Anything but a shadowy, evil organization that holds a martial arts tournament for some nefarious purpose, which even having a hero win the tournament so many times, they keep on sending him/her an invite.
Thats one of the nice things about SC tho right? There's not really a tournament, people are just drawn to fight for the sword.
Fighters CAN have strong narratives (capcom is the only company that really falls down on that), and namco has been strong. The other advantage of rebooting it tho' is that you can cut all the excess garbage that you have pulled up over 5 games. Kind of a spring cleaning thing.
Games I can think of with strong stories:
Soul series
Samurai Shodown
Art of Fighting (story > game)
Arcsys games (if you like it on the edge of insane)
Tekken
Mk 4+
Weak stories:
SF
VF
KOF
Darkstalkers
Old MK's
The problem being that the really big titles have been the ones with stories along the lines of 'hey go fight!'
~~~ And yeah. MK9 had the best story and presentation of story ever. Its writing was spot on for the themes of the game, the characerizations were rad, and the actual story presentation was just insane.
Soulcalibur has a way they like to present stories, but I hope htey take some tips from that.
~(drugposting probably shoudln't do hope this isn't too carayz)