Mortal Kombat II
Mortal Kombat II is a 1993 fighting game developed and published by Midway for arcades. It was later ported to multiple home systems, including MS-DOS, Amiga, Game Boy, Game Gear, Sega Genesis, 32X, Sega Saturn, Super NES, and PlayStation, by Probe Software and Sculptured Software, and published by Acclaim Entertainment.
Mortal Kombat II is the second main installment in the Mortal Kombat franchise, and a sequel to 1992's Mortal Kombat. It improves the gameplay and expands the mythos of its predecessor while introducing more varied finishing moves and several new characters such as Kitana, Mileena, Kung Lao, the hidden character Noob Saibot, and the series' recurring villain, Shao Kahn. The game's plot continues from the first game, featuring the next Mortal Kombat tournament set in the otherdimensional realm of Outworld, with the Outworld and Earthrealm representatives fighting each other on their way to challenge Shao Kahn.
Mortal Kombat II was released to enormous commercial success and critical acclaim, winning several awards and inspiring numerous clones. However, it was also involved in controversy due to the series' continuous depiction of graphic violence. In the years since its release, Mortal Kombat II has been cited as one of the best games in the series, as well as one of the greatest video games ever made. It was succeeded in 1995 by the direct sequel Mortal Kombat 3, and in 2005 by the spin-off Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, which takes place during the events of Mortal Kombat II.
Gameplay
The gameplay system of Mortal Kombat II is an improved version of that from the original Mortal Kombat. There are several changes in standard moves: a crouching punch was added, low and high kicks have greater differentiation, roundhouse kicks are made more powerful, and it is easier to perform combos due to reduced recovery times for attacks. Returning characters also gained new special moves, including some to be used in mid-air, and the game plays almost twice as fast as the original.As with its predecessor, matches are divided into rounds, and the first player to win two rounds by fully depleting their opponent's life bar is the winner. At this point, the losing character will become dazed and the winner is given the opportunity of using a finishing move. Mortal Kombat II lacks the "Test Your Might" bonus games and point system from the first game, in favor of a consecutive win tally where wins are represented by icons.
The game marked the introduction of multiple Fatalities as well as additional, non-lethal finishing moves to the franchise: Babalities, Friendships and additional stage-specific Fatalities. Finishing moves cannot be performed either by or against the boss or secret characters.
Plot
Following his failure to defeat Liu Kang in the previous Mortal Kombat tournament, the evil Shang Tsung begs his master Shao Kahn, supreme ruler of Outworld and the surrounding kingdoms, to spare his life. He tells Shao Kahn that if they hold the next Mortal Kombat Tournament in Outworld, the Earthrealm warriors must travel away from home to attend. Kahn agrees to this plan, and restores Shang Tsung's youth and martial arts prowess. He then extends the invitation to the thunder god and Earthrealm's protector, Raiden, who gathers his warriors and takes them into Outworld. The new tournament is much more dangerous, as Shao Kahn has the home field advantage.According to the Mortal Kombat series' canon, Liu Kang won this tournament as well, defeating Shao Kahn and his bodyguard Kintaro. The game's story mode can be also finished using any other playable character, resulting in a variety of non-canonical endings for each of them. This game also establishes that the original Sub-Zero Bi-Han was killed by Scorpion in the first game, and Bi-Han's younger brother Kuai Liang took the identity of the new Sub-Zero.
Characters
The game includes 12 playable characters.;New characters:
- Baraka, a mutant warlord of Outworld's Nomad race, responsible for the assault on the Shaolin Monastery on the orders of Shao Kahn.
- Jax : U.S. Special Forces officer who enters the tournament to rescue his partner Sonya Blade from Outworld.
- Kitana, a female ninja who works as a personal assassin in the service of Shao Kahn. She has been suspected of secretly aiding the Earthrealm warriors.
- Kung Lao, Shaolin monk and close friend of Liu Kang, a descendant of the Great Kung Lao. He seeks to avenge his ancestor and the destruction of the Shaolin temple.
- Mileena, twin sister to Kitana who also serves as an assassin for Kahn. Her mission during the tournament is to ensure the loyalty of her sister, but she also has plans of her own.
- Johnny Cage, Hollywood actor who joins Liu Kang in his journey to Outworld.
- Liu Kang, Shaolin monk who is the reigning champion of Mortal Kombat. He travels to Outworld to seek vengeance for the death of his Shaolin monastery brothers.
- Raiden, thunder god who returns to Mortal Kombat to stop Kahn's evil plans of taking Earthrealm for his own.
- Reptile, Shang Tsung's personal bodyguard.
- Scorpion, a hellspawned spectre who returns to the tournament to once again assassinate Sub-Zero.
- Shang Tsung An evil sorcerer who convinced Kahn to spare his life after losing the last tournament, with a new plan to appease his master, who in turn restores Tsung's youth. Although playable in this installment, also serves as a sub-boss of the game, always appearing before Kintaro in the single-player mode. As in the first game, he is able to morph into any of the playable characters, retaining their moves.
- Sub-Zero, a male ninja who possesses cryokinesis. Though apparently killed in the first tournament, he mysteriously returns, traveling into Outworld to again attempt to assassinate Shang Tsung.
- Kintaro, Shao Kahn's bodyguard, sent by his race to avenge Goro's defeat. He is the game's penultimate boss.
- Shao Kahn, the evil Emperor of Outworld, who wishes to conquer Earthrealm by any means. He is the tournament host and the game's final boss.
Sonya and Kano are the only playable characters from the first Mortal Kombat who were not implemented as fighters, as they only appear in the background of the Kahn's Arena stage, chained and on display as his prisoners. The reason for this was due to the storage limitations of arcade hardware at the time. When Midway employees ran audits on several Mortal Kombat arcade cabinets in the Chicago area, they found that Kano and Sonya were the least chosen characters. So they were cut to background sprites in order to make room for new characters.
Development
According to lead programmer Ed Boon, Mortal Kombat II was "intended to look different than the original MK" and "had everything we wanted to put into MK but did not have time for." In 2012, Boon named creating the game among his best Mortal Kombat memories, recalling: "When we did Mortal Kombat II, we got new equipment and all that stuff, but it was funny because when we started working on Mortal Kombat II, the mania, the hysteria of the home versions of Mortal Kombat I was literally all around us. We were so busy working on the next one, going from seven characters to 12 and two Fatalities per character and all these other things that that consumed every second." Both the theme and art style of MKII were slightly darker than those of its predecessor, although a more vibrant color palette was employed and the new game had a much richer color depth than the previous game. A new feature was the use of multiple layers of parallax scrolling in the arcade version. The game was made to be less serious with the addition of humorous alternative finishing moves. Some of the considered Fatalities were rejected as being too extreme at the time.Care was taken during the programming process to give the game a "good feel", with Boon simulating elements such as gravity into the game's design. Lead designer and artist John Tobias noted that the first game's reliance on juggling the opponent in the air with successive hits was an accident, and had been tightened in Mortal Kombat II. Boon said that the reason to not completely remove it in favor of a different system of chaining attacks together was to set the game apart from the competing titles such as Street Fighter, and allow for players to devise their own combinations of attacks. A double jump ability was implemented but later removed. At one point, a bonus stage was planned to feature "a bunch of ninjas jumping all over the place and you would swing at them, just like you're in the middle of a fight in a kung fu movie." All of the music was composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Dan Forden, the series' sound designer and composer, using the Williams DCS sound system.
As with the first game, Acclaim Entertainment published the home conversions. San Francisco Chronicle claimed in 1994 that Acclaim had spent on developing, manufacturing and marketing the game.
Characters
To create the character animations for the game, actors were placed in front of a gray background and performed the motions, which were recorded on videotape using a broadcast-quality, $20,000 Sony camera instead of the standard Hi8 camera used for the original Mortal Kombat. The video capture footage was then processed into a computer, and the background was removed from selected frames to create sprites. Towards the end of the game's development, they opted to instead use a blue screen technique and processed the footage directly into the computer for a similar, simpler process. The actors were lightly sprayed with water to give them a sweaty, glistening appearance, while post-editing was done on the sprites afterward to highlight flesh tones and improve the visibility of muscles, which Tobias felt set the series apart from similar games using digitized graphics. Animations of Shang Tsung morphing into other characters were created by Midway's John Vogel using a computer, while hand-drawn animations were used for other parts of the game, such as the Fatalities. For Goro and Kintaro, clay sculptures were created by Tobias' friend Curt Chiarelli and then turned into 12-inch latex miniatures that were used for stop motion filming. Because of technical restrictions, the actors' costumes had to be simple and no acrobatic moves such as backflips could have been recorded; the most difficult moves to perform were some of the jumping kicks.Several characters were created using the first game's palette swap technique on just two base models. The game was noted for its "strong female presence", as it was featured more than one female character, which was uncommon in the fighting genre at the time. Due to memory limitations and the development team's desire to introduce more new characters, Sonya Blade and Kano, two fighters from the original Mortal Kombat whom Boon cited as the least-picked characters in the game, were excluded, substituted by two palette swaps: Mileena and Reptile. In place of Sonya, two new playable female characters, Kitana and Mileena, were introduced so the game might better compete against Capcom's Street Fighter II: The World Warrior featuring Chun-Li. Another planned female fighter, based on the real-life kickboxer Kathy Long whom Tobias admired, was omitted due to time constraints. A male bonus character played by Kyu Hwang was also cut from the game.