I bought Mortal Kombat yesterday at the local Fred Meyer, where, instead of getting an unlockable retro character skin, I ended up getting a Mortal Kombat T-shirt with my purchase.  Okay, then.  Not going to argue with that, but whatever.

I haven't tooled around with anything more than the story mode and Krypt so far.  Now, as utterly ridiculous and fucked as the MK story became in the later games (I've always considered Armageddon a sign that the writers just didn't care anymore), the story mode in this game is fantastic.  I've always been a fan of stories in games; yes, even fighting games.  Even if I'm not the sort of guy that's willing to put in the ten thousand hours required to become a god of the tournament scene, I at least like knowing the character backgrounds and narratives of games that take the time to put effort into them.  And while Mortal Kombat is certainly not the first game in the genre with a story mode like this, it does a really good job, at least to the point I've played, of cleaning up the mess, revisiting past events, reinterpreting them so that they make sense, or altering them so that the plot doesn't stumble along into the same painful direction as before.

For reference, I'm somewhere past the halfway point in story mode, toward the end of the Mortal Kombat II tournament in Kung Lao's chapter.  It's been really neat seeing how the characters physically change and evolve over the course of the story, what with being able to play as Cyrax before he becomes a cyborg, or the way that the roles of certain characters feel more defined, even if the vast majority of them feel like very stock comic book characters.  Which is fine; the MK story and characters were always pretty goofy to one degree or another, and while the narrative takes itself seriously, it's never to an extent that would be undermined by the ridiculous violence and the more absurd character moments.  Which pretty much entails anything involving Johnny Cage.

It is, dare I say it, about on par with the characters and story of BlazBlue (and I enjoy me some BlazBlue), though the ways that each franchise delivers their stories is vastly different.

So that's all really cool.  Then the game throws a 2-on-1 fight at me where I have to win against a tag team of two opponents twice, and I end up retrying the match six or seven times until I find whatever magical cheese combo will let me wear them down by abusing it over and over again.  It's less skill and more "mash these buttons until my opponent falls over."  Though when I fought Goro near the end of the MK1 tournament, I found it almost quaint that the same tactic that worked so well back in the day (jump-kick Goro in the face over and over and over again) is pretty much the way to take him out this time, too.

Though, I never did beat Motaro or Kintaro back in the day.  This could get ugly.