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This iconic fighting game continues to hold its share of secrets and the power to astonish, well past its 30th anniversary after its initial debut in coin-op establishments. A new collection covering the series' initial period, featuring four original arcade titles, various home ports, and spinoffs, transcends just a well-emulated set of legendary games along with lesser-known entries — it additionally serves as a detailed chronicle about the development of the renowned brand.

As a dedicated devotee of the franchise who has closely monitored its development and progression, there was numerous fresh aspects for me to discover and admire about the series.

What Constitutes the Historical Compilation

Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is, like other retro collections from developer Digital Eclipse, part historical documentation, portion interactive museum. The collection includes 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 collection even includes the franchise's attempts at spin-off titles, like combat-focused releases Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces — some of the brand's least successful installments.

The Legacy Kollection consequently doesn't represent a “best of” collection, but an examination of the franchise's initial era, when developer Midway and franchise originators the creative duo behind the series were figuring out how to develop a battle series, digitized from footage of real actors, as they went along. Watching the documentary — which includes historical videos, contemporary discussions, and reproductions of classic advertisements, graphic novels, and even interoffice faxes — it's astonishing to observe how the franchise evolved from simple starts to a worldwide phenomenon. It's truly remarkable to observe several young game developers, operating with virtually no plan or oversight, focus their cultural enthusiasms into creating a legendary video game series.

Documentary Portion

The historical documentation of Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection traces the growth of the combat franchise and the founders' vocational paths at the no-longer-operating Midway. It then goes on to show how the very same individuals reckoned with how to routinely one-up themselves, facing no small amount of stress to duplicate their success. It serves as a compelling period piece composed of VHS tapes and analog photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, which demonstrate the hands-on approach of Mortal Kombat's development and how personal recommendations helped spread its rumors and secrets of MK in its golden era in coin-op establishments. Presented in manageable segments, it's thoroughly enjoyable series of documentary shorts that spans games, comics, films and even the comical physical events. The collection additionally features some never-implemented techniques and character sprites among its cutting-room-floor content.

Interactive Gaming

Placed within the quintet of documentary episodes' progression are opportunities to engage with the games themselves. During specific moments, viewers can hop into a Mortal Kombat title or one of its home console ports to reexperience its mechanics and visual presentation, simulated with remarkable precision on current technology.

I dedicated most of my time engaging with the vintage coin-op games, especially Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Many of the games here remain enjoyable, particularly during one-on-one local play. But playing against the aforementioned game's AI-controlled opponents is a reminder of how crude and unjust the coding existed in early Mortal Kombat games. AI-managed characters blatantly cheat to win or are alternatively incredibly stupid. Lacking someone to play against — network gaming is included in numerous anthology releases, but rather basic in functionality — the experience will be incomplete.

Display Features

The 23 playable Mortal Kombat games in the compilation, a blend of arcade, console, and handheld games, are accurately emulated, though I detected a couple minor issues — primarily delayed responses and the occasional bug, especially with Mortal Kombat 4. Even though the releases are primarily displayed authentically, the development team has added several intelligent user experience improvements and display customization choices. As an illustration, you can choose to display fighter-specific techniques on the display and choose to enable unlimited duration to perform a Fatality. There are also options for accessing hidden fighters, eliminating the need to execute some esoteric trick to unlock them.

Artistically, the releases can be enjoyed with multiple visual enhancements and presentation styles. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection offers very realistic filters that mimic the cathode-ray tube displays of gaming halls or household displays, or the monochrome green display of a Nintendo handheld. An especially welcome feature is the choice to enable coin-op-inspired frames encircling the display, with the MK game of your choice faithfully and subtly duplicating against the simulated dark plastic edges. It's very artistically charming.

Additional Features

There are plenty of nice touches beyond the historical footage and recreated vintage titles, containing a soundtrack mode that lets you revisit the soundtracks of different Mortal Kombat games excluding the sounds of combatants violently defeating each other. There are also combatant descriptions that feature histories and numerous narrative components presented by the idle displays of gaming hall releases and final sequences.

Lost Media Recovery

A particularly notable inclusion for hardcore Mortal Kombat fans is the ability to access a piece of "lost media" in the format 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 gaming halls. This network version of the game is practically indistinguishable to UMK3, but provided the ability to battle network competitors and contained several small glitch repairs and refinements. Yet this online edition failed to achieve popularity, in part