There is an alternate universe were KR wasn't a dud and we would have a season 3.
Zas has a lot of blame I'm sure, but NRS didn't exactly make it a tempting package with all the weird character/story choices.
Weird ass choices for guest characters, radically changing beloved characters and making them so much worse, a story that is ultimately pointless.
And then charge an arm and a leg for it.
It's pretty shocking to me just how much of a major fuckup KR is.
MK is probably the ONLY fighting game that could get away with a full priced story expansion. MK9-11, even if parts are absolutely garbage tier writing, are about on par or above your average hollywood blockbuster (i dunno, transformers). It's all about the spectacle and the nonsense and it works well enough. They've been chasing cliches since 9 (which chased their own past cliches, but at least put some spin on it), but it was working well enough.
1 was already pretty garbage for story. A huge portion of it is just boring as hell, and they wrote themselves into a corner with the Liu verse and also ignored every interesting possible plot point it could have generated. It ends in such a wacky fashion though that I felt "fuck it, running up a pyramid, AGAIN, referencing one of your worst games AGAIN, with a goro quad wielding shao hammers is just dumb enough that it feels like you're steering into it, fine".
Maybe this would be the jump back to wackier MK. If you can't write half decent cliches then write off the wall nonsense, and hey havik is a super underused character (....especially in the liu verse...) so it should be cool to see what he wants.
And then KR is just...fuck i dunno. I normally criticize films or shows as being an "ad libs" script where they just pick an IP and then shove it into some template they already have.
Protagonist has their
family/friends/dog captured/harmed/killed but thanks to their
friends/powers/both they can.....
And frankly that feels like a step above KR, which is this strange amalgamation of just......garbage? Like there's a checklist somewhere they had to hit and otherwise they shoved it in chat GPT and called it a day. The fact that MK can't sell single player content is a BAD fucking sign, because it's clearly what keeps this mess afloat. For all the bitching on these forums zillions of casuals rush to pick up every new MK and tend to enjoy it "enough".
The few casuals I'm aware of who even touch MK i heard gossiping about how garbage KR felt. These are people who enjoy CoD plots so it's not like their some sort of narrative snob like me. I just can't understand how they can just drop the ball so consistently, and yet have interesting plots right there in front of them waiting to be looked into.
