Fighting Games: Story?

  I have always loved fighting games.  Some of my earliest gaming memories are playing Mortal Kombat on Sega with my brother.  One of the great things about a fighting game is the wealth of characters.  Most fighting games do a great job of keeping these characters very different with very different stories.  There's so much possibility for rich narrative.  Unfortunately, the "story" is most fighting games barely exists.  Normally a short scene at the start of the game or a blurb in the manual tell the basic story which barely explains anything at all.  Then after fighting through, usually, a very hard arcade mode you get a couple of lines of text related to the character you just worked so hard to beat it with.  And sometimes we get a very short video that last just long enough to almost tell you something.  I will never understand why game developers put so much time and effort into the appearance of the characters and what seems like very little time on the stories of each character.
  However, it seems Ed Boon has noticed this.  The new Mortal Kombat actually has a story mode.  Like a real story mode.  It's just wandering from fight to fight as it goes through an alternate story of, I believe, the first three MK games.  But it has cinematics and an actual story putting it far ahead other fighting games on the market right now.  I hope other developers take notice of this and try to include similar features in their games.  I would love to see Mortal Kombat take this even further in the future, like being able to choose the character you play or even which side you are on.  It would be great to play as Liu Kang or Johnny Cage helping Earthrelm, or Reptile assassinating for Shang Tsung, or even Scorpion, being lead by Quan Chi in his own schemes.  As much as I want to save Earthrelm, it would be awesome to see the other sides of the story.
  I'm sure story isn't the biggest worry for fighting game developers.  They gotta worry about playability and for some reason, new characters.  I would rather have the story develop more for the characters that have been around than learning to care about a bunch of new people with each game.  But I'm crossing my fingers that more fighting games will follow Mortal Kombat in this new territory.  Soul Calibur V is on its way and Project Soul seems like they are trying to bring some new things to their formula.  Hopefully in the near future we will have some fighting games with stories!