I LOVED it. Yes it's a bit goofy, because time travel stories are almost impossible to make sensical, and yes Kronika and her goons aren't the most captivating villains of all time, but damn was this some Mortal Fucking Kombat.
I will backread at some point but
@Gamer68, my thoughts in response to yours:
The rules that apply to young and old versions of characters make no sense. Young Kano gets kick in the gut and Old Kano feels it, yet Old Scorpion beats the absolute shit out of Young Scorpion and he feels nothing?
Time travel stories are always goofy with this and go mostly based on what the plot demands. Scorpion was the only real inconsistency and maybe revenants don't feel pain the same way~ or something.
Kotal Kahn can defeat Goro which was undefeated for like thousands of years, yet in both MKX and now MK11's story mode, he gets defeated by pretty much everyone and now he's a cripple. He even almost got killed by D'Vorah. It's disappointing to see NRS hype him up to be awesome only for him to be so... underwhelming?
I think they make a point of illustrating that Kotal is past his prime, much as Goro was past his prime when Kotal defeated him. That's part of his conversation with Jade, where he's like you are exactly the same as you were and I'm old now, and she's like it's cool I still wanna bang. I thought he came across as a really powerful dude who is unfortunately not as powerful as he once was, and certainly not as powerful as Shao Kahn at the peak of his strength.
Some characters kinda just disappear in the story. Where is Old Johnny? Where is Young Sonya and Johnny?
Young Johnny was severely injured, which meant Old Johnny was also severely injured, so that made sense to me. Young Sonya exits stage left to take care of them because Ronda Rousey cannot act her way out of a paper bag and they clearly tried their best to use her sparingly imo lol
Cetrion and Geras are underwhelming new characters. Geras should seem unstoppable, yet he is stopped every time he shows up. He should have been this game's Sindel, so powerful he maybe even kills off a couple characters or something. Cetrion on the other hand did absolutely nothing other than "B-b-but my mom said to do this!", like Jesus. Nothing happened with these characters.
I thought Geras was a really fun implacable juggernaut type. He IS unstoppable, because you can't kill him, and I thought they got that vibe across well. He doesn't have a ton of personality, but he's a fun mook for Terminator-style sequences.
That said, Cetrion was a total bomb. Just nothing to that character, unfortunately. A real letdown.
No mention of the whereabouts of Takeda and Kung Jin is weird. Takeda and Jacqui should still be a couple, so she doesn't mention to Cassie that she's worried about him during all of this? Kung Jin is never mentioned to Kung Lao?
It's been two years and they're not official special forces members, so I figure they're off doing something else.
Jacqui says she and Takeda are engaged now in one of her fight intros, IIRC vs. Johnny.
Overall power levels make no sense. I think it makes sense for Kitana to be Kahn, but Shao is suppose to be nearly unstoppable. Yet it seems that Kitana can slice him in the face on time and he's dead for good?
Power levels in MK are always whatever the plot demands, and Kitana in particular has varied a lot in terms of power level over the course of the series. A lot of people softened Shao Kahn up before she struck the killing blow, and narratively I think it really should always have been her to kill him in the first place, so I was cool with it.
Both the endings felt pretty much the same. One has Liu having to craft a new timeline, the other is Liu having to craft a new timeline with Kitana. Not much of a difference because either way we are getting a new timeline, lol.
There's only one ending, really, it's just got Silent Hill style GOOD versus GOOD+ variants.
The ending in general is too open ended. We don't actually have any idea what direction NRS is going to take. At the end of MK9, we knew revenants were going to be a thing. At the end of MKX, we knew that Dark Raiden, Emperor Liu Kang, and Empress Kitana were going to be a thing. At the end of MK11 we know nothing other than we are going to see a new timeline. I guess the only big takeaway is that Raiden will be sitting out a game MAYBE, now that he is powerless and Fire God Liu Kang is a thing.
I actually was totally fine with this, because it made MK9/MKX/MK11 feel like a complete trilogy. I think the point is that they are closing this chapter entirely and whatever comes next can be an entirely new story. Honestly, while I don't WANT it to be the case, and I doubt it will be... storywise this would make a lot of sense as the final Mortal Kombat game.
I also don't like how in MK9 we got a timeline reset and now only two games later we are getting ANOTHER timeline reset. I'm really starting to get the feeling that NRS doesn't know how to continue a story without bringing in time or dimension factors.
I mean, they don't, particularly. The MK story has always been kind of a slapdash series of set pieces. It's a lot of fun with great characters and settings, but internal continuity and plot development was never Midway's strong suit.
The bigger thing here was they wrote themselves into a corner. They killed off so many fan favorites in MK9, and then the MKX newbies weren't quite as popular as they'd hoped, so I think they feel a bit like they need to go back to the drawing board. I'm interested to see what comes next.
