Well, to be honest, Midway fighters have never really been known for their gameplay. I actually cringed when I first heard about MKvDC.
True, as the technology and genre advanced, it only served to highlight their limitations. They just kept getting worse. Still, if one can't appreciate a classic like Mortal Kombat II, we might as well not play video games.
As far as Blazblue having mediocre concepts, I'm taking that to be in regards to characters and story, as there are some novel fighting game concepts that are quite compelling, such as Rachel's wind control, and Tager's magnetism.
Yeah, I was talking characters and plot, but don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for a plot, less is more actually. It's the awful attempt at plot and dialogue that's so horrid.
For me a fighter needs to have a good fighting system first. The music is second. Character design third. Everything else last. Story doesn't matter to me nor what each fighter is fighting for.
I just mean that they're cool looking/acting and not a lame cliches that, I don't know, might be considered rad in Japan, but are extremely stupid to my foreign eyes, and especially my ears. From my, albeit limited, time playing the game, the BlazBlue lineup were like copies of copies of characters that weren't good in the first place. I don't know, the more you play, the more you grow to like whatever, but certainly nothing about the characters themselves made me want to learn more, quite the opposite.
In the case of MKvDC, I didn't like any of the criteria I mentioned above. Sure the characters(on the DC side) are popular, compelling and time tested but they simply didn't fit into a fighter for me. It just seemed weird to me.
Well, nobody "fits" into a fighter if the fighter isn't good. Plus, as I've been preaching, that whole concept was just an abortion of a mismatch that only brought to mind the much better concepts on the table.
Blazblue has a nice fighting system. The music is exceptional.
I'm contesting the latter by the definition of exceptional, as I didn't find anything particularly exceptional about the music as far as composition or the genre goes. It's the same style guitar porn from all the Guilty Gear games, I just remember a bunch of solos. Maybe it was just me, but it certainly wasn't getting stuck in my head.