Mortal Kombat's Legacy Kollection: An Almost Perfect Triumph for the Fighting Game Franchise

Mortal Kombat continues to hold numerous undisclosed elements and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its first appearance in arcades. This latest compilation including the brand's formative years, featuring four original arcade titles, multiple console adaptations, and derivative games, goes beyond only a accurately simulated collection of iconic titles including less celebrated releases — it functions as a comprehensive historical account about the creation of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong devotee of the franchise who has carefully followed its origins and transformation, there was much to discover for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Defines the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection comparable to previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, portion educational film, part playable archive. This compilation features 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. This compilation also features 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 thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but an exploration into the series' formative period, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators the visionary developers were discovering methods to create a combat title, created from video recordings of actual people, as they went along. Observing the archival material — that features archival footage, recent conversations, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and even interoffice faxes — it's astonishing to observe how the series transformed from simple starts to a worldwide phenomenon. It's truly remarkable to watch a handful of early video game creators, working with minimal planning or oversight, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Educational Component

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the no-longer-operating Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how these identical developers reckoned with how to regularly outdo their previous work, encountering significant stress to duplicate their achievements. It's a fascinating time capsule made from video recordings and film-based pictures and manual drawings, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of Mortal Kombat's development and how oral tradition helped spread its rumors and undisclosed elements of the series in its arcade heyday. Delivered in easily digestible portions, it's thoroughly enjoyable series of documentary shorts that covers video games, graphic novels, movies and even the comical physical events. The compilation also contains some unused moves and game character images among its archived development assets.

Interactive Experience

Placed within the five-part documentary's timeline are invitations to experience the original releases. At certain intervals, viewers can hop into a Mortal Kombat title or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on modern hardware.

I allocated the majority of my time playing the arcade classics, particularly Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here stand the test of time, particularly during local multiplayer matches. However, facing the computer-controlled adversaries in these titles is a testament to how primitive and unjust the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are alternatively incredibly stupid. If you don't have another person to compete with — online play is available in the majority of included games, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the anthology, a combination of gaming hall, television, and mobile releases, are faithfully recreated, though I have noticed a few small quirks — primarily delayed responses and sporadic glitches, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has incorporated various clever user experience improvements and display customization choices. As an illustration, you can choose to reveal combatant-unique actions on-screen and select to activate unlimited duration to perform a Fatality. There are also options for revealing concealed combatants, without having to perform complicated methods to unlock them.

Visually, the games can be enjoyed with multiple filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection includes remarkably accurate effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of arcades or home televisions, or the limited color monitor of a Game Boy. A notably appreciated element is the choice to enable arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with the MK game of your choice precisely and gently mirroring against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Additional Features

Players will discover multiple welcome features besides the educational material and simulated classic games, featuring an audio component that allows users to rediscover the soundtracks of different fighting releases absent the noise of fighters brutally eliminating opponents. Additionally included are combatant descriptions that contain backgrounds and multiple story elements displayed via the idle displays of gaming hall releases and final sequences.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers 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 slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at head-to-head network battles in arcades. This network version of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but included the option to compete against internet adversaries and featured various slight glitch repairs and refinements. But the Wavenet update failed to achieve popularity, in part