Wanderer Wrote:

People liked Mortal Kombat's story because of how it was told, and many of them don't seem to realize this. Many events are left up to the reader's imagination, creating a sense of mysterious wonder about how events play out behind the scenes. You are in control of the narrative. You are given the plot, and your imagination makes up how point A gets to point B.

Wanderer Wrote:
While I agree that the story mode is extremely poorly done, your review doesn't really shed light on why there are so many problems to begin with. Most of your complaints have more to do with retcons and inconsistencies between canons. This in itself is not the problem. It was never the problem. Story mode's downfall is in its narrative, not its plot. It's the difference between how it happens and what happens.

You only seemed to realize this on a subconscious level as you were running down your list of criticisms with the game, but it's the one and only reason why story mode is as bad as it is. "The tournament is missing a bracket." "Cyber Sub-Zero dies from a single hit to the chest." "Quan Chi is always loitering around in the background." These examples are issues that concern how the events play out, not the event itself.

People liked Mortal Kombat's story because of how it was told, and many of them don't seem to realize this. Many events are left up to the reader's imagination, creating a sense of mysterious wonder about how events play out behind the scenes. You are in control of the narrative. You are given the plot, and your imagination makes up how point A gets to point B.

Let's take Kitana and Mileena for example. Kitana and Mileena are sisters. They've grown up together faithfully serving Shao Kahn their whole lives, until Kitana learns the truth behind her heritage and her sister's secret.

What was it that made Kitana so suspicious of Kahn to begin with? How did the battle between Kitana and Mileena unfold? How did Kitana kill Mileena? The answers to these sorts of questions are left up to your imagination.

In contrast, MK9's story mode depicts that it happens something like this:

After beating up Johnny and Smoke because they idiotically fight people unprovoked, Kitana is told by Raiden to visit Shang Tsung's Flesh Pits to find out the truth to what she seeks. She wanders into a refurbished warehouse and finds a half-naked mutant woman lying on a table, whom is awoken by Kitana's intrusion and instantly recognizes Kitana as her "sister." The mutant clone, obviously Mileena, provokes Kitana into fighting her because I guess that's what mutant clones do. They have a duel which Kitana wins and leaves Mileena lying alive but unclothed on the floor. An antagonistic Shang Tsung enters from stage right, provoking Kitana only for Kitana to beat him up too.

Putting the difference in canon aside, there's just simply no way this could've met anyone's expectations because of how it's portrayed. It's directed quite literally like an elementary school play. "You walk this way, and they walk that way. He talks to you, then you talk to him, and then exit this way. Hurry up, Kitana, or we won't have time for little Billy's role!"

Letting the audience's imagination construct the narrative is exactly why the opening of story mode is as highly praised as it is. You're shown a glimpse of the aftermath of a great struggle. Mutilated bodies are strewn around. It's a horrific and ugly sight. Your imagination kicks in and you start to think. "Who decapitated Johnny Cage? How was Sub-Zero able to subdue Scorpion and stab him through the back? How did the unseen warriors meet their fate?" This is a strong storytelling technique when you wish to appease your audience without disappointing them. You give the audience just enough information to appeal to their expectations and let their imagination do the rest of the work for you.

But see, the entire intro is the very definition of a happy accident. They didn't do it this way because they thought it made a strong narrative. They did it this way to cut corners and save the amount of work they had to put into the introduction. This is prevalent all throughout story mode.

Don't want a tournament bracket? Then hell with rules, make it an unfair tournament in Outworld's favor by design. Want Sub-Zero to die in one hit? Make that one hit so powerful it emotionally affects all of the other characters in the same room. Want to give Quan Chi a constant presence? Have him stick to the shadows in background scenery, playing up to his shady manipulator character.

It's not that they couldn't have constructed a better narrative to present the events they wanted. It's that they chose not to do it. "So Johnny Cage goes first and fights Reptile. Then he fights Baraka after that. Oh, what? Nah, doesn't matter that he goes twice in a row."

I would love to see Vogel's script for story mode. I'm really quite curious what the hell he wrote down for scenes for everything to turn out as badly as it did.

RazorsEdge701 Wrote:


Most people have a preference for fiction that doesn't fucking DO giant retcons all the time or pull the rug out from beneath their mainstream universe to replace it with an alternate one while pretending they haven't.

In fact, most fiction doesn't DO those things, because contradicting your own writing is not a tool that a good writer tends to keep in his arsenal, you never see a novelist forget what he wrote in his previous book and say something completely different happened when he writes the sequel.

Only comic books (and now this game) do that because in comics, the writer of a character's book isn't constant, it changes, and one writer decides he doesn't like what the previous writer did so he just undoes it at a whim. And people wonder why comic books are a dying medium. People get tired of stories they paid money for and read and enjoyed being treated as meaningless.

The weird thing is, Vogel is still working on this series and he used to demonstrate a mastery of and loyalty to Tobias's work in his past three canon outings.

I say do it like the fucking movies if you want to reboot and start over so bad: start completely from fucking scratch, don't play fucking continuity gymnastics. Batman Begins didn't pretend it was a sequel to Keaton or Clooney. I hated Vincent Proce's concepts when he started posting them...but in hindsight? I would've WAY preferred THAT as a game than what we got here, because at least it didn't pretend to be part of the same universe as MK1 thru 3, it admitted it was starting over from scratch.

Chrome Wrote:
Nobody blasts The Magnificent Seven for being a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai