Hey, I’ve actually been struggling with this exact question recently and am currently landing somewhere in the middle.
I randomly decided, for the first time in my life, to get into a fighting game beyond the most basic surface level, and started poking around the genre to pick a game. My criteria was just providing a good casual-competitive environment for a new player jumping online, but this turned out to be hard to find – almost everything appears to suffer from bad netcode, a total lack of non-master-level players still playing, or both. So MK11 won kind of by default, being in the right place at the right time with the combination of good netcode and a healthy playerbase driven by the new expansion’s launch.
So I bought it, despite finding the hyperviolence juvenile and offputting – from an aesthetic point of view, I’d rather be playing basically any of the other games in the genre.
I remember seeing some videos of MK9, and that was part of why I was hesitant to try MK11. But FWIW, MK9’s approach bothered me much more than MK11 does. There’s some sort of uncanny valley type of effect, where MK9’s were just grounded and physically plausible enough for me to perceive them as actual trauma happening to a an actual human body. But MK11, despite being more visually detailed, takes things to such an absurdly over-the-top extreme that it doesn’t read as “real” to me, and (at least sometimes) becomes comical.
It also helps that the game clearly establishes that anything happening within a fight beyond winning or losing doesn’t really happen. Story mode starts off with a friendly sparring session where a girl puts five point-blank bullets through her mother, and then helps her up, no worse for wear, for a proud hug. And in all of story mode, both fighters are perfectly healthy after every bout, with any real deaths or injuries only happening in cutscenes.
But it’s totally personal where that line is. I still find it a negative against the game on the whole – depending on the violent sequence and my own mood, I’m occasionally amused, occasionally repulsed, but mostly just nonplused and waiting for the cutscene to get over so I can get back to the actual game, as @Mellified mentioned. But with the lack of viable alternatives, I’ve been willing to accept it.
And the actual game has been pretty fun! It’s got a very thorough tutorial that does a great job of breaking down the mechanics, with built-in live demos of each button’s precise timing. The single-player seems to have a ton of varied content. And there are plenty of people at various skill levels playing multiplayer, and my matches have mostly had solid connections. I’ve still got a long way to go to be competitive, but it looks like a climbable mountain rather than a sheer cliff. I completed the story mode and the tutorials, spent some time in practice mode, and then actually managed to win the occasional game online. I think my record so far is something around 2-8, which sounds discouraging, but nowhere near my 1-30-ish career records in Killer Instinct or Soulcalibur VI.
