The Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection is a laughable cash grab.

I quite like the Capcom fighting collections, because they are made with love. They took the best version of each game, the arcade editions, then spent time making them look and perform as good as possible, while adding modern quality of life features so they are actually fun to play in 2025. And then they made them all cost $30. As a result, the communities that love these games switched to it immediately and never looked back. They are now the definitive versions that everyone plays.

The Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection, by contrast, has every version of every old Mortal Kombat game that has ever existed, plus a five-hour documentary and some concept art unlockables, and costs $50. The love is noticeably absent.

There are 23 “games” here, everything from the the original arcade edition of Mortal Kombat 1, all the way to Mortal Kombat deadly alliance–but only for the Gameboy advance. If you are feeling saucy, you can play the SNES version of MK1, the one with the blood removed, while raising a glass to the ghost of Joseph Lieberman. Or You can play, if you so choose, the version of Mortal Kombat II that was released for the Sega Mega drive. You can even play it online! Assuming you can find another person to play it with, an unsafe assumption considering the collection peaked at 900 online players on the launch day.

Why was that, BTW? Well, a few reasons. You can’t cross-play, for one thing, but you also matchmake. At all. You can’t play with your friends, and there are no lobbies. Apparently this is bespoke technology that, in 2025, is super tough to get working. But as it turns out that’s only half of the problem. The other half of the problem is that online, once you find a match, plays like absolute dogshit:

It is awful to play, awful to hear and (I assume) awful to look at. Who wants that? Nobody.

Realistically, there are about four good games here that people might actually play: MK1 arcade, MK2 arcade, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wave Net, and MK4 arcade. But even these play like ass, because apparently all they did was throw them into MAME and didn’t bother optimizing anything. Even offline there is input lag, the default filters make it look terrible, because turning it off makes it look even worse, you can only turn off the filter on a per game basis and it doesn’t save your choice after you leave the session. The move lists don’t even have all of the moves. Some of the soundtracks don’t loop, or they are for the wrong version of the game. Etc. The emulated versions of these games that already exist have none of these problems.

The other nineteen games in here are filler. Some people might play Mythologies, or Special Forces, just to see what they are like. The Game Boy Color edition of Mortal Kombat will be played by twenty people, for twenty minutes. They are clearly only there to justify the absurd $50 price of the collection. The same is true of the aforementioned documentary, available on YouTube for $0 (plus ads, I guess).

The joke of this, that is not very funny, is I will probably still buy it — after they fix their issues, and make it cost about $20 less. Until then, no sale.

Comments? Join us on the forum.

Object in Space