Also part of the fun for me comes from naming custom variations tied to skins with names of your choice and on occasion even a perfectly fitting variation icon adds the cherry on top. You can make them silly, make them personal, or as I do, make them tied to various parts of Asian folklore or old MK lore/spin-offs that for me have a lovely feeling of franchise adoration (have my burgundy hooded variant of Jade named 'House of Qali' after Kitana's best friend and the very similar looking character Qali in Conquest who theoretically could have been an ancestor to Jade, whilst have my default D'vorah is 'Kreeya's Heir' after the similar - though far more attractive - insect women also in Conquest).
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I've changed the names of pretty much
every variation I've given my characters to something often involving the "extended universe" of Mortal Kombat to embrace the wider lore or something from Shinto or Japanese legend for the Asian characters, often based simply around skins they're using; I literally have no idea what the default variations are even called anymore haha (and literally have no idea what pretty much every variation you all talk about refers to!).
Such silliness as "Let's Dance" Johnny Cage, "Eternal Life" Raiden (reference to the old Mortal Kombat The Album CD by The Immortals there), "Cardinal" Jax Briggs (movie reference there), "White Lotus" Kung Lao and "Wasteland Nomad" Baraka (classic MK2) have all long-since replaced whatever the game originally named them and that's all the more enjoyable for me!
But hey, that's a great thing about the game, you can just go geeky with MK lore and play for fun, names, icons and costumes, building AI smashing characters with augments or go hardcore tournament and play to more regimented character constructions learning lots about technical sides of the fighting... whilst I just spam uppercuts, sweeps and the special moves I know because I spent more time playing dress-up with my characters than I did playing with them haha (I think I'm honestly playing the game as a mix of Football Manager meets MK action figure customisation... and hey, in that self-analysis, I LOVE that, never even thought that's what I'd be looking for in a game either!).
Considering the game is "just a beat 'em up", I personally feel it's been very very gracious to the casual solo player, especially when living in a world of titles like Star Wars Battlefront 2 that offered so little single player enjoyment, this seems such a rarity especially for a genre that grew out of multiplayer by its very nature. It's why I think I've loved this game more than any other MK game in the past, and I've honestly been there since the beginning. Hell I've got The Journey Begins' soundtrack CD somewhere!!! No... that's probably not a proud thing to boast haha.
