A Kompletely Kool, Nearly Komplete Kompendium
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/73462/mortal-kombat-legacy-kollection-switch-review
The Mortal Kombat franchise has come a long way since its inception in the early 1990s. Releasing around the same time as Street Fighter II, the original arcade game became a breakaway success and caught so much attention for its comparative “photorealism” from motion-captured actors and a slew of bloody fatalities–the moral panic brought it all the way to U.S. congressional hearings. The series has been transformed into an absolute bloodbath; just look at the most recent game’s dedication to giving the player an up close and personal seat to the torn ligaments, broken bones, and sinew gruesomeness that could make anyone wince. The earlier entries in the series would become quaint by comparison, and while the violence is ratcheted up a little more with each release, the series has been able to do so without the societal scrutiny it once faced. With the Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, we’ve been gifted one of the most holistic fighting game compilations yet.
Mortal Kombat’s history is cross-generational but generally hews to the standard fighter template with the best of 3 match format and special moves to boot. There’s usually some kind of bonus round similar to Street Fighter 2’s car destruction stage. Test your might is MK’s answer to that, raising a meter by button mashing and chopping a wooden block in half. In the first Mortal Kombat, part of how the difficulty ratchets up is 2v1 matches, and then a bout with multi-armed monstrosity Goro before conquering Shang Tsung, a shape shifting despot. It’s heavier both in action and tone, filled with shady combatants and disturbing backdrops.The Legacy Kollection itself is a comprehensive chronology of titles from its Halcyon days from the arcades through the Game Boy Advance. The original entry, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 are here in every iteration you could find. Mortal Kombat 4 is included, albeit in arcade form only. As an additional treat, included is Mortal Kombat Trilogy, Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero, and the barely playable Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, for the PlayStation 1. From the Game Boy Advance we get Mortal Kombat Advance, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, and Mortal Kombat: Tournament Edition.
You might be asking yourself - why do we need five different versions of Mortal Kombat & Mortal Kombat 2? The Mortal Kombat series might be one of the best examples of how much difference there was between arcade, console, and handheld versions of these games. The feel and complexity of combat, time between button input and character action, graphics, audio, and basic difficulty are meaningfully different between them. Take Mortal Kombat, for example: the arcade has a close-up field of view that favors hand-to-hand combat, while the console versions are spread farther out, benefiting those who prefer ranged attacks and special moves. You get to see differences between the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo as well. Beyond the blood censorship from Nintendo, the Genesis version has a wider range and tonally different music than the relatively muted palate of the SNES. The Game Boy version was a surprisingly good facsimile of the original, scaled down to a smaller screen with bigger sprites and converted to a two-button input. The Game Gear port traded substance for style, leaning into improved handheld graphics but playing like the cheap imitation you’d expect to get from a handheld port. There are a few omissions from Mortal Kombat 4, but the first attempt at a 3D fighter was clunky, making me less concerned about the absence of its PlayStation 1 counterpart.
That’s the magic of the collection: if you grew up in this era, it’s likely you played an arcade game and MAYBE one home version. It didn’t take long to reacquaint myself with the Sega Genesis versions I grew up with, turning into a bicycle kicking machine. But how cool is it that I can get exposed to games I’d never touched growing up? I never even knew a 32X version of Mortal Kombat 2 existed. Mortal Kombat 3’s representation includes an especially curious WaveNet edition, which was a severely limited port and a testbed for online matchmaking. The PlayStation 1 generation was a time of experimentation for the series, with a top-down 3D brawler in Mortal Kombat: Special Forces and a 2D side-scroller in Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero. Bluntly, both were a failure to launch, and are games which tried to shove the stiff combat the series was known for without taking into account what makes a good entry in those genres. Special Forces is persistently rage-inducing with how quickly you get surrounded and pummeled. Mythology will have you reeling from how many environmental instant kill traps there are. The Game Boy Advance games feel incredibly cheap. I got chain kicked by Scorpion over and over early on, like a younger brother spamming one move over and over. It’s beatable, but there isn’t much fun having to cheese an opponent as a primary strategy.
Like any good collection, this comes with a bevy of special features and settings. Every game includes an option to display your character’s special move commands in the corner. I’m like that person who goes to a restaurant and only picks one meal because I know I'll like it. It’s Ryu in Street Fighter, Sol Badguy in Guilty Gear, and for Mortal Kombat it’s Liu Kang. I love this feature since it lowers the barrier of entry to learn new characters and got me out of my one-character-only rut; it even displays the fatality inputs. For some games that have secret characters or modes, you can flip a switch to guarantee encountering them in your round of play. You can set longer times to pull off fatalities, increase damage output, enable rewind, enter a fatality-specific training ground, and even tamp down the violence & blood. Each game includes either some advertising material or scans of the original artwork, but there’s a thin amount of those materials compared to other compilation contemporaries.
Up to this point, Capcom has been churning out a prodigious number of collections, many of them a hodge-podge of different lesser-known and cult classic hits. While their choices feel more like a potpourri, Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is like slices of pizza with different toppings. It’s a delicious meal, filling and flavorful, if a little redundant. Sure, there’s some anchovy slices and someone decided to bring a Hawaiian pizza to the party, but no one’s forcing you to eat it and there’s more than enough of the good stuff to go around. I have great reverence for this package and its cataloging of the Mortal Kombat franchise’s now humble origins. It’s a toasty good time.
Topic: Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection (Switch) Review (Read 13 times)
