Actually, does anybody care about story in fighters? I mean, I don't play fighters for character stories- I play them because they're fighting games. If I want a story I'll go play an RPG or a good survival horror game.
I hear people say this a lot, and I never buy it. RPGs and the like are perfectly capable of having garbage storylines and flat characters. And either way, you can play those game just to slash at or shoot stuff. It can all be boiled down to "kill this monster/bad guy/evil overlord" or maybe "escape" in the case of some horror games. It's all just a means to an end. If you want a story, people can also go watch a movie.
The story part of any game can be made superfluous since gameplay is supposed to be the main point. But,
any game is made better by attempts at story telling and making us care about the characters and the scenario somewhat. There's no real reason fighting games
can't do that. A lot of the ones not confined to a tournament setting (Guilty Gear, Skullgirls, Soulcalibur, Injustice, etc.) manage to do a lot with it. And even then, tournament settings can work as it did for MK9 in the end. We shouldn't be trying to let fighting games off the hook in the story regard. It's just a different way of beating up enemies.