Mortal Kombat: Deception

Deception is definitely the peak of the PS2 era of Mortal Kombat for me. It adds some depth to the gameplay, and some new features that fit in just fine with the violent motif of the series. The konquest mode, in particular, is a highlight for me, although it may get annoying for other players since you can only unlock certain characters through that mode.

Once again, the krypt is full of content, and there's a new twist to some of the unlockables. Some of them require keys, and those can only be found in the Konquest mode. That part of the game has you play as Shujinko, and you go through what is essentially a prologue to the story of this Mortal Kombat game. You start as a young Shujinko and eventually, he gets old, but wise. I'll be honest, I kinda liked the idea of picking up moves from other characters. Now, when I say you "go through" - I mean that literally. You are in an RPG world, or rather, earthrealm at the start, and run through different areas, going to markers to advance the story, picking up items, etc. - it's a full blown adventure. I won't get into too much spoilers, but I'll say I'm a sucker for world building and the Mortal Kombat lore. It was fun to play through this for a few reasons.

The Konquest still teaches you how to play the game and the combos of characters, but you can literally roam around and even meditate to make time pass faster. You also get to run around in other realms, such as Outworld, Netherrealm, Edenia, etc. - there are side-quests as well, and challenges. Some of them can be annoying, like the ones where you have to hit a kombo with X amount of hits. To cut to the chase, the point is that there's a LOT to find in this Konquest mode. You even run into some Deadly Alliance characters that you can fight (but not unlock).

As far as the gameplay goes, it's definitely a step-up from Deadly Alliance. A small, but very, very appreciated detail is that pressing down and high punch delivers an uppercut with every character. It's one of the laws of life for Mortal Kombat, and it must not be broken. There is no more impaling, or power-ups that lead to a clearly unbalanced roster, and there's also 3 c-c-c-combo breakers for every character. Breakers are a very, very good addition to the fighting here, considering how long some default combos can get. A few stages have weapons which can be picked up, but I find those to have limited options of attack. Stage fatalities return in the form of death traps, but you can also just kill your opponent by hitting them into said traps. It fits Mortal Kombat, but it seems a tad unfair.

Regarding fatalities, each playable character has 2 fatalities...except for Noob-Smoke, they have one for each guy. I have no idea why the decision was made to throw both of them into the roster as a tag team, but hey, I don't really mind it. They are the sub-bosses of the Arcade mode. Hara-kiris make their debut in this game, which is just suicide so that your opponent doesn't get the satisfaction of hitting a fatality. It's really annoying when the AI does this, but it happens every now and then. This game also brings back the concept of a big bad final boss, and this time, we get Onaga.

Onaga is exactly what you'd expect out of a character that is supposed to be stronger than Shao Kahn. The developers, however, felt like giving players a bit of mercy. When you face him, there are objects around the stage - Kamidogus. By walking into them, you destroy them, and this leaves Onaga open for attacks. He's still a pain to beat, but at least there's some help for players.

We have to talk about the roster - there are some greatly appreciated returns, like Mileena and Baraka. Man, they really got a lot of mileage out of that video where they fight each other. Ermac was given a new look, and new voices, Nightwolf is another appreciated return, as is Kabal, who got a hell of an upgrade with his outfit. Sindel, Jade, and Tanya are back, but there's no Kitana here, which is disappointing. Li Mei is miss fanservice (not that I mind) this time around, and the new females are Kira and Ashrah who are...not great characters. There are reasons as to why Kira and Ashrah haven't been playable since MK Armageddon - no one cares for them. Same goes for characters like Hotaru, Darrius, Dairou, and Kobra. I liked Havik, but he didn't make many appearances outside of the PS2 era of MK, either. Evil Raiden is somewhat interesting, but it's really just a new coat of paint for his outfit. Zombie Liu Kang is gnarly, but this is merely Midway acknowledging that they made a mistake by omitting him from MK Deadly Alliance.

In some alternate timeline, a Mortal Kombat game that combines ideas from Deadly Alliance and Deception exists, and it's an all time great fighting game. Sadly, we don't live in that timeline. You take what you can get with the PS2 Mortal Kombat games.

Some classic stages return as well, and generally, the new stages are very good. The soundtrack feels like a step up from the previous game, but it's still not nearly as memorable as earlier entries in the series. Nothing bad, but nothing truly great from this soundtrack, barring some of the returning classic tracks.

There are a few other game modes aside from the usual Arcade mode. Versus mode and practice return, but we still have no rotating towers from MK4, no team mode or tournament mode. However, Midway did get a little wacky with their options. Enter Chess Kombat, and Puzzle Combat.

What you do here is pick a team of characters that have roles similar to chess pieces. The roles determine health, how you move on the board, and what a character can do as far as spells, functions, etc. - Shifters transform into their opponents, and if opposing Shifters fight each other, they don't transform. In order to win, you must beat the opponent's Champion. Once you beat them, the character that got the win over the Champion automatically hits a fatality.

Given the amount of ways that you can get health bonuses, I just don't feel like roles really matter all that much. Taking a green space gives your team a 25% fill on the health bar, and if you have both of them, the team gets 50% - on top of that, you get another health bonus if you initiate kombat. The AI isn't that tough to deal with in general. I found that certain actions can mess up the AI, like Mileena's teleport kick. With the right timing, being aggressive with Baraka's specials can work surprisingly well even in high difficulty settings. I'm not saying that these strategies work 100% of the time, but I took off some considerable amount of health from AI opponents...

There's also Puzzle Kombat. Right off the bat, I was let down when I saw not all of the roster made it into this mode. Honestly, I just didn't have much fun playing this. I'm going to guess that someone at Midway wanted to make something like Super Gem Fighter, but I just didn't enjoy myself with this. You play this tetris-like game where you can only break blocks with matching colors when you have a breaker block (it has the MK logo). As you keep playing, you fill up a super meter and can use a super to clear blocks on your side. It takes a long time to fill this meter, and sometimes, the game takes its sweet time to give you a breaker block.

On top of all that, the default setting has you go through 2 rounds. Yeah, 2 rounds of slow matches that frankly have no good reason to be slow. This needed to get more wacky, that's what I'm saying. I found myself getting bored with this rather quickly, but hey, they tried.

Am I going to knock off points for one mode that is essentially just a bonus to the game? No.

There's plenty of content to unlock in this game, and the fighting got some improvements that Deadly Alliance sorely needed. The Konquest mode is a highlight, and it goes to show that Midway was at least well aware of what kind of content was needed. If you're curious about MK Unchained on the PSP, feel free to check it out as well - I feel like that has the roster that Deception should have had.