I was actually rather surprised that they finished what MK9 started by killing off the rest of the prime mover villains. We don't have any sorcerers or necromancers or anything running around causing problems. Mileena was finally given a true villain role and executed pretty much immediately. Baraka was justifiably butchered. Curiously that leaves us with a lack of cartoon-style over the top bad guys, which hopefully means we'll eventually get a more nuanced MK story in the future.
Subtly dropping one of Kung-Jin's reasons for being insecure was priceless. I never really expected NRS to go there. They played up him being a thief before launch, but the only thing he confirmed trying to steal was something that once belonged to his family, which is.. different than what they let on too.
Dark Raiden, it seems, was inevitable but this time it really felt justified in a way it never was in Deception. (Or at least, done without much build up, or too much build up? Whatever)
The storymode in general gave me the impression that the Outworld Civil War was written and planned first, then they tacked on Shinnok's role later. As a Rain fan I felt like they really did have plans to make him playable but dropped him probably for Goro or Reptile. Because why not?
Fujin was the worst cock-tease I've ever seen. It's one thing to have a character show up and mess around.. like Frost, or Bo, or Sareena even. It's another thing entirely to give them a bad-ass fighting cutscene with an interesting voice actor, new weapon, and then just drop him off the face of the story. Again feels like there was another version of MKX we aren't getting to see.
The game however is Solid. Dark Empire Liutana looks epic.
Please, please do a UMKX and extend the story, bring in another row of characters.
One thing that struck me as bizzare -- When Raiden was describing the 'snare' that Kano (how was Kano involved if Rain took the talisman????) left for him, that kept him busy during most of the story, he started saying that 'he visited a lot of strange realms' ... etc, etc, is that some kind of cross-over or side-game set up? Why? --- Please don't tell me it's just an excuse for fucking Tron-Raiden outfit too, because that's just stupid.