Don't forget Raiden. Raiden was unbelievbly good when the game came out. His teleport was super fast. He had the vicinity blast trap. So much of his stuff was plus on block. His air teleport recovered so much faster. He could zip across the top of the screen and much of the cast could do nothing about it and he dropped down so fast at the end.
Infact, looking at all the previous posts in this thread im not sure MK9 was made better with all the patches. Oh im sure from "This isn't fair" point of view many people would consider it better now. But once the final patch was released in late 2011 it wasn't long before one character came to stand head and shoulders above the rest, Kabal. Out of all the patches Kabal only lost one thing, his F32,NDC block infinite. Which turned out to be a rather small part of his overall devastating toolset. In short, Kabal got to keep nearly all of his dirt while Kung Lao,Raiden,Sindel,Subzero,Smoke and lot of others lost theirs. Aside from Cyrax who seemed to just dig up more dirt whenever he lost some, most of these characters never found anything to compensate for what they lost, regardless of whether it was considered broken or not.
So most of MK9 2011-2012 was dominated by Kabal. He certainly won more tournments than every other character in the cast combined. And most would agree he has no losing matches, some would say he doesn't have any matchups he doesnt win.
My thought is if none of these other characters had their dirt taken away from them, essentially de fanging them, their would have been alot more characters capable of giving Kabal a fight, they might evenhave givin him a losing matchup or two.
The game might have been dirtier overall, but as long as Kabal was in the game it was going to be dirty anyway, its just that he got to keeep all the dirt. And the best way to fight dirt in a fighting game is with more dirt, better dirt. If more characters had gotten to stay as dirty as Kabal, I don't think Kabal would have ruled MK9. I think it would have been a bigger variety of characters, which is what everyone complained about during 20Kabal12. That all they saw was Kabal.
