Well, let's be real here; you only have but two choices.

You either play the games, or you don't. Regardless of whatever flaws or errors exist, those are your choices, and at the end of the day, you will make that choice.

No, I'm being forceful, like ReptzMK. I don't get his deal. I'm being realistic. We can definitely speak out about the flaws of a game, and we definitely should, but that doesn't change the fact of the matter.

No matter how much we speak or how loudly we complain, we will always only have two choices. You either play the game, or you don't.

Life is more than just whether we do something or don't though, it's how we feel about it after doing it and whether we liked doing it or not and the opinions we share with others. We have emotions and invented language for a reason.
Side note, why does everyone who has a problem with me always go to the "he just compares it to the old and say how much better old things were and new things aren't" defense? That's NOT the only thing I do when I point out the flaws in 9. All the damn time I'm critiquing parts that have NOTHING to do with "old vs new"! Besides, I've also been known to compliment some things 9 did right, like some of the dialogue, the graphics, the seamless loading, the ACTUAL gameplay in said fighting game...
Gee, it's almost like my detractors don't actually read what I wrote, they just have a kneejerk reaction and stick to that.

I'm not sure Razor's problem has ever been with the actual plot of MK9.

It's just that its story narrative was atrociously executed and did not make any sense in a visual medium.

When you actually read a plot synopsis of it, there's a lot less to complain about, but once you see it in motion it makes a whole lot less sense. I'm not sure whom was directing the story mode for MK9 but they sucked at it real bad.

When you read "A super powered Sindel brutally kills several hero characters in a single cutscene" your head starts playing imagination and attempts to construct how this scene plays. When you actually see it, it's extremely underwhelming and outright confusing in some instances.

I very much agree, which is why I encourage our right to express our dissatisfaction with whatever it is a game possesses.

However, the choice still remains, and all of the emotions and feelings we emit will - or should - guide us towards making the right choice for us. You cannot get through your satisfaction or dissatisfaction without making this choice. It's not even that we are deliberately aware of the choice. We decide through our actions.

Honestly it's a little bit of both. I mean you're right that the second thing is a way bigger issue, but I'm also not a big fan of stories where the main character is unintelligent, or where the bad guys win. I mean, they should be a threat, Megatron yelling "retreat" at the end of every single episode of Transformers isn't the way to go either...but killing off all the good guys and making them zombie slaves of a badguy...that's a little too bleak for me, not to mention MK9 is the THIRD time Vogel has done it.

YAAASSS, whip that hair back and forth like you're mama. Hair laid like the throw rug is Shao Kahn's throne room

Yeah, that's all I got out of those last two pages.

What was the other time besides Deception?

Especially when she kills both Smoke and Cyber Zero with a single physical hit... Like metal and vapor would be killed that easily by physical attacks...

SO.MUCH.HATE.RIGHT.NOW

MKD, MKA, and MK9 right? I mean no one got turned into a zombie in MKA but it was still the same look at how dead the heroes are story.

I'm counting the fact that Zombie Liu Kang was Dark Raiden's slave. In retrospect, I guess MKA could count as a fourth game where all the main heroes die...but the thing about that is MKA doesn't tell you how it ends, they COULD have made a sequel where it turned out they WEREN'T dead.



Well let me be clear on my feelings about MKX.
And this by the way isn't the first time I've said this, even in this thread, so it shouldn't be a revelation to anybody:

I AM planning to buy it and play it because even though I didn't like MK9, I have HOPE for improvement. I have NEVER been unwilling to give second chances. You're talking to a guy who likes Armageddon and Shaolin Monks despite everything wrong with them for fuck's sake.

Yes, I did call it building a house on a bad foundation...but that doesn't mean the foundation can't be repaired. I don't know where this image of me as hating everything and being nothing but negative and a troll is even coming from, the dude is clearly just going "Stop disliking things I like, I don't want to read someone doing that, go away".

Right, had a feeling it was Zombie Liu

Looking back it was a really dumb idea to even point this out. I really should have just kept my mouth shut and remembered the old saying that compares"arguing on the interwebz" and "the special olympics"...

But I didn't. Poor judgment on my part.

Like I said, I've said my peace. I don't really understand why you're here, Razor, given your intense dislike of where MK is going in terms of lore and storytelling. But you are, so...whateve's.

So! How about that sapphire-garbed Edenian Princess rotting in Hell?

Well I explained it several times so at this point that's not my fault and there's nothing I can do about it.

I actually prefer the bad guys to pose a great threat to heroes; good guys scaring villains is so boring to me.

I think a hero should work fiercely to earn his/her victory. It shouldn't be peachy. Honestly, it should be damn difficult. Hell, it should be at a grave cost sometimes.

This is why I was ultimately satisfied with Sindel killing so many people in one go. It presented the height of the heroes' struggle. Heroes kill multiple opponents all the time, because they're "supposed" to win.

Villains aren't meant merely to lose. They're meant to bring about a great struggle. Sindel created that struggle. Fuck yeah.

*Bites tongue for the sake of civility*

Anyway, I really don't think Kitana is going to return in MKX anyway, so we likely won't see any more development for her until the next game (she may be DLC this time around. Who knows).

I would have liked to have seen her more developed in MK9's story mode, but there were a lot of characters to be explored and you can only spend so much time on each one.

Sindel created the struggle that... Honestly could have lasted a bit longer than a minute to two minutes scene. At least she and Kitana could have had more of a fight with each other than just two lines said between them.

I mean I really liked that scene, finally some bad guy comes in and just takes away all the good from the heroes. I just wished it could have lasted longer.

This.

OptimusGrime's fun fact of the day: You can still like a franchise while disliking one entry.

See, that's sorta how I feel about the whole thing. I'd have been fine with the heroes suffering casualties. But I really would have preferred they not all collectively become braindead and forget they have weapons and super powers for 2 seconds and run at the screaming banshee with nothing but their fists. That was just fucking dumb.

It's official.

Sindel: Doesn't last long enough to satisfy.

I don't think it was a struggle, though, because immediately after Sindel does it, Nightwolf kills her, and Nightwolf's not that important to the plot. He's not a "main" character.

The real heroes, Liu Kang and Raiden, didn't actually have to struggle to beat her, and since there's only one chapter left after she's dead which Raiden spends alone fighting Scorpion, the zombies, Liu Kang (all of which are NOT members of Kahn's invading army), and then Kahn himself, the rest of the invasion wasn't actually a struggle because of those heroes being removed from the fight either.

If you want to have the bad guys get some wins to make them seem more dangerous, there are two better ways they could have done that:

A) Give the bad guys chapters and let us play as them, so that we/they can actually win some fights. Reptile, Baraka, Mileena, etc. look like losers because they lose every single actual fight they're in. The stakes of the two tournaments would have been higher if we had seen more onscreen eliminations of the heroes. The only good guy who we ever actually see lose a match is Johnny Cage.

B) The problem isn't killing people, the problem is which people they killed. Just for example, why not leave Stryker and either Cyber-Sub or Smoke alive so they'd have a chance to grow into their new roles. Why bother to change them if you're going to wipe them off the slate at the end anyway?

Or alternatively, if they had told a more traditional story where Liu Kang and Kitana remain the main heroes instead of being turned into tragic victims, you could still kill other, less plot-relevant good guys in order to up the "these guys are dangerous" factor. There were several deaths in the original trilogy, after all, though some were undone by later games. Johnny Cage and Kung Lao was kind of a big deal back in MK3.

Sindel was a bad Devil Ex Machina.

Well that's another point worth making about the whole "bad guys being real threats" thing, Ermac is actually just as much of a loser as Reptile and Baraka.

Every time he shows up he gets the coolest entrances in the game, and he gets to do stuff in CUTSCENES like blow up Jax's arms or eliminate Johnny Cage from MK2 (why didn't he finish him, BTW?), but every time you actually fight him, he loses.

He loses to Stryker. He loses to a Cyber-Sub who SHOULD be exhausted because he just fought Goro and Kintaro at the same time.

If Ermac had had a chapter, if you got to play as him and beat some people, he'd look like the most dangerous motherfucker on the roster. But his actual record is like 0 and 4 (1 and 4 if you count that match with Cage that happens almost entirely off-screen), so...