The thing with blaming it all on DEI is that this assumes Moron Kombat was good in the first place.
There have been no worthwhile entries since the PS3 days.
I've always maintained that Mortal Kombat games have never really been very good, and I say this as a big fan of the series. They've always been fun, cool, weird, creative, and just generally rad, but as a fighting game in general, they were always clunky and were nowhere near even lesser known Japanese fighters in terms of quality, but the cool factor of the games and the interesting world and lore have always dragged it across the finish line in the end.
Well, turns out that DEI inevitably makes things seem far less cool, less rad. There's nothing "cool" about feminist ideologies, left wing rhetoric, and trans propaganda influencing a game that was fundamentally about multiple colored ninjas murdering each other, and all these reboots are making the deep and interesting lore that the games were developing over time just seem inconsequential now; it's almost like the story has no stakes, making the whole violence and gnar factor of the game seem massively toned down from the earlier titles.
I actually think DEI is literally the only reason, and I really mean only one, that the new MK fell on its face like this. I certainly can't find any other one, cause everything that this new game's guilty of, apart from DEI of course, 11 was guilty of too and it sold great. It was DEI that caused the reboot of so many characters that were iconic and beloved, and it was DEI that removed any semblance of sex appeal from all the female characters, and it was DEI that caused the gender reassignment of iconic characters. The whole thing just became cringey, like I could legitimately see someone presenting this interpretation of MK as a parody for a sketch comedy show back when those were good, (90's to early 00's), and it's insane that noone on the team saw this reboot and didn't realize how shockingly milquetoast and lacking in personality or atmosphere it is before shipping. This toxic positivity shit is truly ruining games, people need more constructive, honest criticism, but what's happening in the video game space is just plowing forward with aplumb, knowing you're carrying the flag of your cause or agenda, with absolutely zero attempt at securing an attempted unbiased review of the progress for the game to see if this is really working from a cohesive narration standpoint, so what ends up happening is a whole lot of different creators making something completely imbued with their own individual bias and generally meant to be as inoffensive as possible and to appeal to metrics and data points based on tags and trends rather than actual quality of character design or narration, and all of these crestors' ideas get in, they're not shot down by a good director who says ,"hey good effort there but doesn't necessarily fit the style of this game, we go big and we go violent and we go scary and we go sexy with this one", and when that guy's not trying keep the cutting room floor well populated with ideas that don't have broad appeal and only pertain to a niche demographic, then we get this completely vanilla, gender confused, edgeless, Marvel-ish pile of vomit known as MK1. It's honestly just a shame.
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