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

The Mortal Kombat series continues to hold numerous undisclosed elements and the capacity to surprise, over three decades after its original launch in arcades. A new collection including the series' initial period, featuring four original arcade titles, various home ports, and related titles, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced collection of iconic titles and not-so-classics — it's also a rich documentary about the development of the legendary series.

As a dedicated Mortal Kombat fan who has closely monitored its development and progression, there was much to discover for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, section playable historical record. The collection includes digitally recreated editions of the original arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of several of these titles. The collection even includes the series' ventures at derivative games, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection is therefore not a highlight reel anthology, but an exploration into the franchise's initial era, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators the visionary developers were discovering methods to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of actual people, on the fly. Viewing the historical footage — that features vintage recordings, new interviews, and digital copies of vintage posters, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's incredible to witness how the franchise evolved from humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon. It's frankly astounding to watch a handful of early video game creators, developing without clear direction or supervision, direct their entertainment passions into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of Mortal Kombat and the founders' vocational paths at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how the very same individuals reckoned with how to consistently surpass their achievements, experiencing considerable stress to duplicate their triumphs. It serves as a compelling period piece constructed using video recordings and film-based pictures and pencil sketches, which showcase the DIY nature of the series' creation process and how oral tradition helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable collection of mini-documentaries that spans games, comics, films and even the comical physical events. The compilation also contains some unused moves and game character images among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the games themselves. During specific moments, audience members can jump into a combat game session or a console adaptation to rediscover its combat system and visual presentation, recreated with impressive accuracy on contemporary systems.

I allocated the majority of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Several releases here stand the test of time, particularly during local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a demonstration of how basic and unjust the coding existed in the series' initial installments. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. Lacking someone to play against — network gaming is included in numerous anthology releases, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a combination of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I've observed a handful slight anomalies — mostly input lag and the occasional bug, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, the development team has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. As an illustration, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions on-screen and opt to have unlimited duration to complete lethal techniques. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform obscure techniques to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate effects that reproduce the CRT monitors of gaming halls or home televisions, or the limited color monitor of a Game Boy. A particularly nice touch is the setting to activate arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with the MK game of your choice accurately and softly reflecting against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, featuring an audio component that allows users to rediscover the tunes of various Mortal Kombat games absent the noise of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Additionally included are fighter biographies that include bios and numerous narrative components shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and conclusions.

Archival Discovery

One of the biggest highlights for dedicated series enthusiasts is the opportunity to play a example of historically missing material in the form of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a moderately improved edition of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at direct online competitive gaming in arcades. The online-enabled release of the game is virtually identical to UMK3, but provided the ability to challenge online opponents and contained several small bug fixes and balance. Yet this online edition never gained traction, in part