Mortal Kombat Advance (GBA) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
1,083A playthrough of Midway's 2001 versus-fighting game for the Game Boy Advance, Mortal Kombat Advance.
Played through as Jax through the grand master tower. Since finishing the largest tower in the single-player game unlocks Shao Khan as a playable character, I showed a match playing as him at the end.
For this video the game's difficulty was set to easy - as anyone that has played MKA can attest to, the CPU AI is impossibly relentless at the normal and higher levels. Since I didn't want to spend the entire video spamming a single move trying to exploit the cheap (but stupid) AI, I knocked the difficulty down a step.
Mortal Kombat Advance was an early Game Boy Advance game, coming out around the same time as Super Street Fighter II Turbo: Revival and Tekken Advance did. Hopes were high for it - the SNES had pulled off a reasonable conversion of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, so though at a reduced resolution, the GBA's far more powerful hardware should have been able to handle a near perfect port. At least, so you might think.
But "Oh no," said Midway. "We can't be having any of that," they thought to themselves as they contracted with the unknown development house Virtucraft to handle the conversion. "Regardless of what they produce, we can slap the Mortal Kombat label on it and the fans will eat it up."
Oh Midway... why? What did your fans ever do to deserve this flaming wreck?
Needless to say, Mortal Kombat Advance was not a success. If you remember how the series fared on handhelds to this point, you might recall what a rough start it had with the Game Boy's release of the original Mortal Kombat. The graphics were grainy and most of the animation was missing, the move set had been slashed, the timings felt wrong - but despite all of this, it was playable. It might not have been fun, nor was it anywhere near accurate, but it was playable. Things improved a great deal with MK2 and MK3, but the original really was better left ignored.
But somehow, on a system two generations newer, Mortal Kombat Advance felt worse. The entire character roster from the SNES port is here, but many of the special moves are missing, as are many of the backgrounds and digitized voice clips. All of the stage-specific fatalities are gone as well, and the violence has seen a dramatic cut despite the game's M rating.
The SNES game Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 used 32 megabits of ROM. Huge cuts were to be expected, but this? It's using a 64 megabit cart, so why does it all look so bad? Why is MKA missing so much stuff?! ...right. Laziness, ineptitude, and greed. Thanks, Midway!
The biggest problem is that the game feels *wrong.* The timings from the original game have been jacked up beyond belief - just try to pull off an uppercut in the middle of a combo to see what I mean... if you can even pull off a combo at all. The input timing requirements for special moves are excruciatingly exact, and when you couple this with the mushy movement controls and a badly adapted 4-button control scheme, you'll generally find yourself flailing at empty space, and the AI is all too happy to exploit the downtime: don't be surprised when the game proceeds to hand your ass to you. The controls are a mess and the game uses that punituvely against you.
And then there's the presentation. If Mortal Kombat Advance was to have any saving grace, surely it would be in how it leveraged the GBA's impressive sprite and color capabilities, right?
Alas, grace is nowhere to be found. It would've looked poor on the SNES, but this is just inexcusable. The static backgrounds are riddled with compression artifacts; the dithering is worse than it was even in the Genesis port; and the characters are tiny, incorrectly proportioned, and are lacking most of their attacks' transition animation frames. The fatalities have all been heavily neutered as well, and many of them glitch in strange ways - notice how Jax's upper leg disappears when the word Fatality flashes across the screen? Spooky.
The sound isn't nearly as bad - the sample quality is alright and the music sounds fair (what little there is of it after being cut down into tiny loops), though a lot of sound effects seem to randomly not play when they're supposed to.
I could keep going, but honestly, what's the point? Short of finding an n-Gage somewhere, you aren't going to find a worse adaptation of any Mortal Kombat. It manages to be even worse than MK Special Forces.
I made myself play it because it's a fun piñata of a talking piece, but seriously, don't play this game. If you want fun, go to your local Goodwill and try on all the clothes until you catch scabies. You'll enjoy that more. I'm sure of it.
*Recorded with a Retroarch LCD shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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