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This iconic fighting game continues to hold its share of secrets and the power to astonish, more than 30 years after its first appearance in gaming halls. This latest compilation including the brand's formative years, featuring four original arcade titles, multiple console adaptations, and related titles, transcends just a well-emulated series of classics along with lesser-known entries — it functions as a rich documentary about the making of the renowned brand.

Being a long-time enthusiast of the series who has paid close attention its development and progression, there was much to discover for me to understand and value about the series.

What Constitutes the Legacy Collection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like previous classic compilations from developer Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, section playable historical record. The anthology contains emulated versions of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of several of these titles. The anthology additionally contains the franchise's attempts at spin-off titles, like action games Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — two of the franchise's most criticized releases.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an examination of the series' formative period, when developer Midway and franchise originators Ed Boon and John Tobias were determining how to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of real actors, as they went along. Observing the archival material — containing vintage recordings, recent conversations, and reproductions of classic advertisements, illustrated stories, and including internal communications — it's astonishing to observe how Mortal Kombat went from modest origins to a worldwide phenomenon. It's genuinely amazing to see a group of early video game creators, operating with virtually no plan or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into creating a legendary video game series.

Historical Section

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection documents the ascent of Mortal Kombat and its creators' careers at the currently closed Midway. It then goes on to show how these identical developers contended with how to regularly outdo their previous work, facing no small amount of pressure to repeat their success. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of analog films and traditional photos and pencil sketches, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of the franchise's production method and how word of mouth helped circulate its mysteries and secrets of MK in its arcade heyday. Told in bite-sized chunks, it's an eminently watchable series of documentary shorts that includes titles, illustrated stories, cinematic adaptations and even the silly live-action tour. It also includes some never-implemented techniques and digital fighter representations among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Interspersed along the five-part documentary's timeline are opportunities to engage with the original releases. During specific moments, audience members can jump into a combat game session or one of its home console ports to rediscover its combat system and graphics, emulated nearly perfectly 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. Numerous titles here remain enjoyable, notably with local multiplayer matches. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a testament to how primitive and unfair the development approached in the series' initial installments. AI-managed characters clearly employ dishonest tactics or are alternatively incredibly stupid. If you don't have a human opponent — internet multiplayer exists in the majority of included games, but somewhat limited in options — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The twenty-three accessible Mortal Kombat titles in the compilation, a blend of arcade, console, and handheld games, are precisely simulated, though I have noticed a handful slight anomalies — primarily delayed responses and the occasional bug, particularly in Mortal Kombat 4. And while the games are largely presented as-is, the development team has incorporated various clever convenience enhancements and visual presentation options. As an illustration, you can choose to show each character's special moves on the display and opt to have unlimited duration to execute finishing moves. Also included are choices for revealing concealed combatants, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to obtain them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous graphical effects and display options. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic effects that reproduce the cathode-ray tube displays of coin-op establishments or domestic TVs, or the limited color monitor of a Nintendo handheld. A particularly nice touch is the setting to activate coin-op-inspired frames surrounding the screen, with your selected Mortal Kombat title precisely and gently mirroring against the faux black plastic borders. It's quite aesthetically pleasing.

Extra Content

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the educational material and simulated classic games, containing a soundtrack mode that enables players to reexperience the music from multiple fighting releases excluding the sounds of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Also present are character profiles that contain backgrounds and the various bits of lore presented by the demo sequences of coin-op titles and conclusions.

Lost Media Recovery

Among the most significant features for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the opportunity to play a example of historically missing material in the form 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 direct online competitive gaming in arcades. The Wavenet Edition of the game is almost exactly the same to UMK3, but included the option to compete against internet adversaries and included some minor bug fixes and balance. However, this network version failed to achieve popularity, in part