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

The Mortal Kombat series retains many hidden mysteries and the ability to amaze, more than 30 years after its initial debut in arcades. This latest compilation including the brand's formative years, which includes four arcade games, multiple console adaptations, and related titles, is more than simply a faithfully reproduced series of classics and not-so-classics — it additionally serves as a comprehensive historical account about the creation of the legendary series.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to understand and value about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other retro collections from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, portion interactive museum. This compilation features emulated versions of the first arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, along with home system and portable adaptations of several of these titles. This compilation also features the brand's experiments at spinoffs, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection thus isn't a greatest hits compilation, but an examination of the franchise's initial era, when the creators at Midway and franchise originators Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to create a combat title, created from video recordings of live performers, through experimentation. Viewing the historical footage — which includes archival footage, recent conversations, and digital copies of vintage posters, graphic novels, and even company memos — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to observe several early video game creators, operating with virtually no plan or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into birthing an iconic game franchise.

Historical Section

The educational segment of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of the fighting series and the developers' professional journeys at the currently closed Midway. It subsequently demonstrates how those same creators addressed how to routinely one-up themselves, facing no small amount of demand to replicate their success. It serves as a compelling period piece constructed using analog films and analog photographs and pencil sketches, which reveal the self-made character of the franchise's production method and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and undisclosed elements of the series in its arcade heyday. 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 previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are prompts to play the actual titles. During specific moments, audience members can jump into a combat game session or a console adaptation to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on current technology.

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. Numerous titles here stand the test of time, notably with direct competitive sessions. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unbalanced the development approached in the franchise's pioneering releases. Computer-directed fighters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are alternatively incredibly stupid. Without having a human opponent — internet multiplayer exists in numerous anthology releases, but rather basic in functionality — you'll be missing out.

Display Features

The two dozen available combat games in the compilation, a combination of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and sporadic glitches, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Although the titles are mostly shown in their original form, the creators has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and visual presentation options. For instance, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on the display and opt to have endless periods to execute finishing moves. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, eliminating the need to execute complicated methods to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be played with a variety of graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic options that simulate the CRT monitors of gaming halls or domestic TVs, or the greenscale screen of a Game Boy. An especially welcome feature is the setting to activate arcade-like bezels framing the gameplay, with the specific combat game you're playing accurately and softly reflecting against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Extra Content

There are plenty of welcome features besides the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple Mortal Kombat games without the din of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Additionally included are fighter biographies that feature histories and the various bits of lore shown through the idle displays of gaming hall releases and conclusions.

Lost Media Recovery

One of the biggest highlights for committed franchise followers is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the format of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This specific release, a slightly updated version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an pioneering effort from the developer at one-on-one internet-based play in coin-op establishments. The online-enabled release of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but featured the capability to battle network competitors and included some minor glitch repairs and refinements. However, this network version didn't find widespread adoption, in part