That's not entirely correct. SF doesn't get the praise it deserves from the MK community. You would not have MK were it not for SF. I believe that. SF is the first fighting game that the first fg fans latched on to (myself included), but look at my name: gamemk. I'm a MK fan, but at no point in SF history did I ever dismiss SF, except for when they released the original SF III and Second Impact. The reason for this is because the parry made offense even more difficult than it already had been in all the previous SF games, and it made defense as simple as a flick forward or backwards. Imo, SF III produced a lot of strategically weak SF players because the parry gave them an easy answer to stuff they would get dominated by in the previous SF games.
What was cool about MK from the beginning, aside from the story and the fatalities, was that normals dealt damage. Anyone who was there at the beginning of SF knows how awesome the game was, but how frustrating it was to deal damage against a good opponent. MK solved that by allowing normal based damage, which put an even greater emphasis on learning how to zone, because any little hit, blocked or unblocked, would result in losing life. However, that plus started to become a minus as players got extremely good at exploiting the game's weaknesses, and after they had lost all incentive to perform the fatalties, because turtling got out of hand. The game got too defensive, so to remedy this the MK team made the run button, to force the action. Problem is that this caused the game to become too offensive, and it nerfed zoning in MK really bad.
MK 9 still has not found the correct balance for 2d MK, which is why the two S tier characters are *gasp an extreme offensive character (Kabal and PL's Kung Lao), and an extreme defensive character (Kenshi). The rest of the cast just factors out into minor levels of offense and defense, with no really good balance to compete with Kabal or Kenshi. Then there's the repetitive target string stuff, and LBSH the funky way some characters look and move, no crossups, no reliable fast anti airs, and the weird hitboxes.
SF players don't just complain for the sake of hating MK. Trust me, there is a MK game to be made that would eliminate a lot of the 3d elements and some of the extreme balance issues that MK9 still retains, making it more of a true 2d fighter, that SF players would go apeshit over. NRS just hasn't made it yet, and they may never make it, which is fine because the sales speak for themselves, but I think a lot of the MK9 fans, especially those for whom MK is like their only 2d fighter, can sometimes be guilty of viewing MK9/MK through rose-colored glasses (I admit that I was once guilty of this, too).
And for those complaining about having to practice links or whatever. Practice, in any competitive endeavor, is supposed to be hard. Michael Jordan used to say something like "Practice is hard; The game is easy for me because I've already done all the difficult work in practice." You're shortchanging yourself if you like something because it's easy, or easier to understand. That's actually why I hope they take the block button out of MK 10. It's too much of a crutch for a lot of players.
