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The Mortal Kombat series retains its share of secrets and the capacity to surprise, more than 30 years after its initial debut in coin-op establishments. This latest compilation covering the franchise's earliest days, comprising a quartet of arcade releases, various home ports, and spinoffs, goes beyond simply a faithfully reproduced set of legendary games including less celebrated releases — it functions as a comprehensive historical account about the development of the renowned brand.

Being a long-time Mortal Kombat fan who has paid close attention its creation and evolution, there was much to discover for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from the development team Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, part playable archive. This compilation features digitally recreated editions 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 franchise's attempts at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but a study of Mortal Kombat's early days, when the creators at Midway and series co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to make a fighting game, created from video recordings of actual people, through experimentation. Observing the archival material — that features historical videos, new interviews, and scans of old flyers, graphic novels, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how the series transformed from simple starts to a global sensation. It's genuinely amazing to observe several young game developers, working with minimal planning or supervision, focus their cultural enthusiasms into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Documentary Portion

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection charts the rise of the fighting series and its creators' careers at the currently closed Midway. It then goes on to show how the very same individuals contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, facing no small amount of stress to duplicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record composed of analog films and analog photographs and manual drawings, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the franchise's production method and how oral tradition helped disseminate its secrets and secrets of MK in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's thoroughly enjoyable collection of mini-documentaries that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the silly live-action tour. The compilation also contains some unreleased actions and game character images among its cutting-room-floor content.

Playable Component

Distributed throughout the five-segment historical film's chronology are opportunities to engage with the games themselves. At various points, audience members can jump into a Mortal Kombat title or a home system version to rediscover its combat system and artistic style, recreated with impressive accuracy on current technology.

I allocated the majority of my time playing the arcade classics, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here stand the test of time, especially in direct competitive sessions. But playing against the artificial intelligence fighters in these releases is a testament to how primitive and unbalanced the development approached in early Mortal Kombat games. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are otherwise dumb as rocks. If you don't have another person to compete with — online play is available in numerous anthology releases, but somewhat limited in options — the experience will be incomplete.

Visual Options

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the collection, a mix of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are precisely simulated, though I have noticed a few small quirks — primarily delayed responses and sporadic glitches, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are primarily displayed authentically, the development team has included some smart user experience improvements and display customization choices. As an illustration, players have the option to reveal combatant-unique actions on the display and choose to enable unlimited duration to perform a Fatality. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, removing the requirement to complete obscure techniques to access them.

Graphically, the titles can be experienced with numerous graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic options that simulate the traditional television screens of arcades or domestic TVs, or the monochrome green display of a Nintendo handheld. A particularly nice touch is the choice to enable gaming hall-style borders surrounding the screen, with the specific combat game you're playing precisely and gently mirroring against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Additional Features

The collection includes numerous appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the soundtracks of different fighting releases excluding the sounds of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. There are also fighter biographies that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore displayed via the demo sequences of coin-op titles and endings.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the ability to access a segment of previously unavailable content in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This version of the game, a somewhat revised iteration of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, was an initial venture by the company at head-to-head network battles in arcades. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but provided the ability to battle network competitors and featured various slight error corrections and adjustments. But the Wavenet update didn't find widespread adoption, in part