Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection: An Almost Perfect Triumph for the Combat Series Series

The Mortal Kombat series retains its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its initial debut in arcades. The recent anthology spanning the brand's formative years, which includes four arcade games, several home system versions, and related titles, goes beyond only a accurately simulated series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it's also a detailed chronicle about the making of the legendary series.

As a dedicated Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its origins and transformation, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Defines the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from developer Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, part playable archive. This compilation features digitally recreated editions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of certain releases. The collection even includes the brand's experiments at spin-off titles, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an examination of the series' formative period, when the development team Midway and brand founders Ed Boon and John Tobias were figuring out how to create a combat title, created from video recordings of actual people, on the fly. Viewing the historical footage — containing archival footage, recent conversations, and digital copies of vintage posters, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's remarkable to see how Mortal Kombat went from simple starts to a international craze. It's genuinely amazing to observe several pioneering developers, operating with virtually no plan or supervision, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the combat franchise and the founders' vocational paths at the now-defunct Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how those same creators addressed how to routinely one-up themselves, encountering significant stress to duplicate their triumphs. It's a fascinating time capsule made from analog films and analog photographs and manual drawings, which showcase the DIY nature of Mortal Kombat's development and how personal recommendations helped spread its rumors and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's an eminently watchable set of brief historical films that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are invitations to experience the original releases. At various points, viewers can hop into a combat game session or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and visual presentation, emulated nearly perfectly on modern hardware.

I spent the bulk of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here stand the test of time, notably with local multiplayer matches. However, facing the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a reminder of how crude and unfair the coding existed in the series' initial installments. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are alternatively incredibly stupid. Without having someone to play against — online play is available in the majority of included games, but too light on features — the experience will be incomplete.

Technical Presentation

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a blend of arcade, console, and handheld games, are precisely simulated, though I detected a couple minor issues — mainly control latency and intermittent errors, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are primarily displayed authentically, the creators has incorporated various clever convenience enhancements and visual presentation options. For instance, users can elect to reveal combatant-unique actions during gameplay and opt to have infinite time to perform a Fatality. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, removing the requirement to complete some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be played with a variety of filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic filters that mimic the traditional television screens of coin-op establishments or home televisions, or the limited color monitor of a portable gaming device. A particularly nice touch is the setting to activate arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with your selected Mortal Kombat title faithfully and subtly duplicating against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's very artistically charming.

Extra Content

Players will discover multiple welcome features besides the educational material and simulated classic games, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the tunes of various fighting releases without the din of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. There are also fighter biographies that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements displayed via arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

One of the biggest highlights for dedicated series enthusiasts is the chance to experience a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at head-to-head network battles in arcades. The Wavenet Edition of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but included the option to challenge online opponents and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. But the Wavenet update didn't find widespread adoption, in part