Mortal Kombat 1 – Zero Punctuation

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Lies of P and Chants of Sennaar. And if you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on El Paso, Elsewhere and a second mystery game, right now!

For more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Chants of Sennaar and Lies of P, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Starfield, Sea of Stars, En Garde! and Blasphemous 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Viewfinder and My Friendly Neighborhood, Remnant 2, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy XVI.

And check out Yahtzee’s other series, Extra Punctuation, where he’s recently talked about AAA games needing to step up their traversal, and BioShock’s incredible opening.

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Mortal Kombat 1 Zero Punctuation Transcript

Is it even worth harping on the title of Mortal Kombat 1? Or that there are now three games one is expected to call “Mortal Kombat 1?” Not that anybody does, in the case of what the wiki stubbornly refers to as MK9. You can’t just keep resetting your universe. For one thing it means we can’t get invested in any characters or anything that happens ‘cos God might shake the cosmic etch-a-sketch again at any moment, and for another, I feel sorry for all the normal plebs who have to live in Earthrealm. Imagine being just a random bloke who runs a dry cleaner. Would you understand why you’ve had to apply for a business license three times because ten or eleven martial artists you don’t know about keep punching each other too hard, or something? Anyway, after Mortal Kombat 11 established within canon that literally anything that happens in the story has all the permanence of a single sheet of damp bog roll after Tex Mex night, newly deified Liu Kang was left with the job of rebuilding continuity from scratch. And so he proceeded to make one basically the same as the last, with a few token changes for the sake of change, and if this were the Saturday morning cartoon the story campaign persistently resembles I’d assume it was trying to force parents to fork out for another round of action figures.

So Baraka and Reptile are good guys now, Sub Zero’s a bastard and the tournament between Outworld and Earthrealm is not a bloodsoaked death arena but a sort of jolly school sports day where entrants pulverize each other’s spines in the spirit of good sportsmanship. But trouble is brewing in the form of – oh it’s just Shang bloody Tsung again. This whole franchise really is just going around on a twatting carousel at this point. I won’t hold back – the word that summarises Mortal Kombat 1 in my mind is “pathetic.” It’s pathetic how all they did to create the logo was copy paste the MK11 logo and remove one of the ones. I’ve long relished the hilarious badness of Netherrealm fighter story campaigns, but the joke is now wearing single ply thin, and now a lot of it’s just plain regular badness. Characters endlessly relaying their entire backstories to each other on their first meeting and smug villains giving away all their secret evil plans to absolutely no benefit. The plot holes come so thick and fast you’d think they were trying to bait the twat who does those Everything Wrong With videos. “I have gathered the world’s greatest martial artists to represent Earthrealm in the tournament. Psych! Only one of you can actually enter, but I guess the rest of you can hold his coat.”

“Oh Raiden, you will represent us for you are the strongest and most honorable. Psych! None of that matters ‘cos all your opponents are going to cheat. Here’s a thing that gives you lightning powers. Bet you feel silly about all those press-ups you did.” And the character roster is… well, it’s pathetic. Mortal Kombat has long struggled with physically differentiating its cast, right from the days when half of them were palette swaps of each other. I remember joking that if you stripped the cast of MK9 naked and put paper bags on their heads you couldn’t tell most of them apart. Well guess what? In MK1, you don’t even need the bags. About 60% of the cast is “generically Asian dark haired man.” A good chunk of the rest are “generically Asian dark haired lady,” and it’s Kitana I feel sorry for. With her usual role of “very dutiful reasonable Outworld authority figure with cleavage you could ski down” split between her and four other chicks she’s left with bugger all to do all plot. Besides that you’ve got the inescapable Johnny Cage who’s now living a prolonged impersonation of Bojack Horseman, and a few monsters, including a vampire lady with the voice acting of a freshman drama major reading aloud the specials at the drive thru. Blimey, I hope whoever they got in to do her doesn’t aspire to a film career.

But the real joke of the story campaign is that it isn’t a reset, really. By the end it’s reverted back to where MK11 was at the end – with all continuity screwed up into a multi-timeline mess like a Gorgon’s bad hair day. At the very end, spoiler alert, contrivance leads every good version of every character from every timeline to battle every evil version on the steps of a giant pyramid that’s shown up for no adequately established reason. Kind of amusing in the initial charge as we discover just how hard it is to animate a character running up a flight of stairs with an air of kill crazy abandon, but which versions of which characters we’re still supposed to be giving a shit about and whether or not it matters if any of them die is entirely lost upon me. It’s like Mortal Kombat as a franchise has already written itself into a corner twice so now it’s trying to break its speedrun record. If it is, it’s about the only thing Mortal Kombat 1 approaches with passion. Everything else has a lacklustre feel, even beyond the easy mode logo design. The bespoke pre-fight banter unique to each character combo just keeps getting shittier with each game. Previously it would use three dialog lines to establish at least some contrived reason for fighting to the death.

Now we’re down to two lines and they’re mostly irrelevant pleasantries. “How’s the ninja clan going?” “Eh, could be worse.” Roundhouse kick, commence stabbing. All of which raises the question: what exactly has been improved, or added to the Mortal Kombat formula, to justify a whole new instalment? Are the graphics better? Not to any appreciable degree. Especially not if you bought the Switch version, which looks like everyone’s mildly perturbed at having had their faces sandblasted. There’s a new round of fatalities to enjoy, still vastly, unnecessarily cruel in a way increasingly at odds with the rest of the game’s tone, but I zoned out halfway through the Youtube compilation ‘cos there’s only so many ways you can pull apart a poorly secured sack of guts and deckchair parts and keep it interesting. Are the mechanics much different? Oh, I don’t give Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Shits for the mechanics of fighting games, you know that, I only play Netherrealm fighters to power through the campaign on easy mode by slapping the controller on my bum and then take the piss out of the plot. But I did note that the big new gameplay feature is the Kameo system, where you are assisted during fights by another character, generally one from a previous game with even less justification for their presence than the vampire lady’s voice actress at the academy awards.

But hey, we’ve established nothing matters. The principle purpose being to let you potentially add additional moves to your combos, but more importantly to give you a whole extra set of dressup dollies to kit out with the inevitable mother hen clucking cosmetics that Netherrealm continue to flog like stingily proportioned bags of granola at a farmer’s market. And that’s about all Mortal Kombat Wonk has to show for itself. I can’t help comparing to Street Fighter 6. On the one hand, a bright, colourful game infused with energy and life, full of flamboyant characters with distinct silhouettes and personalities, with a groundbreaking approach to single player gameplay that might conceivably sell a new player on fighting games, even if it doesn’t quite prepare you for them, but at least gives you the chance to beat up a fridge, which is great if you’ve been put on a diet and are looking for symbolic catharsis. And on the other hand, you have… Mortal Kombat One. More of the usual bollocks. And I’m not talking about the contents of the janitor’s wet-dry vac after every round.
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