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This iconic fighting game continues to hold its share of secrets and the power to astonish, over three decades after its original launch in coin-op establishments. A new collection including the franchise's earliest days, featuring four arcade games, multiple console adaptations, and derivative games, is more than only a accurately simulated set of legendary games along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a rich documentary about the creation of the iconic franchise.

Even as a lifelong enthusiast of the series who has carefully followed its creation and evolution, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to learn and appreciate about the series.

What Makes the Legacy Kollection

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection similar to other retro collections from the development team Digital Eclipse, part documentary, portion interactive museum. The anthology contains simulated releases of the pioneering arcade Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, Mortal Kombat 3, and Mortal Kombat 4, including television and mobile versions of certain releases. The collection even includes the brand's experiments at derivative games, like action-oriented titles Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — among the series' worst entries.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an exploration into the franchise's initial era, when developer Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were determining how to develop a battle series, produced using film material of real actors, through experimentation. Watching the documentary — that features vintage recordings, new interviews, and scans of old flyers, illustrated stories, and even company memos — it's remarkable to see how the franchise evolved from humble beginnings to a worldwide phenomenon. It's frankly astounding to observe several young game developers, working with minimal planning or guidance, channel their pop-culture interests into establishing an enduring gaming brand.

Educational Component

The documentary portion of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the combat franchise and its creators' careers at the now-defunct Midway. It further illustrates how those same creators contended with how to consistently surpass their achievements, experiencing considerable stress to duplicate their achievements. It represents an intriguing historical record made from video recordings and film-based pictures and hand-drawn illustrations, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of Mortal Kombat's development and how oral tradition helped spread its rumors and hidden aspects of Mortal Kombat in its peak period in gaming halls. Presented in manageable segments, it's an eminently watchable set of brief historical films that spans games, comics, films and including the humorous real-world tour. The collection additionally features some unreleased actions and digital fighter representations among its previously unreleased material.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the five-part documentary's timeline are opportunities to engage with the actual titles. At certain intervals, users can directly access a Mortal Kombat title or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and artistic style, emulated nearly perfectly on contemporary systems.

I spent the bulk of my time experiencing the original arcade titles, specifically Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Numerous titles here remain enjoyable, notably with local multiplayer matches. Yet competing with the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a demonstration of how basic and unfair the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. CPU-controlled opponents blatantly cheat to win or are conversely remarkably unintelligent. Without having another person to compete with — network gaming is included in the majority of included games, but rather basic in functionality — you'll miss the full enjoyment.

Visual Options

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the collection, a combination of coin-op, home system, and portable titles, are accurately emulated, though I detected a handful slight anomalies — mainly control latency and sporadic glitches, notably within Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are largely presented as-is, the creators has incorporated various clever quality-of-life features and display customization choices. As an illustration, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on-screen and choose to enable endless periods to execute finishing moves. Also included are choices for unlocking secret characters, removing the requirement to complete complicated methods to access them.

Visually, the games can be experienced with numerous filters and visual treatments. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection provides highly authentic filters that mimic the CRT monitors of arcades or home televisions, or the limited color monitor of a Game Boy. A particularly nice touch is the choice to enable coin-op-inspired frames surrounding the screen, with the MK game of your choice precisely and gently mirroring against the artificial ebony plastic frames. It's remarkably visually appealing.

Extra Content

There are plenty of appreciated elements beyond the documentary and emulated arcade classics, containing a soundtrack mode that allows users to rediscover the music from multiple fighting releases without the din of two kombatants viciously slaughtering each other. Also present are character profiles that feature histories and numerous narrative components shown through arcade games' attract mode screens and endings.

Historical Preservation

A particularly notable inclusion for committed franchise followers is the chance to experience a piece of "lost media" in the guise of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wavenet Edition. This particular edition, 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 challenge online opponents and contained several small error corrections and adjustments. Yet this online edition didn't find widespread adoption, in part