It is weird looking right? Like they tried to go old school but lost interest half way through. They are clearly referencing the OG dirtbike armor robo bros but this design lacks the cheesy but charming aesthetic they had to work with at the time.
The game's problem is... it looks too fucking good when it wants to. The costume design and textures are INCREDIBLE when they're done right yet that means that the more tacky looking costumes really stand out and look awful by comparison. MK11's graphics are off the scale when they want to be, literally sometimes I have to marvel at how good they captured real world textures and applied them to the costumes of its characters. Compare that to the consistently awkward "sweaty clay" design of MKX; it's literally incredible how good this game looks at times.
Look at the gorgeous textures of Kold War Skarlet... the worn leather, the stitching. Gaze down her boots and see the leather flaking brown upon its creases. You can literally feel the materials with your mind's eye. Jade's velvet literally looks like velvet; your fingers can sense its soft yet course pile depending on the direction they ran across its grain, the graphics are literally
that good when they make the effort to be.
Kano's old school storyline leather MK3 redux/reboot/redesign "Down Under" looks great (I personally prefer it without the upper body sections as per "Shameless Grifter" but that's beside the point); just look at the thick leather stitching, the creases, the weathering, you can zoom in and know how it feels to the touch. It literally looks amazing.
Then compare it to his actual (and pointless due to the above) official MK3 DLC Kombat Pack "Cannonball" skin Kano received and I'm staring at it going "ewww what material
is that?" I can see the shoulders are clearly some kind of awful manmade cushioned padding akin to a gym mat, but what the hell is the main costume made of? It looks godawful and thoroughly artificial whatever it may be, it's like some kind of sheer nylon-neoprene-lycra weave that's just 100% revolting and belongs on a sex-offenders' register. I tried having him in white as one of my variants for the MK1 throwback, but the texture of the costume looked so revoltingly skin-hugging across his thighs that I just had to remove it. I'd love him in a thick stitched cotton MK1 karate gi, but not in this vile tacky shiny tent-material.
Likewise, the MK3 cyberninjas may have been made of a gloss spray-painted plastic, but they had this glorious futuristic stormtrooper-esque "plastoid" texture to them that actually worked. As my above pic of Sektor shows, I love how the light glistens off the smoothness of the helmet, it feels like a natural evolution of MK2's ninja masks. I actually felt they looked more original in MK3 than they did the more robotic they made them. They looked thoroughly like unique MK characters in 3; the cyberninja redesigns that continually followed just felt like they were trying to shed themselves of their original design too much and became far too generic looking.
And due to how good the textures can look, that for me is a big reason Robocop's cyber ninja skins look like a tacky cosplay that lack either that hard chrome of his default outfit, yet are also devoid of the lightweight sci-fi plastic armour sheen of the MK3 photocapture costume. Instead the end result looks like something home-made for a comic-con, one of those "lol I made a Cylon-Cyrax mashup costume" that loses the edge of both costumes it plays heritage to.
