Those fears were allayed early on, as the preview gameplay footage of MKX showed a game that looked to be making positive strides forward in refining the MK fighting engine, while also adding new elements to the mix. The phrase "adding new elements" is often a cause for great concern with MK games - many times has the series added in new gameplay mechanics only to have them turn out to be shallow, clunky, or otherwise worthless - MKX's changes to the formula seemed to be coming from a more carefully considered design mentality. It also didn't hurt that two of the core ideas - the stamina meter and the variants system - are evolutions of earlier ideas; running from MK3 and (roughly) the fighting styles system used in Deception, Deadly Alliance, and Armageddon.
Skip ahead to April 2015, and now everyone has MKX in their grubby little mitts. The general critical consensus is markedly positive, fans seem to be enjoying it, and the competitive community is starting to really dig into it. By all measures it looks like NRS has done it again, producing a game that is just as good (in some ways, better) than it's previous offering. A significant feat considering the series checkered past; a particularly remarkable feat considering that the previous game was actually pretty damn good.
For what it's worth, I wholeheartedly add my endorsement to the pile. Mortal Kombat X is the best game in the series by a fair margin and, just as importantly, it compares favorably to other current, prominent fighting games. It's a lot of fun to play, it looks fantastic (especially considering how janky and bad the series has looked in the past), and it has a ton of single player content (along with passable-but-still-improving multiplayer). If you're on the fence about MKX and you're at all a fan of the franchise, fighting games, or quality games in general, I heavily encourage you to check it out.
What I find most interesting about MKX is what it represents. Independent of it's success or acceptance (though it seems to be getting a healthy amount of both), MKX embodies several significant changes for the franchise that are remarkable and interesting, particularly in light of the current video game industry. In many ways, MKX represents the right way to take an old franchise and reinvigorate it; something many developers are eager (and sometimes struggling) to do with properties that have fallen from public perception.
I could write a lot of words about MKX - and I might, because this game does a shocking number of things right - but for now I want to focus on one of the major factors that makes MKX work so damn well: it's ability to (finally) establish an effective, consistent tone for the Mortal Kombat universe. Join me after the break for musings on how the series has struggled with tone over the years, how MKX gets it right, and why that is so important.
A History of Violence
To understand why MKX works so amazingly well as a modern take on the Mortal Kombat franchise, lets look at some of the issues the series has run into over the years and how MKX attempts to address them.
Mortal Kombat has struggled over the years with tonal consistency. The games oscillate wildly between farcical silliness and grim seriousness, often times within the same game. I think much of that identity crisis can be traced back to the progenitor of the series: the original Mortal Kombat was a game that was, possibly accidentally, both completely ridiculous and shockingly dark.
Much of the ridiculousness comes from the presentation. The technology of using digitized actors was remarkably eye-catching for the time (and in all honesty still looks fairly decent) but that technology also almost always resulted in fighting games that ended up looking at least a little bit silly (with most instances looking goddamn ridiculous). I'm not really sure why this was the case - it may have been difficult to getting good captures of the actors doing moves then map them into the game so they read well visually - but whatever the reason, motion captured (mo-cap) games always ended up with moves that looked silly.
For my money, there is no better expression of this than Liu Kang's Flying Kick special move: one single, glorious frame of "animation" as the character flies across the screen, then just kind of sticks there in mid-air after it connects for a second before the character resumes his idle pose. Mechanically, the move feels good (great, even, when you connect a particularly juicy one), but it looks preposterous (and more than a little cheap).
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| Liu Kang's Flying Kick, in all it's glory |
That rationalization stops making sense once you get out of the first game - the story quickly turns into an inter-dimensional mystical martial arts war which feels much more at home in an American comic book than anything else - but it also works out because improved budgets help those games look much less innately ridiculous.
Where the ridiculousness comes from in the follow-up games (most directly, Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3/Ultimate, but technically everything else in the series up until MKX) is through things like Friendships and Babalities (innately farcical moves initially intended to poke fun at those critiquing the violence of the game's Fatalities), several of the Fatalities themselves (MK3/U has several Fatalities that are outright bizarre, nevermind the fountain of arms and ribcages that everyone seems to vomit forth when they explode), and the brazenly insane Animalities (where the winner turns into a glowing, neon animal and mauls the opponent for reasons I've never had adequately explained to me, because it is impossible).
What I find remarkable is that the series eventually returned to outright looking ridiculous, during the era that plagued so many game series: the jump to 3D gaming. For as silly as they may look from a remove, the 2D MK games settled on a visual consistency in their game play that made them easier to watch without guffawing at the screen. The 3D games, unfortunately, undo all that progress: all of the 3D era games look sloppy, goofy, and cheap, to the extent that it makes those games difficult to really enjoy.
This inherent factor of ridiculousness has always been at odds with the other key tonal factor of the Mortal Kombat series: lots of violence, some of it very graphic and disturbing (though that tends to be relative to the year of that game's release). The violence inherent in MK from it's inception serves several purposes:
- Marketing. The only reason most people know about MK at all is because it is one of the most notoriously violent fighting games, even though the quality and intensity of that violence in some cases pales in comparison to some of it's copycats (many of which tried to make up for lower presentation standards with more gore and blood). The ratings system which persists today traces it's roots back to the "violence in videogames" outrage of the 90's, and the original Mortal Kombat was at the heart of that controversy.
All of this gave Mortal Kombat an incalculable boost in recognition, desirability, and ultimately sales. Midway gambled with putting violence at the forefront of Mortal Kombat's marketing, which ended up paying off handsomely. The original Mortal Kombat is a fair fighting game, but not nearly as technical or refined as some of it's contemporaries. The violence, and the controversy surrounding it, elevated it from a curio to a classic.
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| Marketing genius, circa 1992 |
Midway's Mortal Kombat is a decent fighting game of the time, but it wasn't anything special mechanically: the addition of a button dedicated to blocking attacks was novel, but the universal attacks across the cast (aside from special moves) made it feel shallow compared to other fighters. Midway had to know they needed something extra to set them apart, and they figured out two ways to do it: 1) use some of the biggest, best looking digitized actor sprites of the time to make the game really stand out next to it's contemporaries, and 2) have blood fly out all over the place to give the game a strong "shock and awe" factor.
- Reinforcement of theme. This is arguably the most minor factor behind the violence in Mortal Kombat, but it is still an important one. The story of Mortal Kombat is that of a secret tournament consisting of fights to the death between entrants, until only one remains to challenge the mystical champions at the end. The blood and fatalities (along with the iconic "FINISH HIM/HER" that booms across the screen upon winning a fight) reinforce that theme by showing actual mortal consequences. Plenty of fighting games had used the "secret tournament of fights to the death" backdrop before, but few of them had showcased the brutal consequences for the losers in the way Mortal Kombat did.
It's also arguable that the blood flying out all over the place during the match is meant to reinforce the "realistic" factor that Mortal Kombat was striving for. It's a game with plenty of fantastic and magical things - fireballs and flying warriors for days - but the digitized actors (combined with the limitations that forced on the cast) makes the game feel oddly more realistic than it's contemporaries. Thus, it makes sense (in the loosest meaning of the phrase) that (a big silly) blood (drop) would fly out when one of them punched the other in the face.
Solving the Puzzle Box
Thus, from it's inception the Mortal Kombat series has had an odd juxtaposition: it alternates between looking silly, and then showing people being murdered in brutal ways. Across the many games in the MK series, it has always felt like the developers didn't quite know how to reconcile this tonal rift. Sometimes they try to play it deadly straight, but the technical limitations almost always conspire against them to make the violence ridiculous (which is good for levity, but bad for their intended effect). Other times, they try to embrace the silliness of it, but instead end up creating content that implicitly kind of silly and difficult to revisit (due to the lameness of it).
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| Related |
MK9 didn't really solve this issue; it sidestepped it by being essentially a super-slick remake of U/MK3 with Fatalities that were played a bit more straight (U/MK3 has some of the most ridiculous Fatalities in the series' history). The combination of strong game play systems - UMK3 being the best mechanical game in the series so far - with good graphics and fantastic single player content were enough to let MK9 get away with not really having a solution to the "MK tone" problem.
MKX had no such luxury. It was primarily built on the engine of MK9 with some tweaks, so gameplay alone was not going to be enough. If this game was going to stand out (and feel like something more than just an iteration on MK9) it needed to update the tone of the series to something that allowed MKX to feel more contemporary.
What is remarkable is not just that the developers succeeded in updating the tone of the game, while allowing it to still feel distinctly "MK", but how they managed to avoid some serious, common conceptual pitfalls that other franchises have fallen for (and that I frankly expected MKX to leap into head first).
First, what they did right: take the absurdity and violence of the setting and implicitly marry them together. Any "realistic" factor the series had goes into the dumpster, but as that's beyond unimportant it's no loss. What you end up with is a setting where everyone is very slightly super heroic in terms of power level - even regular joes can take remarkable punishment, and keep up with supernatural entities by using technology and pluck - which makes previously ridiculous elements now fit within the power level paradigm they've created. This also involved culling some of the stuff on the far ends - sadly, no one in MKX turns into a polar bear (yet) - but as with realism, its an easy trade to make.
Coupled with that addition of a fantastic setting (using the "removed from reality" definition of fantastic) is the tonal choice to make their version of reality a macabre parallel to ours. Everyone in the Mortal Kombat setting is comfortable and familiar with death in a way that most of it's audience probably can't relate to. This ends up making sense for two reasons: 1) everyone involved in the story is a warrior of some kind that has been in many, many battles, so they've assuredly seen their fair share of death and killing, and 2) the universe in this reality seems to revolve around the idea that tremendous violence can be visited upon you at any time. Given that context, it makes sense that everyone involved would be cavalier about some of the things that happen.
The combination of those two factors - superhuman capabilities and a profound sense of the macabre - culminates with the moneymaker for the Mortal Kombat franchise: the Fatalities. Previous games ran into serious issues when it came to each character's capabilities. "Normal" people were stuck with either very boring actions - how many "punch hard enough to decapitate"s did we all have to sit through over the years? - or actions that were so fantastically ridiculous that they ended up unintentionally farcical and distracting.
MKX gave the developers just enough leeway to get creative - everyone is at least slightly superhuman and aided by magic or technology - and they make damn good use of it. The Fatalities in MKX are creative and often fairly brutal but, and this is important, they never go too far in the other direction and end up being exploitative and vicious (though Mileena's "Tasty Treat" is pretty damn close). The beauty of it all is that the inherent (but now tonally consistent) ridiculousness of the setting and characters does a lot to soften the brutality of what's going on.
Many of the Fatalities in the game would be kind of unnerving if played totally straight; the fact that everyone involved is a comic-book character, doing crazy comic-book things (closer to Image than Marvel, in all ways now that I think about it) does a lot to make the violence less serious and pornographic. It is still often shocking and gross, but it's easy to recognize it for what it is - entertainment - without the developers having to nudge and wink into the camera to remind you not to take it seriously.
The Importance of Getting It Right
The ability to marry tone with execution is a key component of all of the most successful video games, and MKX is a much stronger game because of it. MKX has the most consistent feel of any of the MK games so far, which in turn makes the overall package that much more effective and memorable. Although MKX's actual story mode is shorter and less grand than the story in MK9, I ended up enjoying the story in MKX much more than the story mode in MK9 because the story in MKX feels like an extension of the fights, and vice versa. That allows me to be more invested in the lore for this game (and by extension, the franchise as a whole), which is how you go about creating/re-establishing fans.
It is very easy to see where the MKX developers could have gone wrong: MK's history has plenty of examples of going too far in the direction of silliness, and most of their attempts to take things "seriously" have been likewise unsuccessful (at least so far as tone and overall product quality are concerned). I don't know that anything MK has done in the past can really be considered a serious, straight-faced take on the content, and I applaud Midway/NRS for never going succumbing to that over the years, or now with MKX. Especially as the temptation must have been awfully strong during the late 90's/early aughts.
While I'd argue that it's impossible to make a truly great game without having a considered, well established tone, I'd also concede that it's perfectly possible to have a very good game without it. MK9 is a great example: tonally its still kind of all over the place, but it's solid mechanically and absolutely stacked with content, so it's still fun to play. MKX didn't need to nail it's tone to be a good game, but NRS did nail the tone, and MKX is a much stronger and more memorable game because of it.
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I have a lot more to say about MKX - focusing more on the story mode of the game and the mechanics - but I'll save all that for another time. I still have a lot to unlock in the Krypt, and I better get back to it.
As always, thanks very much for reading!
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