Mortal Kombat is a Great Franchise of Its Own Bloody, Stupid Making

Mortal Kombat’s appeal lies in how stupid it is. As much as the series has made strides to become more serious and mature through its story modes, the foolishness with which it operates on remains an intrinsic part of its identity. Watching a girl with the fangs of a horror monster bite the jugular out of a bug woman is one of those sights that never gets old and elicits some kind of reaction, whether you’re making the input or watching it happen on a screen. The franchise’s core concept of various characters from wildly different settings beating the shit out of each other is goofy, and it knows this. 2008’s Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe basically opened the floodgates, and the reboot trilogy decided to go all in on this by bringing in characters from various properties as DLC fighters like the Xenomorph and Terminator.

At the same time, the series believes in itself. This is something that its imitators early on failed to recognize: underneath all the potentially traumatizing blood and goofy one-liners, the games take themselves and the franchise’s comic book-like lore deeply seriously. Clearly, there’s no shortage of cinematic games these days, but NetherRealm’s series is something of a rarity in the fighting genre for how much it considers the narrative to be an equal to its competitive play. Yes, seeing two color-coded ninjas team up to fight ninja cyborgs is automatically kickass. But knowing that they spent decades as enemies and later became best friends makes the sight of seeing them do team attacks or stand beside each other all the more satisfying. That conviction even manifests in-game as the characters trade barbs (or hisses) and allude to the events of the game’s campaign, effectively turning competitive play into a post-game adjacent to canon.

Equal parts over-the-top melodramatic and childishly silly, it’s hard to not fall a little in love with Mortal Kombat. Not unlike the Fast & Furious films, there’s a dumb sincerity to the franchise that makes it great to play and interesting to watch. Whatever kind of future it has, NetherRealm’s franchise will remain memorable because at the end of the day, there’s nothing truly like it.

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