Mortal Kombat II still a favorite despite misses

Editor’s note: This review originally appeared in 1Q2008. It has been edited for spelling, grammar and clarity.

When I first got into arcades, Mortal Kombat II was there. It was my beginning game for fighting competition and it was my first bottle in the milking-it-for-all-it’s-worth category of popular games. That being said, while I love MKII, I can’t say it’s fared all that well in 13 years.

MKII’s graphics are horrible by today’s standards. When you look at it and then compare it to graphics of today’s fighting games, you can see that the graphics engine needed work then and still does today. The backgrounds were inventive and creative, and had a lot of work put into them. Character designs did, too, and I like how realistic the characters seemed with the motion capture method. However, swapping the male and female ninjas’ palettes was just lazy. As of MKII, there were two female ninjas and five male ninjas, all of which were just different colors of the same outfit. I shook my head then, and I shake my head now.

Dan Forden’s sound effects and music shone then and still do. I love the music of the game and it fits every background. Voice work for the game was outrageous and funny, something gaming friends and I still talk about today. I think of the soundtrack as something that Forden obviously wanted to do and really pushed the boundaries.

Control was an interesting piece of work. While there are moves that are easy, there are some finishing moves that I still cannot get to work consistently to this day, which is problematic. I also have major issues with the AI. The challenge in the arcade version ramps up considerably by the fourth level, which is rampant in most of Midway’s games. The AI constantly guesses what a human player will do and reacts obviously inhumanly to situations. However, most fighters have a pattern so once you’ve got the pattern memorized, it’s easy to trick the AI. I think in today’s games that wouldn’t have gotten very far.

Would I play MKII in this day and age? It depends on what else was available. For its time, MKII got things riled up and made a name for itself by introducing something that Capcom didn’t have in its Street Fighter series. But the lazy graphics and crazy AI would not let the series get this far today, and I can’t say that I would disagree with it.

Modern score: 4.5 out of 5
Retrograde 2008 score: 6 out of 10