There are a few different ways to approach Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, the latest release from Digital Eclipse. While this does not carry the Gold Master Series label that previous titles, The Making of Karateka, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, and Tetris Forever had, this is very much in line with those in structure and features. That means you can look at it as a collection of retro games, an interactive documentary, or both. Depending on what you want from it, Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is either going to be a homerun or a slight misfire.
If you’re coming at this as an interactive documentary, I think you’ll be extremely satisfied with what you get here. In The Krypt, the usual Digital Eclipse timeline is employed here, taking you year by year through the history of the Mortal Kombat franchise. There are tons of videos, both archival and newly recorded, that fill in the context of these games and add insights from the people who made them and played them. I was genuinely surprised at how much video was recorded of this team back in the day, and I’m very thankful to have gotten to see it. Other material includes flyers, comic books, advertisements, and photographs. Going through the documentary takes a good chunk of time, and it’s time well spent if you have an interest in gaming history.
Elsewhere in The Krypt, there is an option to listen to music from the included games, allowing you to even make your own custom playlist to jam out to. Do people do that with these music players in games? Probably. The list of tracks is plentiful, but I’m not sure if it’s exhaustive. Still, it’s a nice thing to have. There’s another nifty section in The Krypt that allows you to browse every Kombatant from the included games and see all their bios and endings from each appearance. Useful for those who want to check that stuff out without having to clear each game with every character.
The main focus here is on the first four arcade games and some of their home console ports, and that extends to the included titles. You get a really good assortment of games and ports in Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection, even if it’s not quite as complete as I would have preferred. The included arcade versions are: Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, Mortal Kombat 3, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, the previously-unreleased Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 WaveNet version, and Mortal Kombat 4. You only get the final revision of each arcade game, which is the one most people would probably want anyway. I would have liked to have had some of the older revisions as an option, but it is what it is.
As for home ports, there’s quite a lot on offer. For Mortal Kombat, there’s the Genesis/Mega Drive version, the Super NES version, the Game Boy version, and the Game Gear version. Mortal Kombat II is here in Genesis/Mega Drive, Super NES, 32X, and Game Boy forms. With Mortal Kombat 3, we’re down to just Genesis/Mega Drive and Super NES. Rounding things out on the console front, we get the Super NES port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, the PlayStation port of Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and the two PlayStation spin-offs, Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces. Finally, a trilogy of Game Boy Advance offerings in Mortal Kombat Advance, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, and Mortal Kombat: Tournament Edition.
Obviously, not every single version of every Mortal Kombat game is going to make it into something like this. Anything on PlayStation 2 and beyond is well past the scope of a project like this, for starters. It appears as though Nintendo 64, SEGA Dreamcast, and SEGA Saturn emulation was off the table as well, which unfortunately removes the possibility of certain games I would have loved to have seen, like Mortal Kombat Gold and the Nintendo 64 version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy. Other omissions are a little more confusing. Why do we only get the Game Gear version of the first game? Why no SEGA CD version of Mortal Kombat? No Mega Drive version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3? How could they leave out the R-Zone version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy?
We can ask important questions like these all day, but ultimately, I’m going to judge the list of games for what it has rather than what’s missing. Twenty-three releases is a pretty large number, and given where the emulation lines have been drawn, I can’t really think of any glaring omissions here. It’s a proper slice of the franchise featuring the good, the bad, the rare, and the sweaty. I particularly appreciate the inclusion of the two spin-offs, which adds some variety to the overall selection. I could see Digital Eclipse adding another port or two here in future updates, like it has with some of its other collections, but even if this is it, it’s a fine enough line-up.
A rather large proportion of those games feature support for online play, with fifteen games available to choose from. All of those save Mortal Kombat 4 are also available to play via local wireless against another player, too. The options here are extremely limited at launch, with only a Quick Match mode for online play. That means you can’t, you know, play with your friends over the Internet. Digital Eclipse has said it will be updating this later, so fingers crossed on that. Unfortunately, even the basic included online play is very poor. I ran into awful latency, full-on crashes, and dropped matches more often than not. It’s clearly not ready for primetime.
Unfortunately, there are other issues here aside from the barely functioning online play. Certain games suffer from emulation quirks like misplaying audio and missing lighting. It should be noted that the arcade Mortal Kombat games have historically had some challenges when it comes to emulation, especially the fourth game. There is a little bit of added input lag on pretty much every game that can mess with your timing, too. Many of the games, particularly the home ports, already had some lag in their original forms, and adding a little more can make some of them feel really bad to play. Ideally, fighting games should have snappy response time with their controls, and Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection doesn’t always live up to that.
I think if you’re just messing around on your own or doing casual play with friends, this is all tolerable enough. It’s just unfortunate that those with an eye to playing more competitively will probably find this collection lacking the precision they demand. Even playing on your own, these games are often so hard by design that having that additional bit of lag can make things incredibly frustrating. You can abuse the rewind feature and save states as much as you deem necessary, at least. Keep in mind that the arcade versions tend to ease up on you a little if you lose, which means sometimes that should be your go-to strategy rather than continually rewinding or loading a save state.
Each game has some options you can tweak, along with full replications of their manuals and some other fun stuff like Fatality Practice and on-screen move lists. You can even just go ahead and unlock secret characters and modes without having to satisfy the conditions, though there are a few secrets you’re going to have to do the usual work for. At least you can save after you’ve done it? Though this is one example of why I wish Digital Eclipse would allow multiple saves per game instead of just one. I want to make a save before each secret character fight, particularly since some of them have wild conditions to trigger.
Bottom line, Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is a fantastic documentary, but in its current state, it is a somewhat flawed way to play many of these games. I think the selection of titles is good enough, but the non-functional and threadbare online play, combined with various emulation issues and bugs, drags down what should have been an incredible overall package. Even with all of that, I think a lot of people will find the games playable enough for their needs. Digital Eclipse has already pushed out one hotfix that addressed some problems, and I hope some of this stuff gets fixed. At this point, it’s neither flawless nor a fatality.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review copy provided by Digital Eclipse
