Mortal Kombat Trilogy's One Incredibly Imbalanced Game


I remembered owning Mortal Kombat Trilogy in the late 90s. Those were the days when the Playstation One was once a very coveted game system by children of that time -- but one had to suffer under its slow loading times. MK Trilogy is one game where I believe was highly imbalanced and shouldn't even be in the tournament circuits compared to Mortal Kombat (2011) and Mortal Kombat X.

The game itself combines as many elements from the first three games and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 -- hoping to make it the best game of its time. But it came out to what it was -- an incredibly imbalanced game. So what makes it imbalanced? I decided to do retro-play with MK (2011) and MK Trilogy and found out just how one game deserves its awards while MK Trilogy deserves way more criticism than the reboot. I mean, the reboot may not be a perfect game, I still wanted Friendships over Babalities and Brutalities (without the annoying long button sequence) but I'd actually end up playing MK (2011) and MKX more than MK Trilogy.

MK Trilogy has one incredibly broken A.I. or artificial intelligence. I'm not saying MK (2011) is for pushovers -- sure it's got some difficult challenges such as the boss version of Shang Tsung or that Shao Kahn loves to spam his hammer but the A.I. is far more refined in this day and age. In MK Trilogy, even regular fighters can be THAT POWERFUL with the broken A.I. such as Scorpion can use his spear much faster than you can. That cheating A.I. or the CPU is a cheating bastard is one thing I realized is a problem for the game. The game itself ends up with you spamming incredibly broken characters such as Noob Saibot (his Disabler was just too powerful in this game) or Rain (his water ball is so spammable) -- not to mention spam the bosses (if you had the PS1 and Saturn versions) for a quick but boring fight. Heck, I even spammed Kintaro many times!

Another I could name is how two-player matches especially for PS1 and Saturn versions can be such a wuss. Try using the bosses such as Goro, Kintaro, Motaro, and Shao Kahn. It takes only FIVE punches or kicks to win a fight. That's a far fetch from Goro depowered in MKX as a playable character or the bosses in MK (2011). Noob and Rain are also very spammable. Noob's Disabler lasts for so long -- fires a Disabler and gets a load of free hits until the effect is lost. Rain fires one Water Ball then fires another, then fires another and they all do damage until he wins the battle. It's quite different than Noob and Rain getting toned down in MK (2011) where Noob's Disabler is almost useless (except against human opponents with the enhanced version) or where you have to strategically think of how to use Rain's water ball now it causes zero damage unless it's in enhanced mode.

Yet I can't deny without this broken game to learn from -- Netherrealm may have not produced MK (2011) and find out what went wrong and created a much better game. Somehow, while I don't really play it much anymore (and it has NO real backward compatibility) but I could still be proud to say that maybe, just maybe this game was a stepping stone to MK (2011) as the really good game it is today.

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