Collection essentials #226 & #227: Mortal Kombat 3 and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (SNES)

Mortal Kombat continues, and does another good job making a sequel that stands out. Mortal Kombat 1 took place on Earth, Mortal Kombat II took place in the dangerous realm of Outworld, and Mortal Kombat 3 sees Shao Kahn and his minions from Outworld invading Earth. And while it’s also on Earth, the stages in 3 are generally more urban and with less of an Asian style. The cast of characters is also mixed up once again with several newcomers unlike anybody from the previous games, such as the cyborg ninjas Sektor and Cyrax.

Mortal Kombat 3 introduces a couple new major gameplay additions. The first is a “Run” button to help make gameplay. The second is “dial-a-combos”. If you’re next to your opponent and hit them, you can press additional buttons for more hits and more damage. And the sequence of buttons to press depends on which character you’re playing as, so you have to memorize the combo sequences for each individual character, for better or worse. 

The violence in this game is a little bit more cartoony and/or unrealistic than in the previous games. When finishing moves were performed in Mortal Kombat II, for example, the victim’s body was designed to move and react more or less like you might expect them to if such a move were to be performed in real life, but that’s really not the case in 3. I’m not sure if part of this was due to budget and/or time constraints or if they were just trying to be a little less realistic, but it always seemed a little odd to me.

Mortal Kombat 3 on SNES was the second game in the series that I spent a significant amount of time with (and perhaps played, period), as my cousins had a copy of the game for a while. The cartridge shown was acquired in my adulthood, though. I enjoyed it a lot and it got me interested in Mortal Kombat as a series.

But there’s two cartridges here, so what’s “Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3”? It’s basically an updated version of the original game with new content and features. Nowadays such an update might be released via a downloadable patch and/or as paid downloadable content, but back then companies had to release an entirely separate game for this sort of thing. I’m going to hold off on talking about UMK3 in more detail since I want to save that talk for when I get to a better version of it. I don’t have as much of an attachment or experience with UMK3 on SNES, but I wanted to have it anyway in order to own all four Mortal Kombat games on the console. 

You might notice I only listed Mortal Kombat 1 for Genesis and not the sequels. I do have II on Genesis, but not 3 or UMK3. I just don’t have as much experience with those versions and generally prefer other versions anyway, so they didn’t make the list.

The SNES versions of these games are generally not ideal. UMK3 suffers in particular because they had to remove some content to save space, so for example, the character Sheeva who was in 3 and the arcade version of UMK3 is missing. There is some merit to revisiting them though as I explained in yesterday’s post about the second game, since these console ports often came with certain options and cheat codes that aren’t available in other versions.

When I want to play MK3 these usually aren’t my go-to versions, but for having childhood significance as well as cheat codes that may be of interest, I’m still counting them as essentials.