No no no no no fucking no! MkD had the worst art direction out of all of the games. (Besides MKA). Characters had too much armor, too many sashes and bands, and just other aspects that made them straight up ugly. At times I thought I was playing soul calibur.

None of the levels really sucked me in either. MK9's levels are 100 times better. There is more animation, detail, lighting, and color.

If there's one thing I hate the most about MKD, it's probably the roster, which the art director is partly responsible for.

This

This

To cut myself a bit lose: you all suck beyond reason. You suck more than this guy.










Seriously, I am not buying it. Soul Calibur looks anything BUT MKD. Neon quasi-power fantasy anime looks against diluted-subdued, actually functional garbs.

Aside the engine limitations of MKD. And aside that MK3 looked to me irredeemably horrendous: spandex indians, people with clothes that were more ridiculous than the Hard Gay parodies of the village people. And Hsu Hao.

Personally metaphysically I hang the responsible one for MK3. And be thankful that MK2011 downplayed the MK3-ness and made the characters look believable, not some rejects at the action figure sale. But each to his own. Either the MKDA and MKD designs or the artistic take of Legacy (digging white-gray Sub-Zero). New MK comes around behind them.

As much as I like MK9 designs, MKD costumes and general menu designs, aside from the Krypt and some characters (Dairou and Kobra) designs, were superior almost in every way to the MK9 ones.

Especially when it comes to ninja characters. I like Scorpion and Sub-Zero outfits in MK9, but they MKD costumes were so much better. They were interesting and fresh. Female desings in the MKD were much better too. In fact this game gave Milleena one of the best costume in MK history. And Jade and Sindel were looking much more interesting than in MK9.

Overall I'd prefer art directors return to the MKD tone and ideas. They felt much more inspired and interesting.

Despite what the cool people think, MKDA and MKD had great atmospheres, and the costumes represented that. I'm not saying this game has bad costumes, but MKDA and MKD surely didn't. And they had much better alternates than this game for sure. Look at some alts like Stryker and Kabal and it's like "WTF's the point", but back in the other games, alternate costume were actually....alternative and different.

As for stages, this game owns. The "Living Forest" in MKD was atrocious, and lots of other stages seemed like filler.

I want the feel of Deadly Alliance mixed with the darkness MK4.

And the great character design of the 3D MK's rather than the lame ones we have now.

Shredder Zero was by far and away the best look he's ever had.

His MKDA maskless "Clint Eastwood" primary is a close runner-up,though.

Deadly Alliance and Deception had the best atmosphere of all the MK games, and the art direction definitely played a major role in that. The character models were certainly plastic looking, but the designs for the most part were great and well above and beyond the designs of this game.

So yeah I'm hoping they can somehow bring back the atmospheric elements of those two games. Not that it'll happen. And I'm moving this to the Future MK forum.

How did this go from menu layouts and music to costume design?

The main menu from MK9 is nothing compared to MKD's, even though I hate that game, I must say that's one thing it got right. But the stages were awful, in MKDA they were very awesome.

Falling Cliffs,Sky Temple and Slaughterhouse would like to have word with you.

I liked Deadly Alliance's better. Scorpion's primary in that game is probably my favorite look for him to this day. However, some characters got a little messed up too.

Actually I look at the alt outfits in MK9 and think "huh, that actually makes sense" instead of just hanging my head and hiding my face in my palms while looking at the MKD alt designs and thinking "what the fuck happened?"

And the menu layout in this game is also aesthetically better, it doesn't hurt that the music isn't a flaming bag of dog shit either.

Yeah, the main menus could have been better. I mean, I don't hate them as much as I hate MvC3's or Super Street Fighter 4's (and I love SSF4), but they could have been better.

You know...I wish they could do something like make character specific main menus that can be chosen for each profile.

I'd love to start the main menu, and see Stryker posing like a bad ass in the Street Stage or something.

Kind of like Armageddon, but far better.

I hate these..."YOU'RE IN THE ACTION" main menus like MKvsDCU. I don't care how awesome Batman vs Scorpion is. I'm getting motion sickness just trying to set up my options!


I can't agree. I'm not saying his past, standard costumes were genius, but I really did not like the Shredder costume.

His MK3 (maskless) and MKDA were both far better.

I would actually say we should have Shaolin Monks's art guys in the next game. They seemed to understand simplicity is good.

I mean with this game Scorpion's, Smoke's and Reptile's alts were better than the primary at least. In my mind.

My real criticism with the alts is that a lot of them are too similar to the primary in terms of the primary colour and design.

I did genuinely like both DA's and Deception's art as well as Armageddon's.

Deadly Alliance injected steroids and Viagra into everyone with Deception adding a lot of extra design tweaks to the returnees. Armageddon carried on with Shinnok, Rain, Sheeva and Reiko looking particularly bad arse.

But again if you were a ninja your outfits were limited.

For primaries they have probably got it now. For alternates they need to do the opposite now.

I mean does Scorpion, Sub Zero, Reptile, Ermac and everyone else need to be their original colour? Hell even Noob could be dark purple/Dark blue.

Eh, MK:D was kind of a mixed bag for me. I liked the menu layout, for sure. I also dug some of the music, but overall the game was WAY too dark and didn't have enough of the asian flare that MK1 and MK:DA did so well.

As for the characters looks, outside of Ermac and Mileena, nothing really did it for me in MK:D. Baraka looked terrible, I hated Sub Shredder's look, I hated Smoke, and all of the new characters looked extremely mediocre to me.

Some of the stages were cool, though i wouldn't include the Slaughterhouse on that list. But every MK game has SOME good arenas. MK:DA had Lung Hai Temple, the House of Pekara and a few other really cool ones.

But I'd agree with Chrome in his assessment of MK3's look. How they went from the cool designs of MK1 and MK2 to what they had in three is still a mystery to me. The robots looked like they had bicycle pants and chest protectors, Shang Tsung looked lik ehe was wearing a diaper and a horrible wig, Stryker looked like Joey from Full House and sadly the list goes on.

Personally, I like a lot of the art style in MK9 in terms of character costumes and arenas, but the menu system and select screen all look pretty blah to me. I was convinced that both were fill-ins until the real menu system and select screen would be implemented. Of course, I wasn't overly pleased to find that wasn't the case.

Still, there's a lot in terms of art style that MK9 does well and on the whole, I'd take it over MK:D any day of the week, month or year.