TemperaryUserName Wrote:
Why is Aquaman conceding to Superman? Never explained. Why is Cyborg willing to torture people? Only explained vaguely. Why is Hawkgirl so into this whole regime thing? It's only explained in her arcade ending. MK9 felt really self-contained despite all the stupid shit that happened in it.
That's not really true. MK9 is full of character bits that never ONCE come up during Story Mode, like Sonya's motivation being her dead dad, or Smoke's amnesiac quest to find out where his powers come from. The only reason we know anything about who Reptile, Baraka, and Sheeva are is because it was explained in previous games. In fact, entire plot twists, like Smoke being saved and Sub-Zero not, would mean nothing to you emotionally, if you weren't familiar with Sub-Zero and Cyber-Smoke's story in the old games. MK9 skips over lots of stuff because it assumes you've either read all the bios or played the original MK1 thru 3. Hell, Kintaro's backstory and purpose beyond "big dude who fights for Shao Kahn", like the explanation for WHY he looks like a tiger instead of like Goro and Sheeva, is actually STILL a mystery to anyone who didn't read the obscure-ass demo leak only we of the message boards know about, because they didn't put the boss bios in the actual game!
That's the opposite of self-contained.
Anyway, of course we don't know the regime guys' motivations. The regime is 5 years old, you can't fill a game with that many flashbacks. That's why they put out a tie-in comic.
As for the rest, I will give you that Shazam's murder basically amounted to little more than a weak shock moment.
But MK9 had so much more of the same cheap trick. It's become a really shitty NRS habit thinking that shocks are good, when that's dumb because, like, it only works the FIRST time the player sees it, once it's spoiled, it loses that value and becomes only as good as the actual writing OF the shock...which is almost never good.
So for me, it's the fact that that's the ONLY time they pull any stupid shocking stuff, is the reason I prefer Injustice to MK9. It's not just the retcons that make me hate MK9, though they're certainly a part of it, it's the fact that the whole game's plot, the only reason it IS the way it is, was to make it possible to do scenes like trading Sub-Zero for Smoke, the Sindel massacre, and Liu getting fried, this "OMG moment" shit that immediately STOPS being an "OMG moment" the second time you play the game. That's a worthless bullshit way to write. A good story is one that's just as good no matter how many times you reread or rewatch it, it's not one that relies entirely on surprise, on doing whatever the audience least expects just to get a rise out of them.
Even an average story, a mediocre one that doesn't really take chances, which I'm willing to agree Injustice is, is better than a story based entirely on shock value.
