I get what you’re saying, and I certainly hope some story-based changes are made, at least to their designs, but looking back at older FG franchises (er…those wirh more entries) if you learned how to play MK Deady Alliance, that knowledge in no way would carry over to either future or previous MK games. Looking at Street Fighter on the other hand, if you learned to play SF2 and then played SF4, you could pretty much just pick up either one at any time and play without missing a beat. I honestly would prefer to be able to do the same with KI3 and KI4.
Oh yeah, absolutely! I think that’s more a function of the games holding to a lot of the same play mechanics and keeping character’s signature moves intact. FYI has his fireball, his DP and his whirling kick in every game. So that gives you an immediate foothold in playing as him.
I don’t think MK’s all that different in this regard. Scorpion’s had his spear and teleport, Raiden’s had his electricity and superman, etc. sure some characters get more worked over than others from one game to the next, but still.
I’d still like every character to have their signature moves, but I also want them to expand out beyond that so there are different options and opportunities to do cool new things. Otherwise, I don’t see a huge point in upgrading if 75% of the cast comes back with say, a rebalance patch’s worth of new stuff and adjustments.
I’m not talking about extreme changes, well, maybe for a character or two, to shake things up, but mostly a shift for each character that feels like enough of an evolution as to warrant a new game for all characters and not just another season.
I was looking for a more recent thread to add this to, but this one kept popping up in my searches, so it’s as good as any to necro post in.
So the past couple of days I’ve been doing a lot of combo breaker training, because I was starting to get annoyed at how badly I was getting locked out all the time. I never really used it before, primarily because I wasn’t really wrapping my head around an effective way to utilize the mode. For me, the L/M/H indicators were more distracting than they were helpful, and I didn’t want to rely on them as indicators for what strength I should use. So what I’ve been doing instead is just turning them off, setting the combo difficulty to Ultra, and then forcing myself to keep playing the mode until I’ve made 10 combo breaks in a row…er, actually 10 correct reads. I ignored timing lockouts unless it was during a shadow linker. I’ve also been doing this in mirror matches so for each character I can activate all the animations I’m looking for manually so it’s easier to determine what is a light and what’s a medium.
Anyway I was thinking of a couple of things that could be tweaked to not only encourage people to utilize breaker training more, but also add a couple more features as well.
First off, allow an option for the AI to initiate counter breakers. An advanced setting, for sure, but I know personally I’ve somehow inadvertently trained myself to try to break when my opponent starts a counter break…monkey see monkey do I suppose… but having the AI throw a few counter breakers in here and there into the mix would definitely help to discourage bad breaking habits, such as always attempting a break as soon as a combo starts, always attempting a break as soon as you see your favorite indicator (usually heavies) or stupidly breaking when you clearly see the opponent initiate a counter breaker (like I do😒).
Secondly, perhaps add goals to training, such as “break 5 lights”, “break 5 of TJ Combo’s Auto-Barrages”, “successfully break 3 Shadow Linkers” or as mentioned before, “break 10 combos in a row on Ultra difficulty with no indicators on”…and after you hit all the goals you get a special color for your character or profile background or something.
I know a lot of people are always complaining about how the other guy “guess breaks” all the time…I think something like this would go a long way towards proactively curbing those bad habits. 
