unlike MK9, the story mode did not have any redeeming qualities.

DESIGN & GAMEPLAY

The story mode section turned out to be a much longer rant than I planned, so I'll try to keep this part short. The following is of course all subjective, but I have two main gripes with the design and the gameplay: the character designs are generic with very few exceptions, and the gameplay doesn't feel responsive at all.

So about the character designs, I'd say Mileena's design is OK, D'Vorah and Ferra/Torr are interesting and decent, Sub Zero's and Scorpion's appearance is also acceptable, and the rest of the cast is utterly forgettable. My series favorite, Kitana looks passable in arcade mode (where she is playable and not a revenant), but her costume is nothing special and her stances look ridiculous (more on this in the next paragraph). Yes, the female ninjas were overly sexualized in MK9, but MK9 was a next gen reimagined version of MK 1, 2 and 3, so it elevated an already existing design to a next level, and for that it had to keep that feature, and it did a brilliant job.

Continued in the next post due to character limit

[–] sati_84 (441) 3 years ago

Toning down the sexuality of the female characters is not the problem, their bland, unremarkable, boring character design is. The MK series is no stranger to introduce extremely forgettable characters, mind you, in MK4 we had Reiko and Kai who were just as generic as Jacqui, Cassie, Kung Jin and Takeda here... but then there is Jax, Sonya and Johnny Cage, and it doesn't help at all that character variations exist in the game, because NRS is so brilliant, they could design not only one but three washed down, lowest common denominator, no-risk taken costumes for them. I kid you not, there are three identical looking characters in this game with forgettable, generic special moves: Sonya, Cassie and Jacqui are all special forces tough girls, in grey clothes / body armor. The stages are also utterly forgettable and none of them are particularly nicely designed, maybe with the exception of the jungle.

About the gameplay's responsivity: I'm an extremely casual MK-player, so I liked that the inputs of certain special moves were F,F or B,B and an action button. In MKX they did away with this, because of game mechanic reasons, which I can understand. However, Kitana's fan lift for example was B,B,B,HP in MK2 and B,B,FP in MK9 (front punch being the equivalent of High Punch, I even mapped them on the same button as in MK2, when I'm playing MK2 on emulator). But in MKX, it became D,B,BK - well, I can understand the D,B part of this input, they had to switch the first B to something else, and D is convenient for that, but it totally fucks my brain up that I triggered this move with the strongest punch for decades and now suddenly I need to activate it with the weakest kick? What the fuck is going on? There are other weird input decisions for some classic moves, but this takes the cake.

Continued in the next post due to character limit

[–] sati_84 (441) 3 years ago

Of course you could argue that the inputs for the specials never made sense, because we had Jax's dash punch activated with F,F,HK (High Kick at the end) in MK3 and I agree. One can get used to the inputs, but I have a more serious issue, and that affects all of the characters: the animations and the flow of the game. Playing the first few matches in MKX I couldn't put my finger on why I felt something is wrong. I couldn't link combos and specials to each other the way I could in other MK games, even right out of the gate. Then I paid a bit more attention, and found that I just don't like the animation of any of the characters, as all of them are moving in an extremely unnatural and stilted way. I'm not saying realistic movement is what I demand from a fighting game that includes magical characters. But a punch should look like a punch, an uppercut has to look brutal, a flip should be a flip, and a fighting stance should look like a stance from which a decent punch or kick can be initiated. While fighting, the characters should look dynamic, snappy and energetic. It's extremely hard to link moves together when my guy consistently performs extremely stiff, awkward movements, uppercuts that look like they just harmlessly flailing their arms, fighting stances that make zero sense (Kitana (Royal Storm), what are you doing? Jesus Christ!), and let me talk about flips as well. In MK9, all characters did flips when jumping forwards or backwards. Flipping is not realistic at all, but looks cool and gives an extra dynamism to mid air kicks, jumps and specials. In MK X, certain characters flip, others don't, and the non-flipping characters look incredibly awkward when jumping. Just look at Kotal Kahn - enough said.

Continued in the next post due to character limit

[–] sati_84 (441) 3 years ago

To better illustrate my points, I found a brilliant video on YouTube, where someone with a background in professional animation breaks down Mortal Kombat X's many-many animation failures. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t06Dkdg6fEo

TL;DR: I found MKX to be a disappointment. The most important aspects I expect in a MK-game are seriously flawed, such as character design, animations, and atmosphere. The story mode also much weaker than it was in MK9 in my opinion. If you like the movement and the character designs, then by all means go for it, you'll enjoy playing it. For me the gold standard MK game on current gen PCs is still MK9. Despite its age, the artstyle and animation is perfect for me.

Inb4 "Why do you play a fighting game for the story? And why do you expect literary levels of writing from a fighting game story?"

I don't play a fighting game for the story per se, but NRS decided to include a story mode, so it's in no way immune to criticism. Of course there are limitations on how sophisticated a FG story can be, so I don't expect anything really thought-provoking or high brow or anything like that. What I do expect however is characterization (with character motivations that make sense, also power levels and personalities should be consistent), a plot that's at least a bar higher than the generic "bad guy is coming" borefest and an intriguing atmosphere. Also, all this should be presented using adequate production values. Based on these criteria, MKX failed horribly to deliver something I could enjoy (large part of this is of course subjective), and largely disrespected fan favorite characters like Mileena and Kitana. And of course MKX has problems in the gameplay, designs and animations department as well, so the quality of the story mode itself is not even my biggest criticism towards the game...

THE END