Hmm for me I’m not really a fan.
Whenever the background first fades into view as the match starts I get all excited when my eyes catch view of, say, the Courtyard’s blue skies, shaolin monks and Chinese architecture, then about a second later I remember it’s a pixelated 16bit wallpaper on a pretend projector and I’m fighting in a sticky floored arcade.
Basically it’s a massive cocktease.
I so wish it was the real Courtyard like in MK9 (or any of the other classic arenas it rotates with). The Island Ruins stage with its literal fifty shades of grey and its dull lifeless music just isn’t the same.
I agree. I'd much rather have the real Courtyard from MK1 (my favorite stage of any game), and all the other classic stages, but Retrocade is the closest we have to them. It's ironic that a cocktease for classic stages is still better than 99% of all other stages in MK11. And that the music in Retrocade is better than 100% of the rest of the music in the game. I feel like MK11 did ok with the gameplay, the training modes, and online, but really dropped the ball with the story, music, and the character roster.
My wish list for MK12 includes complete wipe of the story from MK9 to MK11 and continuing in the original timeline right after Armageddon. All of these time travel, timelines, resetting history, and non stop bringing back of dead characters shenanigans made a big mess of the franchise's storyline. It seems like every franchise (MCU, Final Fantasy, etc) is doing this now and NRS decided to just follow suit.
For the music, they need to go back to the dark, creepy, fantasy martial artsy, old school Kung Fu movie themes, as opposed to the blockbuster action movie, melancholic, and whatever else you would call MK11's music.
Also, MK11 has more guest characters than any other MK game. 5 out of 37, which is roughly 14%. It's kind of pushing it to even call this an MK game at this point. It's more of a mashup of MK and various movie franchises owned by Warner Bros. They should just call it MK vs. Warner Bros so everybody knows what it is.
To sum it all up, my MK12 wish list is:
- Pretend MK9-MK11 story never happened. Start fresh in original timeline, after the events of MK Armageddon.
- No time travel.
- No alternate timelines.
- No alternate universes.
- No more bringing back of dead characters. That really cheapens the storyline and makes all the efforts of the protagonists to defeat an antagonist in a previous game pointless, i.e. if you are going to endlessly bring back Shao Khan and Shang Tsung what is the point of ever defeating them? If a character is too popular and fans always want them back, do not have them killed, and make it clear they are not dead.
- Bring back dark, creepy, fantasy martial artsy, old school Kung Fu campy movie themes, in the vein of MK1-MK Deception (and possibly Armageddon).
- No more guest characters.
- No more celebrity driven characters, i.e. characters should not look like any real life person. NRS is trying too hard to make MK as cinematic as possible. This is a game, not a movie. In a game, players want to immerse themselves in the experience, suspend their disbelief, and imagine themselves as the character doing all of these awesome things on the screen in front of them. Having characters that look like real life people, especially celebrities, breaks the illusion and turns the experience from one where "I am playing this game and as a [insert character name], i am doing all of these cool moves and i am fighting all of these bad guys" to one where "I am watching Rhonda Rousey or Sylvester Stallone (WTF??) in an MK game, doing all of these cool moves and fighting all of these bad guys." Unlike the passive arts such as books, painting, theater, movies, and TV shows, in videogames, which are interactive, the audience does not read or watch, the audience becomes the star of the show because it participates in and drives the action. I want to be the star of the show when i play a game, I don't want a celebrity to be the star of the show.
- Less violent fatalities. Seriously. MK11 crossed a line they should have never crossed. Many of the fatalities in MK11 are straight up disturbing murder scenes.
- As for the art style, i feel that a more stylized approach would work better than the ultra realism they are going for with MK11. By stylized, i mean something like Soul Calibur and Tekken, not quite the almost cartoony style in Street Fighter. This goes towards points #8 and #9 above also, i.e. if a stylized Sub-Zero rips the spine out of a defeated opponent, it doesn't look nearly as disturbing as if a photo realistic character looking like a real life person does it to another photo realistic character looking like a real life person.
