I was never a fan of the original Mortal Kombat. I played it back when the game first came out and it just never held my interest. The blood and guts were cool to my young impressionable mind, but it just didn’t play very well. It also didn’t help that all home versions of the arcade release suffered from their own issues. Of these the Game Boy port was particularly heinous. We aren’t talking about that one today though. No, the subject of this review is instead the Sega Game Gear edition. This too was a portable and under-powered system. At least it had color. Do the shades and hues, as well the stronger hardware make this one worth playing? Let’s check it out.
Right out of the gates Mortal Kombat has a few things going for it. The story and setting are surreal, cheesy, and very memorable. Think Bloodsport (excellent movie) but with fantasy elements. Mortal Kombat takes place in modern times. The world as we know it is called Earthrealm. In its shadows we have the Outworld. This place is ruled by the evil Shao Kahn and is full of monsters and bloodshed. A sorcerer named Shang Tsung wants to open a portal between the two. Obviously this would doom the real world. He can only be succeed by winning a tournament between both those of the Earthrealm and the Outworld. This battle is known as Mortal Kombat.
Mortal Kombat plays pretty much the same as it always has. Even on the Sega Game Gear. This is a 2D one-on-one fighting game where your ultimate goal is just to drain the life bar of your foe. The winner of two out of three rounds gets the opportunity to ‘finish him’ by performing a fatality move for extra humiliation. Of course you can opt out and just use a standard attack. The choice is yours. On top of kicks and punches you can also use special moves against your opponent as well as block their attacks. It’s a pretty standard set up, but back then it worked. Unfortunately the Game Gear version suffers from some issues. Major ones. We’ll get to all that in good time.
The character roster is actually pretty grounded compared to later installments. Everyone is human, or at the very least, resembles one. You have the typical martial artist Liu Kang (who is clearly modeled after Bruce Lee), Raiden the thunder god, Johnny Cage (who is based off Jeanne Claude Van Damme), Sonya Blade the token female fighter, as well as two ninjas Scorpion and Sub-Zero. Missing from the Game Gear version is Kano. That’s not a big deal because I’m pretty sure no one likes him anyways. I certainly don’t. The roster was always pretty small, but it’s more noticeable here with the aforementioned omission. The bottom line is this version of Mortal Kombat only has six fighters.
That’s a little weak in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong though. Midway chose the right character to cut. By the time this Game Gear release hit the scene however we had better fighters with more fighters to choose from. What’s more is the fact that special moves were cut from their pools. It’s not like they had that many to begin with. In the console iterations everyone had three special moves and one fatality. Now they’re down to just two. The fatalities also made the cut, but performing them is more difficult here. The Game Gear had only two face buttons so the developers didn’t exactly have a lot to work with.
Speaking of controls they’re not good. I understand that the developers had to try and make it work with just two buttons but they did not do so gracefully. Performing roundhouse kicks for example requires you to hold a direction on the d-pad while you kick. Same for sweeps, but in this instance you must do so while also ducking. It’s awkward to say the least. Thankfully the uppercut was kept simple. It’s still one of the most useful moves everyone has. For some unfathomable reason the developers decided to throw the Start button into the mix as well. You use it to block. I’m not kidding. The genre standard at this point was to simply hold the away button to block but the developers were stubborn. Instead they went with this awful set up.
This leads me to one of the biggest problems. The hit detection is bad. I’m talking horrible. It’s absolutely bonkers how far away your fists and kicks can be from an opponent and still strike them. Even after hours of playtime I was still surprised every time I landed an uppercut when my character’s fist was a quarter inch away. Things get weird when you’re too close. It looks like your fists are actually going through your opponent instead of knocking them back. You’re still hitting them when this happens, but it looks awkward to say the least.
There’s also not much diversity in each character. Yes, they have two special moves as I mentioned earlier. Literally everything else outside of the fatality is just the same however. Everyone has the same kicks, punches, uppercuts, and blocks. The controls aren’t fantastic at registering inputs for the special moves. This means you’ll have to rely on the basics here. Because everyone is the same it doesn’t much matter who you pick. Some of them have different animations for their throws but these are all functionally the same. The original Mortal Kombat never had good gameplay, but at least the characters felt different from one another. That’s not the case in the Game Gear version. Another insult is that there are only two stages; the Pit and the Cave. Come on now. I know the scenery doesn’t use a lot of storage. This just seems like laziness.
On the plus side the engine here runs significantly better than it did on the Game Boy. This actually feels like a fighting game rather than a random salad of graphics and animations like the black and white edition did. The characters actually have some speed to them. I was able to play as aggressively as I like to in the console versions. There’s some slowdown when the screen is scrolling but it’s a fair price to pay to keep up the gameplay pace. Because the engine is baseline functional I was even able to string together attacks here into combos. I couldn’t perform anything amazing here but it definitely made me appreciate this cartridge over the Game Boy release. You can consider the Game Gear Mortal Kombat a ‘diet’ version of the original from a gameplay perspective.
The Game Gear was never a graphical powerhouse. When I first saw screenshots of Mortal Kombat running on it I thought there was some witchcraft afoot. The character sprites are absolutely huge. What’s more is they actually retain the digitized actor look that made the series famous. Once you see it in motion however it becomes pretty clear what had to be cut to make it look so good. For one thing the characters have barely any animation. They almost look like they’re twitching while just standing still. Furthermore several frames were cut from the special moves, and it’s pretty obvious even on the small screen. Overall though I dare say Mortal Kombat on the Game Gear looks decent. The music however is horrible. There’s barely any of it, and it’s hardly recognizable from the arcade original. Everything sounds like random notes strung together with no rhythm.
