There’s a lot of division over Mortal Kombat 1’s central Kameo assist mechanic right now as the franchise’s latest imaginative evolution clearly has some fine-tuning to go through, and this attention to system mechanics has led PNDKM down an interesting path for a new video idea.
Starting in the days of Mortal Kombat 3, Ed Boon and his team were careful to add new gameplay mechanics to shake up the action in just about every franchise entry thereafter, and Ketchup has gone analyzed and ranked all of them on a scale from 1-10.
The first two Mortal Kombat games were fairly straightforward, following the then-standard approach of having characters with normal attacks and special moves. Combos weren’t even technically an in-game mechanic during this time, but that changed heavily when the franchise made its third major evolution.
The Mortal Kombat 3 series brought with it both combos as well as the run button, which changed the pace and flow of the MK experience forever, widely for the better.
Mortal Kombat 4 took the franchise into the third dimension (sort of) with side steps, upped the violence with weapons, and toned down the infinite combo potential (sort of) with Maximum Damage… in congruence with the legacy of MK4, none of these mechanics are all that fondly remembered as they ultimately didn’t enhance the experience in a positive way.
It was in the true 3D era that stances were first introduced, and these added tons of variety to individual characters. This mechanic was used again frequently, and were eventually refined and evolved into Mortal Kombat X’s variations, a mechanic PNDKM offer a rare 10/10 to.
It’s interesting to hear the passionate and learned perspectives from Ketchup as he goes through all the franchise mechanics.
From the arena traps of Mortal Kombat Deception to various versions of the combo breaker, see how each of these special global mechanics impacted their respective games and see how Ketchup feels about MK1’s Kameos in the full video here: