While you do have a good point, in that the story should be in the game itself for the sake of accessibility, it’s a sad day when people are putting any sort of implied value on contrived fighting game stories.
Dude, they wrote a novella. That’s practically half of a novel. How you gonna be upset that the ten-second panning stills with 1-3 sentences are less valued to the narrative? KI is pushing renaissance levels with what their narrative experiments, and the novella isn’t just on “some website”; it’s on the official website.
It could only be better with TF2-style short films.
((but MK story mode! blahblahblah. WB money, nuff said))
—that’s not aimed at any individual in particular, by the way. Just heading off the inevitable.
EDIT:
OH MY GOSH THOUGH I DIDN’T THINK OF THIS UNTIL JUST NOW:
An in-game dramatic reading of the novella. I’ll just leave that thought there, y’all do what you will with it.
Well to be fair, not everyone wants to/has time to go to a website (official or not) just for the lore. Some people just want to enjoy the lore, world building, and character ambitions in-game at the comfort of their own home and not be forced to use an external source to get that. So it’s understandable he’d be disappointed.
The only reason I’m putting any “implied value” on the story is because the devs are putting all this effort into it because they want us to care about it.
Obviously the novella is neat but when every season’s story mode retcons the previous one, it starts to turn into a muddled mess. In-game story should be the priority, the stuff you read online should be secondary like lore and backstory. Not the main narrative.
I’m kinda upset that there aren’t more cinematics in KI, like KI1 or 2.
But this new mode is adding some RPG synergy with this game.
On the other way, on this video, it shows some challenges who unlocks new cinematics.
Hope there will be a real one
One side note: the tea-bagging of this Jago shows a very bad example towards the community…
Please do not do that again…
You are correct, Earthling. Above post edited to reflect such.
Just to be contrary, though, external sources and varied mediums has been done by a bunch of really really popular stuff. A prime example would be Star Wars, whose core canon 6 (7 now?) films are actually sort of unimportant to the overall fictional universe at large, as a vast majority of it takes place outside of the common medium. Blizzard has been doing it forever, Magic: the Gathering and so on. Even D&D, whose primary gaming medium is actually books, distributes their story elsewise (well, MORE books, actually, but you get what I’m saying).
You are right though. That’s not sarcasm, either.
EDIT & SOZ FOR DOUBLEPOST: @xCrimsonLegendx I would 100% agree, if fighting games had anything resembling a history of rich and competent storytelling. But they don’t.
They are getting there, though. I’ve always wanted to really enjoy and have some investment in the stories of the FG’s I love, but that’s never really been in the cards. In fact, many others rely on external sourcing to adequately develop their lore as well (specifically GG & BB, but those are both Arksys so…).
EDIT2: Also, it is unfortunate that they’ve had to retcon stuff from previous seasons (it’s legit to retcon the entirety of the originals though, considering this is a reboot). That’s not the best way to deal with hindsight, from a storytelling perspective, but it is what it is, I guess. At this point, it would be far worse if they retcon their retcons. That’s a DiCaprio can of worms, but not the kind that ends in an Oscar.
I’m not trying to judge this story on what games have done in the past, I’m just saying that the season approach has made the story so hard to follow that its difficult to understand at this point, especially since it keeps rewriting itself every time they come out with new content.
At least a classic fighting game has a singular plot, this bad dude did something, fighters came together and then you defeat him at the end, yay! In KI each and every season has had a different story, each one has changed what the previous one told us and now the novella is come out to expand the lore and all its done is fragment the story further.
Basically if someone were to ask me what the plot was in KI, I’d have to roll my eyes, bite my tongue and instruct them to read ONLY the novella and the shadow lords plot. Disregard the character bios in season one, ignore the classic story mode and don’t take season 2 rivals seriously. Because as it is, those are all outdated, rewritten versions of the plot that are no longer canon.
I’m one of the hardcore fans, I’ve loved KI since I was a kid and I always wanted to have more of the story outside that one comic and the in-game texts. Now we have it but its not any more comprehensible than it was before. That being said, I love where they’re going with it. I love the themes and the overlying story but its really done a poor job of drawing me in and making me care about it, like I usually do in games. Its hard to have a conversation about Thunder and Fulgore because the entire story built up until this point has been completely erased because of the novella, there’s really no point in trying to be involved with the novella because it all feels temporary like next week it’ll be different anyway.
/rant rant rant
Short story, I love KI despite its flaws but the story despite being really cool has been getting me down with its abundance of inconsistencies.
I think people are over focused on what SL is NOT, instead of evaluating it for what it is.
I have no insider knowledge and I don’t want to lead people off on rampant speculation. But when I look at SL I see it as an effort to increase both the breadth (i.e. Total number) of players as well as to capture those players for a longer time. This probably is intended to increase the amount of money people spend but I also suspect MS uses number of monthly players or player hours as a metric for assigning resources. Again, that’s complete speculation but it seems pretty reasonable to me.
I think SL looks cool and I appreciate what they are trying to do. The same way I appreciate Top32 even though I won’t ever attempt to get a pro star (and probably couldn’t if I tried). I probably won’t sink much time into it, although I will give it a try. But if you look at my theory on the purpose of the mode, then apealing to people who already play tons of KI is clearly not important.
Not everyone needs to like SL. But I get tired of hearing the same whining that has nothing to do with anything other than personal preference. " Don’t do stuff for other people, make the game for me!!!"
LOL. To be clear, I did not mean you. Although we don’t always agree (heck, we might not often agree) I generally think you make suggestions to improve the game not just to mold it in your own image. I think one of the things SL does, incidentally, is provide a platform that might allow them an opportunity to release more content for the game. Hopefully they have built in some hooks to do things like say “In November, if you beat SL with Sabrewulf on your team you get his special turkey costume” etc. We will see, but my interpretation of your complaints suggests this might at least somewhat address them.
Not to get too off topic with this, but I remember DoA did something like this where they would give away different backgrounds at different seasons… I don’t recall the details. It’s funny, that game series has done a lot of interesting stuff that I think, unfortunately, gets swamped out by it’s focus on upskirt antics.
Only reason I’m playing this is for the stage unlock.
I gave up on the S2 story mode before I finished everything, as they somehow managed to make it worse than S1’s barebones story mode.
I Love XCom, it’s one of the best games of all time, but for it to work as a fighting game mode it would need dozens of new character models as minor enemies (like in MK9, where they had the director, the tarkatans, the stuntman, etc), not some green versions of characters with the same exact models. It would need to be fully voiced, multiple new stages and it would need GOOD cutscenes, not those S2-level cutscenes with the same-old characters with the camera panning on the same-old stages doing the same-old animations thing we got.
If their budget is so miniscule despite the millions of players they bragged about at E3, then they should make a basic arcade mode with ONE ending per character and make it as POLISHED AS HELL.
Jesus, NOTHING on S1, 2 or 3 sotry modes matches the Kan-Ra, Aganos, Hinako trailers, and that’s just sad - they spent more money and time on trailers than in anything on the actual GAME.
Exactly how is Shadow Lords worser than the other story modes when its offering a lot options to customize than the pervious seasons?
Look, quit your whining already, you’ve already proven that you are not excited for Shadow Lords, total ignorance to what resources they’re using to deliver KI to us, and all you’re doing is being unpleasing and obnoxious.
I’d be down for this, but with the characters being voiced. That’d make all the difference instead of having one person reading it as is done with most of the cutscenes in the video.
Also, it’s a shame that those who can’t see (though we are in the minority) won’t get much out of this mode from what I’m aware of. The cutscenes I’d guess unlock as you play, and the skins/stage/other unlocks are unintentionally walled off at the moment. But for all those wanting to enjoy the mode, have a good time.
There was a reason why KI 1 & 2 had cinematics…it’s the same as in most original Playstation games like Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy 7: the technology of the day made the games look like garbage in comparison to what a more powerful PC could do. So they spliced in those scenes to make the games look more flashy than they could do on their own. This KI doesn’t need that. The same effects can be done on the in-game engine.
Kinda… it wasn’t exactly an arcade ladder…mostly because there was no real boss fight at the end because they hadn’t made one yet, just Fulgore. And in Season 2 you could kinda say the same about Aria…sure she was technically the “boss” lore wise, but in game you just fought X number of characters & done. It’d be nice if at some point they could make a classic ladder, but for now I say let’s see what Shadow Lords has to offer.
Forgive me for quoting myself, but this post was not a joke. The video literally put me to sleep, it was so boring!
I did get around to watching it again later, though (it almost put me to sleep again!). It’s a lot of fancy menus, garbage gameplay (skill-wise; the player showed very little in the way of skill and his opponent, naturally, was craptastic AI), and inconsistent, garbled cutscenes. Furthermore, you really mean to tell me that “tthe all powerful” guardians are basically akin to Pokemon? Really!?
Despite my opinions on what I’ve seen, I’m sure the mode will be great; I just don’t think a 16 minute video demo that puts me to sleep was the best way to advertise the new features. They should’ve put together some sort of awesome, kick ■■■ trailer instead, but nope, that’s not what we got…
The thing I liked the most about Shadow Lords mode is the versus screen. Much cleaner and orderly… at least the ones seen in the video
As for the story bits… well… personally I’d just erase everything from S1 and S2 and just make an arcade mode with new intros and endings. As it stands now the stories are kind of a mess, both presentation and story-wise. But that’s just me!
Fighting AI is the worst part of this game. I honestly have 100x more fun in practice mode. I’ll give this mode a playthrough for any unlockables but i don’t see any replay value from the video. These fights really should be against other’s shadows.
Rico’s shadow should be in charge of Manhattan, daytonj in Chicago, sleep in LA, lcd in siberia, etc… until otherwise dethroned. I feel like this was a missed opportunity to give our shadows ownership and goals. Oh well, maybe in S4.
Having been thoroughly bored by a game I’ve been testing that employs a similar structure but for top-down strategy variant, i am not as excited about the mode. I have a couple of nitpicks, a) that dossiers include descriptions of the mimic power attributes (i.e, Fury I, Power II etc) and take up a slot in the card packs. And b) there’s a bit in the Guardians’ descriptions (i think?) that mentions Ichoreans, whereas I remember it being written as Ikkorans somewhere else. Also whoever was playing made that video a lot more annoying and boring than it should have been.
That being said, I AM excited for the individual fights as they are far better than the RTS I mentioned earlier. Seems like more Guardians will be added in the future. I also like that the Guardians react to you getting hit, from what i noticed with the Ram. Definitely going to give the mode a shot, seems to be a lot to unlock. The replayability aspect is there, but it feels like it will be more of a chore to unlock everything rather than just for fun.
