Even with a ton of experience in other fighting games, being a first-time Mortal Kombat player can be tough. Somewhere around your tenth consecutive online loss to a seven-year-old, you may even find yourself saying something like this:
“I don’t know, dude. I’m pretty good at Street Fighter, and I thought that would carry over to Mortal Kombat, but I just keep getting bopped and I have no clue what to do.”
Well, it’s great to have a background in Street Fighter, or any other 2D fighter for that matter, but that experience by itself probably won’t translate immediately to Mortal Kombat success.
So you have a killer 14,000-point Yun, or you win your Melee local every week, or you’ve been playing Super Turbo for, like, 30 years now, and that’s awesome. Perhaps these days, though, you’re finding it difficult to go five minutes in Motal Kombat X without having your character’s head separated, one way or another, from the rest of their body.
For those familiar with Capcom-style mechanics, veteran player and analyst Bill “VGP|Tom Brady” Menoutis explained, much of the Mortal Kombat X learning curve stems from its combo system and frame data having more in common with Tekken than Street Fighter.
“I usually find that 3D players have an easier time understanding the game,” he said. “Mortal Kombat’s frame data is built more like a 3D game. In Street Fighter, you have moves that are two frames, three frames, four frames, but these moves don’t exist in Mortal Kombat X. The frame data is very 3D-like, with six-frame jabs, eight-frame jabs, nine-frame jabs.”
“It’s weird,” Menoutis added, “Because you have a 2D jump speed, but a 3D attack speed. Jumping is very quick, but you’re still doing six-frame low pokes, and nine, ten-frame jabs, so it’s a little different. Most people coming from a 2D fighter are already looking for a combo system like Street Fighter. They’re not so much looking for, ‘Okay, what are my launchers?’”
Fatalities in Mortal Kombat, of course, are just glorified taunts. They don’t affect gameplay, but for the once-proud 2D veteran, they’re a reminder: this isn’t Street Fighter, and you’ll need to relearn some fundamentals.
But with the proper mindset, and some practice, players can make this transition rather quickly.
Marvel icon Michael “IFC Yipes” Mendoza is one notable player that’s taken the Mortal Kombat plunge in recent weeks. Shrugging aside fifteen years of Marvel vs. Capcom muscle memory, Mendoza now runs Sub-Zero and Takeda with confidence against New York’s best. And the learning process, he said, was painless. Despite having little prior experience with Mortal Kombat 9 and Injustice: Gods Among Us, he quickly felt at home with Mortal Kombat X.
“I liked the speed,” Mendoza said in a conversation with Steam Co. teammate and Mortal Kombat luminary Emmanuel “CDjr” Brito. “It was really welcoming. Once I transitioned to the pace of the game, it wasn’t really too hard to follow up.”
Meter
Even at the highest levels of Mortal Kombat 9, Team Razer’s Carl “Perfect Legend” White often found himself bored.
“I felt like there was nothing else I could do,” the back-to-back Evo champ said. “I could play crazy, but I wasn’t really trying to pay attention. It was all very autopilot.”
But the stamina system in Mortal Kombat X has largely made autopilot situations a thing of the past. Where characters could once apply safe, mind-numbing pressure, stamina now forces players to think proactively.
And White couldn’t be happier about it.
“As a player, it makes the game so much more interesting, because I’m managing all this stuff while I’m fighting,” he said. “I love that. It keeps me so engaged.”
Still, it could be easy for the Mortal Kombat novice to overlook the meter’s huge potential. Without paying close attention to stamina, players trying to learn the ropes will lose all day to run pressure, backdash escapes, and breakers they never saw coming.
“Hands down,” CDjr said, “Stamina is the most important bar in the game.”
Okizeme and Set Play
At first glance, some of Mortal Kombat X’s mechanics may appear familiar to Street Fighter players. Often, though, the systems are significantly different. Delayed wakeup is one such vital mechanic.
The timing of a delayed wakeup in Ultra Street Fighter IV is uniform. Once the command is input, characters rise a steady 11 frames later than they otherwise would have. Street Fighter technicians quickly adjusted to this system, accounting for both possible timings with new vortex schemes.
In Mortal Kombat X, though, players can precisely control the moment at which they wake up. This flexibility, players agree, should prevent the rise of routine-but-effective set play.
This also gives way to interesting okizeme situations. Even though there’s no true parallel to the wakeup Dragon Punch and the few rough equivalents are meter-intensive and dangerous, players must still be careful in applying meaty pressure. If these attempts are mistimed against a delayed wakeup, they can be whiff punished by an on-reaction rise into a quick string.
“Normally, you feel overwhelmed because you just don’t feel like you have the tools to push back,” Menoutis said. “This game, basically, gives the entire roster the tools to push back. And when each character can bully the other, it comes down to fundamentals, spacing, footsies, reads, knowledge of the game. It comes down to who’s smarter, not who has the better buttons.”
“A myth I want to kill,” Brito said, “Is that when you’re knocked down, you’re done and you’re going to get opened up by 50/50s. No. If you know they’re going to keep going for 50/50s on your wakeup, just lay on the ground for a little bit. Let them finish their string, and then get up. It’s that simple.”
“It’s a weird situation,” he added. “Some people are complaining that you can’t do anything on wakeup. But I bet once people discover that you can stay on the ground, they’ll start complaining, ‘Oh, there are no real setups.’ But if you ask me, this is a beautiful thing, man, because now, there’s no brain dead oki, no brain dead set play, no brain dead 50/50. Now, everybody has to think, so you have to be really solid.”
“And there’s no Morrigan,” Brito laughed. “Nothing cheap like that.”
Rushdown and Keepaway
If you’re naturally the stretchy-limbed, max-range sort of player, take heed: dedicated full-screen zoning is not really a thing in Mortal Kombat X. Running straight-up nullifies many traditional keepaway patterns, and rushdown play, as Mendoza noted, also builds meter more efficiently. Even as the game continues to evolve, run-based high/low/grab pressure will remain a centerpiece.
“If you just want to zone in this game, you have to be really exceptional at zoning,” said White. “Right now, everyone’s complaining about Sub-Zero ice clones, but you can’t just ice clone all day and win. You have to actually kind of rush people down and push them into the corner. It’s not simple to just zone.”
“The game is a lot faster,” he added. “It doesn’t really cater too much to the runaway, ‘I want to shoot projectiles from across the screen’ zoning. I feel like it’s going to cater more to the Street Fighter zoning where you have Bonchan, with Sagat, throwing Tiger Shots, but he’s not really sitting across screen. He has to move around first, he has to keep his spacing correct. Because if he throws one bad Tiger Shot, he’s done.”
“It’s going to be very common to see someone run up to footsie range and grab, because it’s so quick,” White continued. “It’s going to be so hard to keep someone out. Characters have teleports, of course they can run. They might have other movement options like full-screen parries.”
Rushdown was intentionally emphasized in Mortal Kombat X, Menoutis said, in part because viewers are more attracted to fighting games with a quick pace.
“The NBA can’t exist without money, and it’s the same thing for professional fighting games,” he said. “To do that, you have to go with what people want to see. Gone are the days of super lame-out matches. That doesn’t sell anymore, the same way 0-0 football ties in the freezing cold don’t sell tickets. You have to build a product that’s consistent for the high-level player, but is also equally rewarding to the guy saying, ‘I’m not playing the game, but I’m willing to pay my money to watch it played.’ And Mortal Kombat X really hits that nail on the head.”
Even slow characters like Ferra/Torr, he said, have tools to deal with keepaway tactics.
In the absence of Street Fighter-style vortex setups and Marvel-style bullet hell zoning, cleanly-strung 50/50s will remain vital to any effective player’s arsenal. Most early character standouts are valued for their ability to combine a solid 50/50 game with heavy damage potential and reset opportunities.
Variations
Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike players might at first approach Mortal Kombat X character variations by asking, “Which of these is the best?”
Similarities between Street Fighter III’s super arts and Mortal Kombat X’s variations, though, are sparse. You’ve got three options to choose from, and the choice is made at character select.
But comparisons pretty much end there. And few decisions, if any, are 3rd Strike Ken-level slam dunks.
“Variations actually add a lot of layers to the meta,” Mendoza said. “It does amplify certain matchup situations, and it gives a lot of flavor to the characters.”
A few variations, early on, have become overwhelmingly popular (Sub-Zero’s Grandmaster, for instance) but Mendoza and Brito predict that sharp players will eventually gravitate away from the one-variation approach. In high-level Mortal Kombat X, they said, mastery of multiple variations will become essential.
“For some characters, there’s always going to be that favorite variation,” Brito said. “But sometimes, you’ll encounter a character that’s going to force you to pick another variation. I don’t think there’s going to be a variation that will be able to completely deal with everything.”
“100 percent,” Yipes agreed.
Tiers
Those hoping to simply pick a top tier, learn a combo or two, and dominate will be sorely disappointed. There is absolutely no S-tier consensus among Mortal Kombat experts, and while this is partially due to the game’s youth, top players believe the roster will enjoy a remarkable degree of long-term balance. Variation-based counterpicking, a vast but still mostly uncharted aspect of the game’s strategy, has made it even more difficult for players to predict which characters, if any, could become dominant.
“The game is still very new, and I don’t want anyone crying nerfs, because I feel like everyone can find a way to overcome matchups at some point,” White said.
With that in mind, series newcomers are afforded the freedom of picking any character they may find intuitive or compelling. Absent, too, is the pressure to choose from a shortlist of tournament-viable powerhouses.
While it may at first seem like a complex undertaking, jumping into Mortal Kombat X is, fundamentally, quite simple. Learn your matchups, keep a critical eye toward the game’s mechanics, and you’ll have mindless spammers ragequitting in no time.
