Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection: A Near-Flawless Victory for the Combat Series Series

This iconic fighting game still possesses its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its first appearance in coin-op establishments. A new collection covering the franchise's earliest days, featuring a quartet of arcade releases, several home system versions, and derivative games, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced set of legendary games along with lesser-known entries — it's also a rich documentary about the making of the iconic franchise.

Being a long-time Mortal Kombat fan who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was much to discover for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to previous classic compilations from developer Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, section playable historical record. The collection includes digitally recreated editions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, along with home system and portable adaptations of certain releases. This compilation also features the brand's experiments at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the development team Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were discovering methods to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of actual people, on the fly. Observing the archival material — which includes historical videos, new interviews, and scans of old flyers, graphic novels, and even interoffice faxes — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to observe several young game developers, developing without clear direction or guidance, direct their entertainment passions into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators addressed how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant stress to duplicate their success. It's a fascinating time capsule made from VHS tapes and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which reveal the self-made character of the franchise's production method and how oral tradition helped circulate its mysteries and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its peak period in gaming halls. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and including the humorous real-world tour. The compilation also contains some never-implemented techniques and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Experience

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the original releases. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a combat game session or a console adaptation to rediscover its combat system and artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on modern hardware.

I spent the bulk of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here remain enjoyable, especially in direct competitive sessions. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the programming was in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking another person to compete with — network gaming is included in most titles in the collection, but too light on features — the experience will be incomplete.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the compilation, a mix of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are precisely simulated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — mostly input lag and intermittent errors, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are mostly shown in their original form, the development team has included some smart quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. As an illustration, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on-screen and opt to have endless periods to complete lethal techniques. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, without having to perform some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate options that simulate the traditional television screens of arcades or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a portable gaming device. A notably appreciated element is the choice to enable gaming hall-style borders encircling the display, with your selected Mortal Kombat title faithfully and subtly duplicating against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, including a music player that lets you revisit the soundtracks of different Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Additionally included are fighter biographies that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements presented by the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Historical Preservation

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the chance to experience a segment of previously unavailable content in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at head-to-head network battles in arcades. This network version of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but provided the ability to compete against internet adversaries and included some minor bug fixes and balance. However, this network version failed to achieve popularity, in part