However objectionable something is, it can get harder and harder to keep up that objection over time, like with the tepid response to the jingoism of Desert Strike in reviews of its later Amiga release. Mortal Kombat on the Mega Drive had its blood hidden behind a button sequence cheat and a series of hints about codes, the better to make it feel cool and like seeing something you weren’t really allowed to. For Mortal Kombat II, it’s just there from the beginning, already a fact of life. It can’t be the selling point to the same extent any more, not least because it can’t be news and get the same level of delicious controversy, but it’s a crucial part of the series identity.
The blood is not the only thing that feels more standard. The orientalism is still there but less pronounced, Mortal Kombat starting to become an inventive setting of its own instead of having to leverage existing cultural associations. Improvements in the approach to capturing real-life performance into the form of animated pixels mean that none of the characters have the feeling of glitched eldritch horror that the first game was constantly on the edge of. Mortal Kombat II is more developed, more refined.
Without being able to call on the same shock and brutality, Midway add interest by lots of different additions, big and small. The character roster goes up to twelve, and sets a new #1 fighting game gender-ratio-high-water-mark with two women (Sonya is gone and replaced with twin sisters Kitana and Mileena). The stages are many and varied, with touches like other characters appearing in the background, and with lots more chances to mutilate your defeated opponent on ceiling spikes and pools of acid.
On that subject, fatalities are newly joined by (forced portmanteau warning) ‘babalities’ in which your opponent magically turns into a crying baby, and by gestures of friendship like offering gifts. The latter is a joking response to the objections to the first game, to which I can only think that as a joke it would be infinitely better and funnier if it had replaced fatalities completely.
In many ways, the changes are good. The process of learning your way through a character and how to beat your opponents is a lot more fun thanks to all of the additions and variation. Constantly being catered to and entertained, given a near unlimited buffet, is easy to feel happy about. Still, though, the fundamental change is not so positive. Mortal Kombat II is a sequel with enough of the flaws of the original, moral and gameplay, still intact for it to be a problem, but without the same singular aesthetic effect. It turns something awful and compelling into something that’s still a bit awful but much less compelling.
Mega Drive chart, Edge 015, December 1994