There needs to be more to the fighting system. Mk:DA was a step in the right direction, let's take a look at the evolution of the system.
MK1- What can I say? Old school, all about the juggles and uppercuts. For the time it was fun, and even looked cool for the time, but obviously they had to get away from it with Street Fighter starting to add combos to their series.
MK2- More juggling, but more creative juggling and faster gameplay make for a better combat system in a time where games didn't exactly make leaps and bounds over it's predecessors.
NOTE- MK2 is actually one of those games during that time that did makes leaps and bounds over the previous game, just not really in that area.
MK3- A COMBO SYSTEM! And a pretty good one I might add, everyones combo's had their own unique style, damage, button configurations and everything, it was quite a nice change. A lot of the old juggles still worked too which was also good, but the addition of the combo system was a requirement since the release of Killer Instinct.
MK4- I really don't know what they were thinking. This was a step back in my opinion, everyone had the same combos aside from juggles. Dissapointing. This game was still fun because it was fast and furious (without the cars), but it lacked dept. Some of the fatalities were good though (Quan Chi) and I am a closet Shinnok fan.
MK:DA- Definately the nicest one of all, depth, direction, unique style, great flow. Truly, a system that has great potential to be expanded. The problem with this system is a lack of freedom. There isn't enough different things you can do, it's pretty much one or two combos per person, and you don't have to do the whole thing if you want it to look different.
I realize that MK offers generally a lot more than other fighters, such as VIrtua fighter or Soul Calibur, whic are purely based on the fighting and don't offer much in the way of story, extras (minus weapon master mode in SC) and character design (minus a few characters in SC), but I beleive that in order to compete in the next while, MK will will have to step up to the challenge of adding depth to the fighting styles.
It may not have to go quite as far as Virtua Fighter, but let's at least measure up to Soul Calibur.
Now, perhaps the reason for this sense of a lack of depth is because of the style change thing you have to perform manually that it seems a little less deep (and more deep at the same time I guess). Maybe because you don't actually change styles in VF or SC, it seems like they have more moves and combos in those games. But let's take a look at this, are you really going to change styles in a fight? Not likely, you should maybe combine styles, makes sense to me.
How about everyone just has a bunch of moves and the only other stance would be weapon. I mean if I'm feeding someone the boot, I don't even really think about what martial arts I'm performing.
Albeit, the other stances are nice to look at, but you could just have the character change to sort of a random of 3 or 4 stances after doing a move, or coordinate it to specific moves to what stance he/she would be in after they performed that move.
Does anyone feel that the fighting system should be enhanced in 6? I'm sure it will be regardless, but I'm hoping for a fairly big step. I enjoyed the system in MK5, I just thought it had so much more potential.
