#1125 Mortal Kombat 9 (Steam) Bosses (1/7): Shao Kahn playthrough.

Описание

A playthrough of the final boss Shao Kahn in the Steam port of Netherrealm’s Mortal Kombat 9/MK9.

It’s difficult to even explain just how good Mortal Kombat 9 is. Released in 2011, when I had long since stopped caring about the series, MK9’s success was something of a surprise for me, with it receiving rave reviews and selling millions of copies, a farcry from the lukewarm reception the previous games had received.
As the name suggests, Mortal Kombat (or MK9, as it is known by most fans) is a reboot of the franchise, seeing the plot officially brought all the way back to the events of Mortal Kombat 1. The story of the game, established in a brand new, cinematic story mode, retraces the events of the first three Mortal Kombat games, also seeing many of those characters included canonically again, and maybe of the later characters, apart from Quan Chi, being left out. Basically, they knew they were in too deep with Armageddon and the like, and took the conscious and understandable decision to reboot the series instead.

Usually, a reboot is a desperate attempt by a studio to make their property relevant again, after lounging in obscurity for a number of years. This is particularly seen in the film industry, especially with horror films (which is appropriate here, as I’ll go into in later videos), and does occur sometimes in the video game industry too with bizarre, with offensively bad titles such as Sonic 2006 and Bomberman: Act Zero. However, the video game industry has a surprisingly good knack at making reboots work, with recent celebrated titles including Killer Instinct 3, the new Tomb Raider games, the new Ninja Gaiden games, the new Hitman games, the new Doom games, the new Wolfenstein games and the new XCOM games; to name just a few.

MK9 definitely falls into that “I’m so glad they did this” reboot category, along with titles like XCOM and new DOOM in particular. It is a true love letter to the first games in the series, bringing back so much of what we loved in terms of aesthetics from the first few games, and is so good it is easily the best game in the series since Mortal Kombat II. Yes, they took nearly 20 years to make a truly worthwhile successor to MKII. Crazy, but, at least they got there. This is all the more impressive considering that Midway went bankrupt during the process of making the game, and Ed Boon’s team were eventually bought by Warner Bros games and turned into Netherealm Studios instead. MK9 stands as a testament to passion in the fighting game industry, and it really is pretty damn special.

The entire fighting style has been changed again, and it’s wholly for the better. MK9 has been brought back to its 2D roots, but it lacks the stiff and bizarre control style of the early MK games. Instead, they’ve implemented one of the most fluid and intuitive engines in fighting game history, with a pick-up-and-play style that anyone can get soon accustomed to, but which still has tons of depth to it, while still retaining much of that Mortal Kombat aesthetic.

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