One For All

Part 7 of a Mortal Kombat Retrospective

After the popularity of Mortal Kombat: Deception and Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, Midway announced that they hoped to be producing a new title in the franchise every year, and the seventh fighting game of the series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, was released in the fall of 2006.

One of the earliest boasts of Armageddon was that it would have every fighter ever featured in Mortal Kombat, which gave it a bloated roster of sixty-three fighters. It was also the first game to allow players to create their own fighters, and their own finishing moves. The fighting engine was largely duplicated from Deception and Deadly Alliance, but added the ability to parry attacks, and had a larger focus on combat in the air, something the previous two games had virtually none of. The Konquest mode used the engine from Shaolin Monks, and told the story of ancient Edenian prince Taven and his battle against his evil brother Daegon, the sole new kombatants introduced in the game, and set the stage for the conflict at the heart of Armageddon. It also featured "Motor Kombat," an MK-style cart-racing minigame.

Unfortunately, Armageddon failed to live up to its hype and quickly fell under criticism for a number of glaring drawbacks. Perhaps most noticeable was the fact that any character who had been in Deadly Alliance and/or Deception simply had their models from those games recycled (with the exception of Reptile, who used instead the costume featured in Shaolin Monks). This meant that the only characters who had any work done on them were Kintaro, Stryker, Rain, Sheeva, Motaro, Fujin, Reiko, Jarek, Kai, Meat, Chameleon, Sektor, and Sareena. Plus, the addition of the player-created fatalities took the place of standard fatalities and hara-kiris, and the fatality system was generic, hard to pull off well, and didn't look very good even if you did. Each character had only one unarmed style (down from two) and one weapon style. Also missing from the game were character biographies, and the arcade mode endings were just the victor doing katas atop a giant pyramid while their ending was narrated. I'm not going to claim that every ending in previous games were good, but the endings of Armageddon have to be the worst and most thoughtless in the series. To remedy the lack of biographies, Midway started posting ones for individual characters on their website, and though they did post a bunch, they stopped doing it probably a third of the way in, leaving a ton of characters with no real reason for being there. So for fans of the obscure one shot characters (like say, Sheeva or Reiko) who were looking forward to seeing their favourite fighters finally get the attention they deserved (or at least, some attention), the game failed entirely to live up to that expectation.

Meanwhile, the story itself was kind of stupid. Evidently having so many magical fighters will lead to the end of all realms (for some reason), and as a failsale, Taven's father Argus implemented the elemental, Blaze, to test Taven and Daegon in Mortal Kombat. The winner would be made into a god, and if Daegon wins, everyone dies, but if Taven wins, everyone just loses their powers. Then, when the bad guys find out about Blaze, they all battle for the right to fight him in the hopes of becoming gods themselves, and all the good guys rally together to stop them by claiming it first. So I guess it's as good an excuse as any for a battle royale, but in an effort to make it epic it became fairly artless. That said, the Konquest mode was fun, if short, and tied into a lot of pre-existing elements such as the Red Dragon, Lin Kuei temple, and Tekunin. But failing to account for the presence of all the other characters was, for me at least, a real letdown.