When does it stop being a “Celebration of Gaming” and start being a meaningless obligation?
Guest characters and crossover appearances have become extremely commonplace in the fighting game space. Capcom recently broke the mold for Street Fighter by announcing that SNK’s Terry and Mai would be joining Street Fighter 6, Tekken 7 brought in characters from within and without the fighting game genre, Mortal Kombat has made themed guests a common practice and you’ll soon be able to pit a Matrix character against LeBron James and the Iron Giant as we just got the MultiVersus gameplay trailer for Agent Smith.
Crossovers bring a natural hype as many of us can remember having conversations about who’d win fantasy match ups between characters like Wolverine, Yoda, and Master Chief, but are we in danger of pushing too much of a good thing into an arena of apathy?
You might be tempted to say that the wave of fighting game crossover and guest appearances began with NetherRealm Studios’ exciting and surprising calls to put the likes of Kratos and later Freddy Kreuger in Mortal Kombat 2011 (often referred to as Mortal Kombat 9), but Soul Calibur was bringing in Star Wars and comic book characters in the early 2000’s.
Even before that you had Capcom vs. SNK, Marvel vs. Capcom, and the earliest entries in the Super Smash Bros. franchise bringing together characters from various corners of the gaming world, and there are a handful of examples I’ve omitted in this brief recounting and thus to say the practice is at all new is entirely erroneous.
While history shows that crossovers and guests have existed consistently in the fighting game space over the better part of the last three decades, one can’t help but notice the fact that the practice has gone from being infrequent or strategic enough to hit audiences with a certain level of novelty to becoming all but expected and possibly rote.
Indeed, multiverse story lines have become extremely prominent in our culture as of late, in no small part thanks to the way the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes have played out, and surely in significant part thanks to the booming success of Rick and Morty.
One could even argue that fighting games are relatively immune to some of the obvious potholes multiverse storytelling can bring with it. Where parallel universes can become tiring for audiences thanks to their convolution, contradictions, and natural lowering of stakes, story widely takes a back seat to the fun of dream matching your favorite figures with some toys and imagination on the table in your room (shout outs to Super Smash Bros. for capturing this essence perfectly).
So is there an issue at all as far as we’re concerned in the FGC? One of the first places I’d like to look is in the realm of Mortal Kombat, the non-crossover based franchise that’s done the most in this avenue in the last decade.
When the aforementioned Freddy Kreuger came out in 2011, it was shocking at first, but it also made perfect sense after the initial surprise that came with “these two things don’t actually go together” wore off and we were able to appreciate just how well Freddy naturally integrated into the Mortal Kombat atmosphere.
Not only was the character gory and violent, but he had supernatural abilities that could easily be tempered into fighting game maneuvers, and boasted a trademark sense of dark humor that overlaps greatly with the one Ed Boon and his development teams have long-established in Mortal Kombat.
The more you thought about it, the more you could see how the pieces came together for the developers who thought this idea up (probably at lunch or in one of those fantasy match up discussions we all seem to have from time to time) and how that concept just kept gaining momentum and growing into actual fruition.
Success here led to even more horror icons being welcomed into the subsequent Mortal Kombat X as Jason Voorhees, Alien, Leatherface and Predator all joined the playable roster as DLC, and all with comparable reception to Freddy’s.
Themed guests continued into Mortal Kombat 11 with 80’s action film characters including Terminator, Robocop, and John Rambo, a theme that may or may not have the same amount of natural overlap as horror icons, but still works extremely well with MK.
Now in Mortal Kombat 1 the theme is violent superheroes as Homelander, Omni-Man, and Peacemaker have all leapt with their red-hot momentum from the mainstream into the fighting game space. While I can’t deny how much sense bringing relevant, violent supers into MK (not to mention the fact that NetherRealm Studios is further qualified for this given their production of the Injustice titles) I also can’t help noticing that I don’t feel the same magic or excitement for these figures as I did for Freddy.
Again it all makes total sense from multiple angles, and I admit I’ve even found myself secretly hoping for a character like Rorschach from Watchmen to join as well, but I can’t shake the feeling that this is being done as much (or more) out of a sense of obligation as it is inspiration.
How much do crossovers depend on their novelty for success? Will Mortal Kombat DLC continue to be successful if every entry from here on out has to have guest characters? I think that it could, and that’s not because the practice runs on novelty, but instead on inspiration.
The fear isn’t that crossover and guest practice will become dry because developers keep doing it, but rather it could easily become dry because developers feel like they have to keep doing it.
This can (and perhaps has begun to) start falling into a more obligatory realm, and that means you lose the factors of both novelty and inspiration. I’d like to ask for those who feel they have an answer, does the relevant MK1 DLC land with as much impact as MK11’s, MKX’s, or Freddy in MK9 did?
It’s hard when fervor for MK1 is relatively low compared to its predecessors, but is our discussion here a relevant part of why fans haven’t received the game all that well?
Further issues with guests manifest when you consider how they compete with legacy franchise figures for coveted DLC spots and so we should at least be questioning just how ingrained we want this practice, which is continually gaining momentum, to become.
We recently heard Street Fighter 6 Director Nakayama claim he’s more open to the idea of a Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter crossover than Capcom seemingly has been in the past, and that notion was met with mixed reviews here on EventHubs as well as on FGC social media with fans expressing some crossover fatigue as well as a desire to keep some defined borders up between fighting game experiences.
For my two cents, I’d say that it’s proven to be a fine practice as long as it’s coming from the right motivations. It can be hard to articulate, but fighting game players have a particular sense for the tension line between passion and obligation in fighting game content.
How do you feel about crossovers and guests in our corner of the gaming world? Do you hope it ramps up, stops altogether, or is regulated to some certain extend as we move forward?