Fighting for a Reason

Bringing back Mortal Kombat was a hard task. The quality in the series has declined significantly with each iteration, a concerning fact when you think that Mortal Kombat II and III aren’t even that great. Fun as they were, they didn’t stand up next to their Japanese counterparts in terms of strategy and play styles. The only major thing the game had going for it was violence.  Risky, then, was the plan to make us all care about the series again, when overly violent scenes and grotesque moves can be found in plenty of video games these days. Somehow though, they did it, and it’s all thanks to clever story telling.

[youtube width=”512″ height=”288″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbliYhG8RWE[/youtube]Mortal Kombat Story Mode Intro

If you’ve ever played a fighting game in your life, you’ll know that “Story” tends to be very bare bones. An intro (if you’re lucky), a boss battle and an ending are usually about all you get. The story is assumed, not told. This was fine, back when games systems were limited by what they could do. Usually just the game itself pushed the boundaries of what the machine could do. In this current generation of consoles, however, putting in one or two titbits of story doesn’t suffice. Mortal Kombat breaks that mould by having a fully fleshed out Story Mode. Not Arcade Mode (although it does have that too)  but a genuine story that you play through. The way this is achieved is simple, you play as several different fighters over a three act story campaign. Each chapter is divided amongst a different fighter and tells the story from their point of view, whilst moving forward with the overall plot. It’s clever and it’s seamless, there is no loading nor odd transitions, everything flows as you’d expect. Herin lies the question this throws up in my mind though – how can story mode in a fighting game ever be improved?

It’s easy to moan and complain about lack of story depth in a fighter. It’s also easy to turn one’s nose up at it and play the game competitively against friends or in tournaments exclusively.  It’s harder to think of a way to tell you why these people are fighting without taking away from that basic element – the fighting. Mortal Kombat has done a wonderful thing for the genre with its single-player features. It will be interesting now to see if other companies follow suit. Look, for instance, at Marvel Vs Capcom 3. With such rich and detailed characters, plots and rivalries already set, it is a massive waste that more wasn’t made of the story. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if fighting Galactus had had some kind of emotional weight behind it, past just being “Oh, this is the final boss and he’s huge”? I cross my fingers, but know it’s futile. Plots will stay wafer thin and playing the game on your own will continue to be a soulless exercise. I know it’s not what the majority (myself included) play fighting games for, but there’s no reason it can’t be.