Mortal Kombat was one of the advantageous releases for Sega’s 16-bit console. The Genesis version featured blood and all of the fatalities intact (with the use of a cheat code of course) and the SNES release was censored. This stuff was important back then, and gave Sega a clear advantage in the mind share of their teen audience. I must admit that violence and gore did seem ‘cool’ back then, but I never sought out any games just for this. The one release of the original Mortal Kombat that I played in my youth was this Super Nintendo version. It didn’t make a big impression, and I never rented it more than once. With so many better fighting games released why would I? Today I decided it might be fun to take a look back at this version of Mortal Kombat. I discovered that even my limited memories were rose tinted. Mortal Kombat on the Super Nintendo is one of the most awful fighting games I’ve ever played. That’s coming from someone who doesn’t even care about the gore. The problems go much deeper than that issue.
The story here concerns a fighting tournament. This is held between the real world, and an alternate dimension called the Outworld. The latter is ruled by a warrior king named Shao Kahn. He has commissioned a sorcerer named Shang Tsung to hold the latest tournament, and there’s a catch this time. If the Outworld contestants win the two worlds will be merged, and that would bring about the end of days. I’ll start off on a positive note. The roster is kind of interesting. Acclaim was going for a sort of East meets West motif, and it works for the most part. You have Liu Kang (obviously modeled after Bruce Lee), the action movie star Johnny Cage, metallic faced Kano, a lightning god named Raiden, the token girl Sonya Blade, and two ninjas Scorpion and Sub Zero (they look the same but with different color palettes and poses). It’s sure to induce some eye rolling, but this is what Mortal Kombat is known for. I’m trying my best to be positive here because there won’t be a lot of good points after this. It’s going to get ugly from here.
That will have to wait though. For now I’m going to go over the basics. Mortal Kombat is a standard Street Fighter II era one-on-one fighting game. You can play against a human opponent or challenge the computer in the main story mode. I’ll focus on the latter for now. You can select from a variety of difficulty levels, but even on very easy the opponents are still a little challenging. Gameplay is strictly two dimensional, and the face buttons all dictate a different maneuver. You have two punches and kicks (both a high and low) and the shoulder buttons are used for the block command. Personally I don’t know why they went against what Street Fighter II established; moving away from your opponent blocks. It just makes more sense to me, but that’s a minor complaint. Each character can also jump or duck (using the vertical directions) which allow for different punches and kicks. The key point of this game is the special moves. Using directional inputs paired with high or low kicks give different results depending on the character. Acclaim used the typical ‘hold direction’ and ‘sweep on the directional pad’ that Street Fighter II popularized which makes it easier to jump in for beginners. Unfortunately this game suffers one major problem…
I’ll get to that in a second. First of all I want to mention how uninspired the special moves are. The developers basically copycatted Street Fighter II in this regard. Everyone has a projectile attack, and the rest of their move roster is pretty uninspired. Many characters feel too similar for me. This isn’t a major problem (I do love the first Fatal Fury after all) but this game needed at least something to differentiate itself. What the developers chose for this is the fatality move. This is performed at the end of your second victory, and is purely novel. I admit they were quite cool back in the day, but by now they’ve lost their luster. To make matters worse they’re censored on the SNES version. Each character has one, and some have been largely removed for the most part. They’re pretty pathetic in this version. The fighting engine is just so standard. It doesn’t innovate in any way aside from the fatalities, but they don’t directly contribute. They’re just graphical showcases. So this brings me to the real problem with this version. Mortal Kombat on the SNES suffers from crippling input lag. This means that anything you do isn’t automatic; you have to wait a few milliseconds to see any attack carried out. Any fan of fighting games will notice this immediately, and realize how much this ruins the experience. This is absolutely debilitating to the momentum here.
The graphics are actually pretty good though. Mortal Kombat on the SNES looks much better than its Genesis, and even Sega CD counterparts. It’s not quite arcade perfect, but it’s surprisingly close. This version also has more frames of animation than the others, and more detailed backgrounds as well. The upgrade in color palette is immediately noticeable. There’s significantly less pixelation on the characters, and the sky for example doesn’t look the same sickly blue color. There’s also no color bleeding here whereas that was an issue in the Genesis version. I still have to question the fact that Acclaim replaced the blood with sweat in this version. It’s laughable to say the least. For this version of the game the developer tried to match the arcade soundtrack. They did a pretty admirable job to be honest although it does sound like someone lathered the speakers in vaseline. It’s a little muffled for sure, but the tracks are still memorable from the arcade counterpart. This version of the game has a definite benefit in the audio department. Unlike its Genesis counterpart the SNES version actually has an announcer that says all of the character names. This is kind of cool in my opinion, and at least moreso than actually having blood.
This version of Mortal Kombat is superior to the Genesis (or Mega Drive) version aesthetically, but as far as gameplay goes this is far worse. Upgrades in graphics and audio just don’t make up for this rubble of trash. The input lag might not sound like a big issue, but unfortunately it is. It’s such a problem that I struggled to even play this game. I barely was able to win a few matches because the character wasn’t responding as they should. This is the kiss of death for a fighting game, and therefore I have to award Mortal Kombat on the SNES with zero redeeming points. It’s not a good game at its core, but this absolutely ruins it.
