Mortal Kombat Trilogy

"A poor mix and mash of the first 3 MK games combined with unbearable load times..."

The Saturn never got itself a good Mortal Kombat game. As a matter of fact, neither did the PSX or the N64, with the exception of Mythologies: Sub-Zero which, although very difficult, was a very unique and brilliant game. Mortal Kombat 2 was terrible for the Saturn. Mortal Kombat 3 was mediocre, being killed by the terrible load times. Mortal Kombat Trilogy, is no different. Trilogy combines a bunch of things from the first 3 Mortal Kombat games and the end result is horrible.

Graphics - 6/10
The graphics are very nice, for the most part. The sprites are large, move with ease, and have an abundance of different moves. The backgrounds are gorgeous and look fantastic. The downsides are however, since Trilogy combines the first 3 Mortal Kombat games, it takes the same sprites from Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 with hardly any modifications. That means Mortal Kombat 1 versions of Rayden and Kano are a pixelated and washed out mess compared to all the characters from later games. So if you're playing as Rayden and you press the run button, you see the same sprite for Rayden moving just moving twice as fast. He's not running he's just walking really fast. Also all the characters from Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 have bland and weird looking combos. The animation for them looks out of place and stiff. It's almost as if it's missing several frames.

Sound - 3/10
Pretty damn bad. The music is bland, quiet, and unmemorable. It's a bunch of short loops that are there for the sole reason of being there. Dan Forden did a fantastic job for the first 2 Mortal Kombat games but the music here is taken from Mortal Kombat 3. The grunts and yells are generic and almost every character, except Liu Kang, share the same grunts and screams.

Story - pretty much nonexistent
I'm not going to give this a rating. Fighting games aren't known for their stories although the first 2 Mortal Kombat's had pretty interesting and good stories that further went into detail with their official comic books. Things do go downhill with Mortal Kombat 3. Thankfully, when Deadly Alliance came out, the story was fixed (partially) and became very interesting and exciting again. There is a little test introduction and each character has a short biography and short ending text but for the most part, there is barely any story.

Gameplay - 2/10
Mortal Kombat 3 was known for its tremendous cheapness. All the Mortal Kombat games after Mortal Kombat 2 had very, VERY, VERY, cheap AI. At least you have unlimited credits. The game is also very buggy. When Mortal Kombat 1, Kano tries to do his cannon ball, he tends to freeze in place for... I don't know how long. I was staring for about 10 seconds to see if anything would happen but it didn't so I just uppercutted him out of it. At the character selection screen, Stryker also doesn't finish his pose when you select him. He freezes in place when he's almost done putting his gun away. Other than the cheap AI and buggy glitches, the game has terrible load times. Mortal Kombat 3 for the Saturn had pretty bad load times as well but not as bad as this. You have to wait 15 seconds before every match. Yes I counted. Anywhere from 12 to 16 seconds. Wait till you get up to Motaro who is the cheapest character. You'll lose both rounds within 5 seconds and then you'll have to wait around 25 seconds for you to get past the continue screen, to get past the Mortal Kombat Trilogy menu, to choose a character, and to finally have the match load. Matches end faster than they load. Simply unbelievable. The game of course boasts a huge selection of characters with the majority of them being pallete swaps of ninjas and robots who have the same fighting stance (with the exception of Reptile).

Overall - 3/10 (not an average)
This is a terrible game. I imagine the N64 version being actually playable due to it loading from a cart and not a CD. This isn't a problem with the hardware folks as the Sega Saturn is a very powerful and fantastic hardware machine. This is a problem with half-assed developers. Mortal Kombat on Sega CD had about a 5 second load time between fights which wasn't bad at all. The Sega Saturn is much more powerful than the Sega CD and there's dozens of other fighting games with no load times whatsoever, yet the developers are a bunch of idiots.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/01/06