The Worst Mortal Kombat Game Released 29 Years Ago, & It’s Not Even Close

The Mortal Kombat series is one of the oldest fighting game franchises around, offering bloody and gory battles between iconic characters in a number of titles. From its traditional 1v1 2D era in arcades, the experimental 3D games, or the modern reformed projects under NetherRealm Studios, the series has gone through multiple reinventions. At the same time, plenty of spin-offs have existed that took Mortal Kombat in fresh directions, but these departures have not always worked out compared to the fighting games players know more.

There have been excellent spin-offs from Mortal Kombat, chief among them being Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, the beat-em-up action game where players could team up with each other as series favorites Liu Kang and Kung Lao. This game even had a mode where players could embody Scorpion and Sub-Zero, the palette swap ninjas who help give the series its identity. While Mortal Kombat: Special Forces is often considered the worst spin-off by comparison, there is one other that also shows why the franchise’s genre experiments weren’t very good back in the day.

Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero Released In October 1997 As An Awful Side Scrolling Experience

Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero is a spin-off where players control Bi-Han, the first Sub-Zero in the Mortal Kombat games before his brother took the mantle later in the series. This game follows Sub-Zero as he must collect several elemental scrolls for Quan-Chi, a dark sorcerer later revealed to be a servant of Shinnok, a former Elder God who becomes the ruler of the hell-like NetherRealm. This is the first game Quan-Chi ever appears in, before the release of Mortal Kombat 4 in arcades. While this premise sounds decent on paper, in execution, it is anything but.

The gameplay of Mortal Kombat Mythologies is odd, as instead of a 3D beat-em-up like Shaloin Monks, this 1997 title opts to be a side scroller instead. This quickly becomes the biggest determent to the game, as it uses the exact same sprite and movement of Sub-Zero from the arcade fighting games, with similar controls too. Movement is extremely stiff as a result, making mobility feel awful to control and attack distances hard to determine when fighting enemies. Sub-Zero’s foes are just as restricted as he is, but often have a numbers advantage that makes battle incredibly annoying.

Even something as simple as turning Sub-Zero around is a chore in this game, with the character having a very hard time fighting enemies both in front and behind him. At the same time, the platforming of Mortal Kombat Mythologies is a strange mixture of 2D and 3D spaces on a flat plane, making depth perception on jumps very hard to figure out. More often than not, you’ll have to judge whether Sub-Zero will cling to a ledge or not during a jump without knowing if it’s even possible on certain surfaces.

Terrible Gameplay Systems & Ridiculously Hard Bosses Made Sub-Zero’s Game Laughable

There is almost no momentum on any action Sub-Zero does in this game either, so you can’t correct your platforming in any way. Every jump feels super restricted, making it next to impossible to predict where you’ll land. The very narrow and oftentimes moving platforms in specific stages only make this problem worse, with timing being arbitrary at best to land safely. The gameplay pitfalls of this game only get worse as you explore them, such as needing a button input to turn around or having poor platform identification mechanics that fail when you needed them the most.

The biggest problem with Mortal Kombat Mythologies was how it tried to force fighting game structure onto a side scrolling platformer through its controls. Nowhere was this more apparent than the boss fights on various stages, which can be aggravating. The biggest example of this is Fujin, one of the first bosses you encounter whose main gimmick is controlling wind to push you off the stage. Due to the horrendous controls, this can easily cause you to die over and over. The larger stage and elusiveness of Fujin also makes the fighting game mechanics feel like a restriction rather than a benefit, defeating the whole purpose of a Mortal Kombat spin-off.

Future Mortal Kombat Games Have Largely Stuck To Traditional Systems Since Mythologies

The direction of Mortal Kombat games since Mythologies have been to steer clear of what that game tried to do. For an original PlayStation game, Mortal Kombat Mythologies was by far the worst one on the platform, but it reflected the series’ tendency to lazily create content featuring the IP without polishing it into a solid experience. By today’s standards, you can certainly criticize the quality of newer Mortal Kombat games, but under the banner of NetherRealm Studios, there has never been another franchise title that was as mechanically abhorrent as Mythologies.

The revival of the series by NetherRealm has seen the series largely stick to its 1v1 fighting game roots, ditching the experimental beat-em-up or 3D concepts from prior titles. That being said, creators like Ed Boon have stated that they would like to see the series be open to other genres, with even recent games having alternate modes that feel different from the “traditional” structure. With RPG elements present in the Invasions mode for Mortal Kombat 1, there could be another spin-off coming, but hopefully it won’t make the same mistakes Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero did almost three decades ago.

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