Sucked? Ha! When ki1 came out it walked over every single game, none matched its graphics and none matched its combo system. I still think to date it had one of the most ingenious(sp) combo systems out there.
The only 50+ hit combos that were out there were the finishing combos, so instead of doing a fatality you just did a huge combo depending how good you were. Some 50 hit combos were easy to pull off while others were hard as hell.
I think capcom was the one who went a bit overboard with the capcom vs marvel games where they had 100+ hit combos that only drained 1/4 of your energy, ki/ki2 had none of that.