Fighting Game Storytelling Sucks and I Love It

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon is epic. It does not hesitate to prove this fact. In the opening scene, as a vulture eats away at the corpse of some forgotten warrior, the narrator describes the impending apocalypse, detailing the “critical point” of the strength of the world’s fighters before those fighters appear and roar at their enemies. Two armies of powerful warriors from the franchise’s previous games smash into each other in a frenzy of violence, showing fan-favorite characters impale, crush, bludgeon, and shoot each other. Then, the pyramid erupts from the ground. As the narrator continues describing the world’s approaching end, the heroes and villains of the series climb and battle their way to the top of the pyramid. As Shang Tsung reaches the top of the pyramid, he is grabbed by the chains of his zombie nemesis, withering away as his life force drains and the camera pans towards the growing flame at the top of the structure. As the narrator announces that “Armageddon has begun,” a massive beast made of fire roars, and the scene ends, sending the player to the title screen with an epic feeling. It’s self-indulgent in its violence and disgustingly full of clichés in its narration, and I love it.

Fighting games as a genre have never been the pinnacle of video game storytelling. In their early days, this was understandable: arcade machines didn't have the capacity for elaborate cutscenes, and it's hard to develop characters when they're so busy punching each other with their massive muscles. Even after decades of innovation in game development, though, modern fighting games – capable of lengthy cutscenes, emotional dialogue, and beautiful graphics – seem to always make questionable choices for their stories. In Tekken 7, a major part in the story is given to Akuma, a crossover character from Street Fighter with no prior role in the story of Tekken. No one understood the motivations of Mortal Kombat 11's villain, and no one ever will because the next game will most likely reboot the series for a second time. Street Fighter has released nothing but prequels and remakes since Street Fighter III, though Street Fighter VI will likely change this trend next year – more than twenty years after the release of Street Fighter III. Every fighting game ends the same way: the good guy is better at hitting hard than the bad guy, and the good guy wins. There are countless flaws in fighting game stories. Those flaws, though, are exactly why I love them. Hell yeah, Akuma appears out of nowhere and is one of Tekken 7's most important characters; that kind of nonsense is what gives fighting games their charm. In that same game, a bear can score a one-hit KO by farting on the opponent. Of course fighting games don't have amazing stories. They're about defeating your opponent in impressive and humiliating ways, not the meaning of life.

The ending of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon is as underwhelming as the beginning is amazing. The story's protagonist, Taven, having killed his evil brother (his only remaining family member), heads into battle against Blaze, the fire beast seen in the intro, ultimately winning and fulfilling his prophesized role of preventing armageddon. Then, the screen fades and changes to a cutscene where Taven narrates the result of his victory: nothing. The world-endingly powerful kombatants were neither destroyed nor disarmed, only made stronger. Taven's family is dead, and the world is still ending. It's a disappointing conclusion to the story set up by the game's awesome intro. A similar situation appears in Super Smash Bros Brawl; the game's intro, more in the vein of traditional fighting game intro videos with music and a demonstration of the various characters and conflicts, includes an awe-inspiring orchestra composition with a choir singing in Latin as various Nintendo characters are shown interacting with one another. At the end of the game, after the characters defeat the evil Tabuu, they unite on a cliff and watch the brilliant light left by Tabuu's destruction. The ending plays the intro song again, this time with lyrics, seemingly revealing that the theme song has been about Tabuu all along. The ending is beautiful and poetic, but it's also vague and a cliché. By any sensible standards, it's hard to call Super Smash Bros Brawl's Subspace Emissary story a masterpiece.

Subspace Emissary is absolutely a masterpiece, though. It is, I think, the essential fighting game story. It's full of high-stakes, intense, and epic battles, but it's hard to find whatever theme the story is trying to convey. It's full of emotions. Ness's sacrifice to save Lucas from Wario is one of the saddest scenes in all of gaming, and Captain Falcon's accidental mass murder of the Pikmin is surprisingly potent dark humor from Nintendo. More impressively, it conveys all of these emotions with no dialogue; the player can feel the grief, tragedy, excitement, and joy of the characters without ever having to be told about those feelings. It's dramatic and fantastical, and I don't know what it's supposed to mean. I love it. Like all other fighting game stories, it starts with a tournament between powerful warriors; and like all other fighting tame stories, it's not long before some malevolent force interferes with the tournament. Tabuu's motivations are as simple as Shao Kahn and M. Bison's: to conquer and control the world. Akuma's arrival in Tekken 7 is, in all its silliness and its awesomeness, rivaled only by Sonic's reveal at the very end of Subspace Emissary. It has ridiculous flaws, too; Mario and Luigi, brothers who have worked together every time the Mushroom Kingdom was at risk, have zero interaction for the entirety of Subspace Emissary. Lucas seems to forget the trauma of watching Ness die after he helps the Pokémon Trainer catch a Charizard. Subspace Emissary takes the absurd premise of combining countless Nintendo characters in a fight against a universe-destroying evil and builds an even more ridiculous story around it, and that story is a masterpiece.

Fighting game storytelling isn't the best, honestly. But it's also awesome. It doesn't have any meaningful statements about the human experience; that's better left to other games. Fighting games are here to tell us that sometimes, it's really funny to punch people in the face and then fart on them. Other art makes us ask questions about our existence and our society; fighting games make us ask how big of a fireball that muscular guy can shoot from his fists. They're full of clichés, plot holes and nonsense, but they're fun. The ending of Armageddon is disappointing and unfulfilling, but wow that pyramid looks so cool. The ending of Brawl doesn't add any potentially valuable context to its story, but oh my god Link and Yoshi are best friends. Fighting game storytelling sucks, and I love it.