So I return after a long hiatus to offer my thoughts/rankings of the Mortal Kombat franchise. This was inspired by the recent release of Season 2 of Mortal Kombat Legacy to YouTube. The series itself is fantastic and I recommend it to anyone whether you're familiar with the franchise or not. Although in all fairness, some of the impact and a few plot points will be lost to those unfamiliar with MK's history but not so much that you can't enjoy the series.
In a few words, this series has allowed me to re-discover why I have loved Mortal Kombat for so long after an extremely disappointing few years which saw the franchise nearly damaged beyond return in my eyes. With this series, that love has been rekindled and I'm looking forward to anything new that NetherRealm Studios (formerly Midway) has to offer in the future. Latest rumor says a new game is coming in 2015 which means it's likely to be announced sometime next year. Quite likely around E3 in June.
With rediscovering the series, I've chosen to rank the games from worst to best with a few thoughts on each game. I'm only focusing on the main franchise of the games and not the side games such as Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero, Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks and Mortal Kombat Special Forces because they're not considered part of the main franchise but are merely side games and because for the most part, with the exception of Mythologies, the stories in them are mostly non-canon in regards to the series itself. Mortal Kombat Trilogy is not on this list because it was basically a "greatest hits" game and did nothing to further the storyline. It simply existed as a way to combine everything from MKs 1-3 into a single game.
Now, we'll start from the nadir and work our way to the top of the mountain. Our worst MK game is:
Mortal Kombat (2011) - AKA Mortal Kombat 9 to differentiate it from the original game. This game was to be the beginning of a new era of Mortal Kombat. For a couple years up to its release in April 2011, Ed Boon, co-creator of the franchise and current head honcho of NetherRealm Studios, promised that this game would be a completely original continuity, new characters and would have such extreme violence and gore that the game might actually have trouble avoiding the X rating which is an extreme rarity in video games. Of these 3 main promises, NRS outright lied on the first 2 and only partially delivered on the 3rd one. The game was nothing more than a rehash of the first 3 games in nearly every way. The only thing really new in the game was the altering of the previous storyline to allow Sub Zero to be transformed into a robot instead of Smoke. Beyond that, everything from the moves, the fatalities, the characters and the vast majority of the backgrounds were a simple rehash of the previous series. The game is similar to the New Super Mario Bros. series in that respect and it should've simply been a side project instead of a new entry into the main series itself. Adding to it the fact that the controls were extremely stiff and, in some cases, non-responsive not only made the game a creative disappointment but made it a disappointment from a gameplay standpoint as well.
As weird as it may seem, I don't consider this the nadir of the MK franchise as a whole. I consider it the worst game because of everything we were promised and because of the extremely high level of disappointment from these unfulfilled promises. This game was basically made to appeal to the fans of the 90's games who just couldn't get over the fact that it wasn't 1995 any more and that Mortal Kombat had evolved and expanded beyond those 90's games. This is another reason I think it should've been a side project. The game sold huge because of that nostalgia factor and it has since faded a long ways now that the nostalgia has worn off and the game's long list of problems are now apparent. This game was pretty much what drove me off from Mortal Kombat for nearly 2 years because combined with the previous game, which is the next game on the countdown, I was disgusted to the point of just throwing my hands up and leaving the franchise altogether because I honestly felt betrayed, lied to, and crapped on by Ed Boon and co. at NRS.
We move on to the next game which, while not the worst game of the series, is hands down the absolute lowest point the franchise has ever hit and hopefully the lowest it ever will hit. Our next game is:
Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe (2008). From this point forward, this game will be referred to as TWSNBN(That Which Shall Not Be Named) because I basically refuse to acknowledge the game's existence or its place in the franchise. Thankfully, this game is excluded from the canon of the franchise but it is a fighting game and was originally intended as an extension of the storyline so that's why it makes its way to this list. The reason this game is not considered part of the main canon is due to the near universal rejection of the game as a legitimate entry in the franchise. The same goes, I'm told, for fans of the DC franchises that this abomination incorporated. In fact, I'm told that while the MK franchise actually tolerated the game as a fighting game, the DC Universe fans not only refuse to acknowledge its existence, it's actually quite the sore spot among many of them. The gameplay itself wasn't too bad, certainly not as ungodly terrible as MK9, nor were the graphics. The main problem is that this crossover made absolutely no sense for either side. Given the timeframe of this game's development and release, I'm guessing that The Dark Knight's highly successful run had a lot to do with Midway's choice to attempt this crossover. That's not to say crossovers can't be successful and well done. Capcom and Marvel had a highly successful crossover series in the 90's as have Street Fighter and Tekken in recent years. The biggest offense this game produced was its T (Teen) rating. Every MK game that's been released since the ESRB established its rating system has been rated M (Mature). The violence was toned down well below the usual Mortal Kombat levels which in essence crippled a high percentage of the appeal these games have to the majority of the population. The reason for this was that DC didn't want the usual over-the-top fatalities performed on their franchise characters i.e. they didn't want Sub Zero to rip out Superman's spinal column with the head attached to it. This pettyness by DC took an already stupid concept and ruined any possibility it had for being successful while neutering the MK aspect of the game.
In short, this game did nothing except piss off fans of both sides and alienate a great many MK fans who simply asked why. Like MK9, NRS had made the same promises about a new storyline and new characters and not only failed to deliver on this entry, but also failed to deliver an actual new Mortal Kombat game. The game managed to sell relatively well as a strange curiosity but as I said, the near universal rejection of the game from both sides has thankfully led to it largely being ignored and hopefully forgotten. NRS has continued its relationship with DC however with their recently released game Injustice: Gods Among Us which is a DC Universe based fighting game, also rated T. This concept actually works because the game is it's own game and has nothing to do with the MK franchise. This is what should've been done in the first place instead of nearly destroying one franchise and highly angering the fanbase of another franchise.
We're past the lowest point of the franchise and so we climb up from the trenches back to sea level with our next game which was the final game in the series released in arcades:
Mortal Kombat 4 (1997). We've covered the only really bad games in the main franchise so from this point on, there are no more "bad" games in the franchise but simply "less good" games. Mortal Kombat 4 was the last game released in arcade format and was the first 3D version of the game. Prior to MK4, the games featured 2D digitized graphics and with the evolution of fighting games as well as highly successful 3D franchises of the time such as Killer Instinct, Virtua Fighter, and Tekken, this was a logical step. The gameplay itself was actually quite good, the main problem was with the graphics. This was not a pretty game to look at for sure because the technology to make an MK game in 3D mostly didn't exist at that point. Software had to be built from the ground up in order to make this game in 3D and it shows with highly unrealistic looking graphics even for the late 90's. Had the gameplay been bad, this game would've been a complete failure but as mentioned, the gameplay itself was fluid like the earlier games which made up for the graphics problems. It didn't help that the storyline of the game was more or less rendered irrelevant by later games of the franchise. Nor did it help that of the new characters introduced into the game, excluding Quan Chi (who was actually introduced in MK Mythologies), none of them were particularly memorable nor did any of them outside of Quan Chi have much to do with furthering the MK storyline.
Time hasn't really done much to improve the game. It's really in an awkward position because the 3 games that preceded it and the 3 games followed it create 2 very nice trilogies. This actually causes many fans to forget the game exists unless someone else mentions it. It also doesn't help that the game hasn't been re-released on any format since its original home ports were released in 1998 whereas MK 1-3 have all been re-released at various times in their original arcade formats. So while certainly not a bad game, MK4 is far from the best this series has to offer.
We've reached the end of the first part of our rankings. With any luck, I'll have the remaining 2 parts of the series up by the end of this week. Leading off the next part comes the last of the second trilogy of the series. It was originally intended to be the end of the original MK continuity and was announced as such when it was released which led many people to think it was the last MK game that would be made. Which game is it? Find out in part 2.
