I don’t want to spoil the Story, so I won’t get into specifics. A good portion of the story takes place 25 years after MK9 and is focused on Cassie Cage, Takeda Tahashi, Jacqui Briggs and Kung Jin, who are all descendants of previous MK Kombatants. Here, while the story mode does reference some of the events of MK4 (albeit in a new context, since MK9 altered the original timeline of Mortal Kombat), it goes in a new direction. MK9’s was fantastic because it took all the flavour text from the biographies and endings in the original trilogy and fleshed it out into a fully featured story. It’s amazing that NetherRealm fit so many characters given the differences in their variations.Ĭontinuing from a tradition which goes back to Mortal Kombat Deception, most recently in Mortal Kombat 9 and Injustice, MKX has a fully featured single player Story mode. Variations opens up the possibility that while one version of your character is a bad matchup, another slightly different version (which will take MUCH less time to learn than a completely new character) could be a great matchup. The reason why this is important, is that sometimes when playing with a character competitively, you’ll find that he’s a bad matchup against another character. Each variation has specific traits, special moves, or different normal moves. The cast of MKX is just a tad smaller than MK9’s cast, but it makes up for it with variations. There are also 2 returning characters in Goro and Shinnok, but neither were playable in MK9. Instead, while slightly more than half of the 25 character cast is returning characters of the likes of Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Raiden, Johnny Cage, et all, there are 9 completely new characters, some of who are descendants of the mainstay characters. The Challenge Tower from MK9 and Injustice? Gone (or at least not in the same form that it was previously). All of the stages and music from the original trilogy? Gone.

But in many ways, Mortal Kombat X takes the franchise in a bold new direction.Īlmost half of the cast from MK9? Gone. It keeps what MK9 had going good for it, returning to the 2D fighting plane, but adopts stage interactions and more stylish moves from NetherRealm Studio’s previous game, Injustice: Gods Among Us.

Mortal Kombat 9 had successfully used through the beloved characters and story from the original trilogy as the base for that game, so it was hard to see where they could go given that the games after the original trilogy were not as well received.Įnter Mortal Kombat X. After I played a bunch of 2011’s Mortal Kombat 9, I had wondered where NetherRealm Studios could go next.

Mortal kombat xl story mode