Based on the demo version.
So, you’ve been playing beat’em ups since Super Turbo. Maybe since Third Strike. Maybe you just started in 2009 with SF4. Whatever your situation is, you’ve only played Mortal Kombat when you were young. When the dark, ominious music before each fatality creeped you out a little bit, instead of just making you laugh.
The new Mortal Kombat is coming out, and you’re clueless.
Tiny “Glossary”:
LP HP
LK HK BL
LP- Light Punch
HP- Hard Punch
LK- Light Kick
HK- Hard Kick
BL- Block
Throw- LP+LK
Stance- LK+HK
Uppercut- d+HP
Sweep- b+HK
Command Normals- Command normals.
X-ray- Super (BL+Stance)
Other moves- Specials
Enhanced- EX
Breaker- Burst
Fatality- Taunt aka Bitchslap
No Back/Front. One hits harder. The other hits lighter. End of Story. Let’s proceed.
**Similarities to other Beat’em Ups
**Allow me to lay down a very important rule:
Forget for a moment what you learned in Street Fighter. Mortal Kombat “9” is not Street Fighter.
And to be perfectly honest, it’s not Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 either. It’s neither. You can’t play MK9 with the same mindset as you play SF.
You’re bound to grasp MK9 better than the common player if you’re used to Virtua Fighter. It’s still a farfetched comparison, but somehow closer to it than any 2D fighter. Don’t even think of it as a blend. It’s something fresh, and you have to approach it differentely.
Juggling
I’m going to skip the juggling and combo system for now, since the game isn’t out yet, and we can’t get into that. It’s also the least relevant aspect of the game. After all, a Beat’em up is not measured by Combos. It’s measured by strategy, reflexes, guessing games, psyching out your opponent, baits, and a bunch of other expressions that reflect the exact same thing: how much of your brain is used to play it. A bad beat’em up doesn’t really use much of your brain. A good one does.
**Block
**
Let’s start off with the most important difference for those who come from a world outside of Virtua Fighter: the Guard button.
Here’s the reason behind there being normal chip damage in MK9: to demote a completely defensive behaviour. While in Street Fighter you can hold down/back and take a breather for a few moments to think about what your next move will be, or how to deal with what your opponent is currently doing (usually raping you with frametraps, for example), in Mortal Kombat you have Chip Damage.
The advantages of having a Guard Button are simple (let’s disregard the Guard Cancels for now): you’re able to move forward and block faster. This translates into a completely different game, since the majority of poking (and footsies, for that matter) revolve around the idea that your opponent will move his stick forward for a split second, leaving his guard, allowing you to hit him.
The same thing happens in Mortal Kombat, but that split second is even smaller. You’re using two hands to do two separate things. You don’t have to use the same hand to stop moving forward and go back to blocking. In MK9 one hand moves forward, and the other blocks. Hell, you can press down/forward and block! Feels odd, doesn’t it? Again, if you’re not used to Virtua Fighter (or previous MK games) you’re bound to feel out of place.
Now that we got over the “Blocking Button” novelty, let’s go over the rest of the mechanics.
The game has Low Hits (must be blocked low) and Overheads, aka Mid Hits (must be blocked high). Then you have High Hits, the least relevant of the bunch, since you can typically crouch against them. Just like SF.
This translates into you being able to crouch against the vast majority of attacks in MK9. If you’ve played the demo, you might have noticed that.
Here’s the issue: several chains have mid hits (overheads). If you’re crouch blocking everything, you’ll get hit. An example is Scorpion’s HP LP HP (High High Mid chain).
First question that will pop into your head if you’re bright:
"Then what’s the point of using combos with no Mid hits?"
Answer: they’re safer, might do more damage, cancellable to specials/super, amongst other properties. But there’s more to it than that. We’ll get there.
Blocking in Mortal Kombat has a large disadvantage when compared to SF. This is related not only to the fact that you suffer chip damage from everything that does damage whilst not blocking, but also because blockstun is a much bigger issue here. This allows you to basically bitchslap the Expert CPU in the demo with just Jab Forward Jab Forward x ad infinitum. Obviously, you can just crouch against this loop and pull an uppercut or sweep.
Being that way, Blocking should be used against things you HAVE to block, and avoided most of the time. In Mortal Kombat, the best defense is your offense. Even if your offense involves backstepping a lot, and throwing projectiles. It’s better than blocking and waiting for punishes. Blocking is worth it if you can see a special coming. The vast majority of specials found in the demo seem to be unsafe on block. Things like Mileena’s Roll, and Scorpion’s Teleport Punch can easily be punished on block. It’s the reason why they can’t be abused and should only be used in combos.
Last but not least: there’s no autoblock. If you block a hit, and there’s another chained afterwards, keep holding block.
**
Normals and Command Normals
**In MK9 you have LP, HP, LK, HK. Each has a particular function which happens to behave similarly amongst the cast.
Here’s a little table for the demo. The values for the damage are aproximates, and everything is bound to change in the official release. But hey, watching for patterns is fun.
Color code:
Scorpion, Subzero, Cage, Mileena, All
(Values in % of life taken)
LP 3 3 3 4
HP 5 5 5 5
LK 5 5 7 5
HK 5 9 5 7
c.LP 2 (better pushback and hit/block stun than c.LK. You can cancel it, but since the hitstun is so low, it won’t combo into anything I’ve noticed)
Upper 12 (Knockdown+Wall bounce back, not cancelable)
**c.LK **<1 (Awful pushback and hit/block stun, and no comboability. Only purpose appears to be: ticking throws and whatnot)
c.HK 3 (pushback varies amongst characters. Appears to suffer from the same issues as c.LP: can cancel, can’t combo. Bad hit/block stun. I assume it’s use is for pushing back and poking safely)
Sweep 7 (Knockdown… Why Sweep instead of Upper? Range. Not cancelable)
J.Punch 3 (Combo starter, cancelable)
NJ.Punch 5 (juggle, cancelable)
J.Kick 7 (knockdown, cancelable)
**NJ.Kick **5 (Combo starter, cancelable)
Everything other than LP HP LK HK and Command Normals (which vary amongst characters, so I didn’t bother calculating the values) appears to be normalized amongst the characters. This happens because their startup frames seem to be the same. Even when there’s a difference, something else might compensate (Mileena’s sweep seems slower, but also moves her forward).
In regards to Mileena’s LP, it’s slightly slower on startup compared to the other three characters. Hence the +1% damage.
Cages LK is slower than others’.
Scorpion’s HK is a fast Anti-Air, and Cage’s HK is special cancelable. Both are 5% because of that.
Sub Zer[COLOR=royalblue]o’s HK[/COLOR] is much slower than Scorpion’s.
Mileena’s HK is faster than Sub Zero’s and slower than Cage’s, I believe, but also special cancelable.
I’m going to assume every character in the retail game will have their non-standing moves normalized too.
When it comes to command normals, you can figure out the properties of each yourself. Overheads, juggles, anti-airs, etc.
**Throws
**
[LIST]
[]12% damage.
[] Can’t hit opponents in hitstun.
[] CAN hit opponents in blockstun.
[] Extremely easy to tech (~30 frame window)
[*] Flashy! Who needs ultras?
[/LIST]
Movement
[LIST]
[]Holding forward moves you at an average pace towards your opponent.
[]Double tapping forward moves you much much faster.
[]Holding backwards makes your character take one slow step backwards, and then quickly backtracks. Much faster than backdashing.
[]**Double tapping backwards **gives you a very small backdash. It’s useless as far as I’ve noticed. Let’s just say it’s faster in startup than just walking backwards. But if you want to run away (as in: cover mid-fullscreen), then simply backtrack.
[/LIST]
Walking backwards and backdashing both reduce your vertical hitbox slightly. Allows you to dodge early jumping moves. Sucks greatly against ground moves. Anything with proper range will catch you.
**Dash Cancelling
**Tapping forward during a move will cancel its recovery partially. It needs further investigation, but you can basically cancel out dashes with both blocks, normals, specials, supers. You can cancel into dashes with blocks, normals, and not much else, I believe (cancelling special moves’ recoveries would be a tad silly).
You can’t cancel active frames. Just recovery frames.
**Block Dashing
**Hold Block, double tap a direction and hold it. Release block. Repeat it quickly. If you do it fast enough and with proper timing (too fast and it won’t work), you can just tap forward once, hold it, and when you release block, a dash comes out.
Basically ff BL f BL f BL f BL. Not as useful for backdashing.
**Scaling
**From what I can tell, at least 2hit combos take away around 1% damage from the second hit. Didn’t even bother to go further into it. It’s something that’s bound to have changed in the final version.
Stance
You have Open Stance and Closed stance. Open is when both fighters’ front feet are standing in front of each other. Closed is the opposite.
Imagine this as your torso from above:
…/ left shoulder
.> head looking towards ->
/ right shoulder
If your opponent is mirroring your stance:
…/.
.>…<
/…
That’s an open stance. If he’s not mirroring it
…/…/
.>…<
/…/
It’s a closed stance.
You’re wondering: “What’s that for?”. In virtua fighter, it affects hitboxes in terms of midair combos (juggles). In Mortal Kombat? Not sure yet. We’ll find out with further investigation.
Combo breakers
BL+forward. 2 bars.
**EX Moves
**
Too busy exploring other combat mechanics. But you know how it works… Increased damage/longer freeze duration, faster startup, stuff like that. Varies with each special.
Super
Block+Stance. Get it in like you’d get a special. Their properties vary. Have yet to notice any invencibility.
**How a Mortal Kombat match pans out
**Obviously depends on the characters.
To get in, jumping is a bad idea, just like Street Fighter. Good if you can predict a lousy move by your opponent (sweep, horizontal projectile, etc), and bad idea if he’s just there standing still.
You’ll want to simply move forward, take good guesses, and try to hit him from max range with a safe chain.
Mortal Kombat is about mixups. It’s about mid/low hits, just like Virtua Fighter. The juggles come as part of either punishes, or good guesses.
Some things might seem unfair at first. A good example is scorpion’s HP > HP+LP. It juggles, is cancellable into teleport punch, has massive pushback on block, and hits mid, so you can’t even make it whiff on block. Still, you have frame advantage afterwards. Even if you can’t punish, you can take the initiative after his attempt.
This makes Mortal Kombat almost a game of turns. You don’t instantly get a free punish for blocking what your opponent does, but you get the initiative if you do block a slow/powerful move. That allows you to “try your mixup” after his. You can go for a tick throw, for a high high low combination, etc. Many possibilities, and it’s all about guessing games, and reading your opponent.
**Everything in this article is subject to change in the final revision of Mortal Kombat 9, apart of course from certain things that are core to the game mechanics, like the way a match is played. Other things, like the normalized damage for non-standing moves are probably going to stay the same, since it’s something that could be found in the old MK games.
**