How Mortal Kombat 2021 Gets EVERYTHING Wrong

6. "Arcana"?!?

I don't know where the push to explain everything came from. The boring, corporate-based assumption that audiences won't "accept" superpowers or overblown rulesets for certain mythologies.

Instead we have to have an "origin story" or entire season of television before a character acquires their costume or power set. Anything more and we might get to enjoying what we paid for.

In Mortal Kombat's case, writer Greg Russo decided that the appeal of MK is not in a swathe of fighters from various colours, creeds and realms competing. Instead, it's that the "worthy" ones get superpowers from an actual Mortal Kombat symbol on their person, either starting as a birthmark or being passed on if you beat someone else with the mark.

This, to put it bluntly, breaks Mortal Kombat. A large part of the core appeal to the fiction is seeing everyone from a Hollywood action star to a special forces unit, a demonic hell-ninja to a teleporting Shaolin Monk do battle.

Flattening all this off just makes MK boring. Characters who were championed because they were humans in a world of demons and gods now have instant superpowers, including things like Jax growing a new set of arms on the spot, because he needed to lift something.