I hope Kitana's gameplay at least is solid and fun to use, because story-wise, they made her freaking boring in this reboot.
I don't necessarily want to be hard on MK1's portrayal of Kitana. I've seen much worse. It's not nearly as bad as how MK9 did her.
And, yeah, it's a new timeline/reboot, so of course things will be different, and they're setting things up for the future, and all that. In context, it makes sense that Liu would set her up with peaceful life.
BUT....
The more I look at MK1's story and the re-imagining of certain characters--such as Kitana--I keep coming back to this quote from Zero Punctuation:
"The interesting part of Jurassic Park the film was not the part where everything was going swimmingly."
Awfully nice of Liu Kang to remove all the trauma & horror from Kitana's life, and yeah, it's wholesome she's so dedicated to Mileena & close with Sindel & her dad is Ermac now...
But it's resulted in a very flat, boring take on the character.
Kitana in MK1 has no drive. No initiative. She's purely reactive. She has no conflicts & no arc. She ends the story the exact same person. She learned nothing. Gained nothing. Didn't lose anything either, since Sindel lives in Ermac now with Jerrod.
I'd argue this is an issue with MK1's story in general. Tanya, Havik, Quan Chi, Mileena, Ermac, Shao Kahn...they all feel watered down and diluted.
I wonder if, after the response to how grim & nihilistic MK11's Aftermath was, they decided to go in the complete opposite direction, because honestly this story is toothless.
I was willing to give the Scorpion/Sub-Zero swap a chance, but...yeah, this doesn't work for me, brother.
I don't see Kuai Liang being Scorpion and Hanzo Hasashi becoming his & Smoke's kid side-kick as an improvement or intriguing change of pace. They just played musical chairs with the characters' names, and in the process sabotaged Hanzo and Noob Saibot.
They set up all this potential intrigue and conflict in Kitana and Mileena's bios just to do f**k-all with them. Mileena's Tarkat disease is taken care of with ease. The alleged "whispers" that Kitana should rule instead of her never come up. So, she becomes Empress and everyone's happy. That was easy!
I know--new timeline and things should be expected to be different. But it still needs to be interesting.
Back to Kitana, in the lead-up to the game, I thought maybe this version of her growing up in relative peace would play into an arc. Like she would start out sheltered & soft and need to grow into the battle-hardened warrior the OG Kitana was in order to survive & protect her home and people.
But...no. That doesn't really come up at all.
In fact, the game pushes against it by having characters constantly assure Kitana how valuable she is to Mileena & how she'll be a great commander of Outworld's army.
We're clearly supposed to regard her as an elite warrior.
...which, unfortunately, comes across a bit hollow when we see in story mode she loses pretty much every single fight she's involved with and fail to contribute anything of real value to the plot.
Where does Kitana even go from here? There's no meat here. Leading Outworld's armies? Being Mileena's benign, bland sidekick? A ship with Raiden?
Guh.
Where does anyone go from here? Looking through all the endings and cliffhangers, literally the only sub-plot that actual intrigues me for the future is the stuff with Ashrah and Sareena.
And knowing Netherealm Studios, that probably means both will disappear for another fifteen years.
So, yeah...story-wise, I think this reboot is a dud. I'm not angry about it. MK9 made me angry. This is just disappointing.
Sorry, Liu. Your timeline's boring. On the bright side, I hear the gameplay's fun. So there's that.
|