When Mortal Kombat 4 came out, I was still in primary school, but I didn’t get to play it until I was seventeen. I had seen the ads for it back when it was coming out, but everything moved too fast for me to know what was going on.
I can remember being in primary school and my friend who rented the game said it was now in 3d. I wasn’t sure if that meant the characters were now polygon models or if you had 360 degrees of movement. Turns out he meant both.Mortal Kombat 4 had the unfortunate honor of being created and released during the awkward puberty of 3d game technology. As such, like many games from that time, it’s aged terribly. Which is a damn shame I think, because MK4 is a great game, and if it was made with the same digitized graphics as the trilogy, or if it were given a remake with enhanced graphics, it would be on another level.
I didn’t play it until many years after it came out. I would’ve been seventeen, so 2006-2007ish. I bought the 64 version from a pawn shop for maybe $5, along with some other games.
When I put it into my cartridge, I had no expectations. Not true actually, I had some negative ones. The only thing I could remember was that there was an alien called Quan Chi, and I thought that was so stupid, even as a little kid. Turns out the kid that told me that was full of shit.
This is what we do to liars!
I beat the game and more-or-less made a judgement call right then and there that this game was pretty bad. I hated the characters, I hated the graphics, the 64 controllers weren’t good for this sort of game, and the final boss Shinnok was a major let-down.
Eventually, out of equal parts curiosity and boredom, I picked it up again over the following weeks. I was sucked in. The characters were awesome. I now consider each one in their own right to be as vital to the series as any from the trilogy. The only weak link is Jarek, as they originally made Kano then changed him into a new character with the exact same moves (including the eye laser), but even Jarek is cool in his own way.
They might take some getting used to, but they’re all very cool additions to the Mortal Kombat roster, and were sorely overlooked ever since. They were given a makeover in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon but they weren’t given the attention they deserved. In my opinion, MK4 had the last solid roster of fighters.
Here’s hoping MKX changes that.
While I never got to play it, Mortal Kombat Gold had a better roster of characters. Gold was the enhanced re-release of MK4 and a Dreamcast exclusive. No-one owns a Dreamcast. Gold had the same roster as MK4, but brought in Kitana, Mileena, Kung Lao and Baraka from MKII, as well as Sektor and Cyrax from MK3.
In my opinion, Gold is the true version of Mortal Kombat 4. Without those additional characters, the roster is only as big as MK3s, and ignores that entire previous games additions.
The pseudo-3d environments are pretty cool, too. At first I thought it was gimmicky and antithetical to the MK experience, but I grew to like it. On one hand, it’s cool exploring the arena, but on the other, the computer spams the pivoting move to avoid projectiles; especially on the harder difficulties. All in all, it doesn’t take anything away from the game, as much as it enhances it.
Speaking of arenas, I can’t think of a bad one in MK4. They’re all very diverse and creative. Again, it’s a shame they didn’t get more attention in future titles, as arenas like Reptile’s Lair, the Ice Pit, the Fire Well and the Prison are some of the best in the series. They also brought in the Shaolin Temple, which was a nice nod to the spin-off game MK Mythologies: Sub-Zero.
The game gets points for tying in Mythologies, too. The story itself isn’t fantastic. It’s cheesy, but that’s par for the course here. Unlike previous games though, this one does its thing with respect to what came before it. I get that the whole plot of Mythologies was as much a prequel to MK4 as it was to the original Mortal Kombat, but I still liked the level of continuity and reverence displayed in a series not really known for doing so.
I love that I can still do this.
One more thing about Mortal Kombat 4 that kicks ass is the close-up moves. Get up close, tap the right button and you’ll see a cutscene of Jax punching his opponent’s elbow, snapping their arm the wrong way; or Tanya twisting her opponent’s head 180 degrees, which they then turn back and keep fighting. Liu Kang breaks his opponent’s leg at the knee by stomping on it I think. I’m not going to check. It’s so over the top, but so much fun.
Also weapons! MK4 introduced weapons. Hit the right button combination and Fujin pulls out a crossbow, or Raiden pulls out a staff, or Liu Kang pulls out a jagged sword, or Johnny Cage pulls out a bowie knife the size of his fuckin’ leg. I love the concept, but I thought that the weapons each character had wasn’t really in line with their character. Like, Jax shouldn’t have a spiked club, and Sonya definitely shouldn’t be fighting with a fucking pinwheel. When you were done with the weapons you could throw them at your opponent, which was pretty cool. You could also throw random junk found lying around the stage.
I have very fond memories of this game. I missed the window to play it when it was new and culturally relevant, but I had a lot of fun with it in my late teens. Many, many afternoons and evenings were spent with a bunch of friends playing this game and doing a shot every time you lost a fight or someone performed a fatality. Like all Mortal Kombat games, 4 shined when it was played with friends.
Drink!
To sum it up, Mortal Kombat 4 was a great addition to the Mortal Kombat franchise, and arguably the last classic. It just had the misfortune of being released at a time when awful disgusting wiry 3d polygon graphics were ‘in’.
-A
P.S: For Part 5: Deadly Alliance & Deception, I actually bought both games for the Xbox. Originally I was just going to write about them from an impersonal perspective, but I figured that kind of goes against the whole “Looking Back” part of the series. I don’t have any real memories of those two games so the next part will be more of a review than a recount of my memories.
I hoped I’d never have to spend money on this blog…
A Link To The Adam. 