This game exists in a weird purgatory of simple mediocrity. I'm not a fan of Mortal Kombat, so it was a given that playing a video game which biggest accomplishment is it functions at a base level was going to be just as enjoyable as the time I drank bong water for $50.

Mortal Kombat Advance lacks everything that gives fighting gives an identity. There are total of zero fluid combat strings you can pull off amongst the entire cast of pallet swapped sprites that have voice lines from characters that don't appear its roster. It's gameplay loop is so exploitable that it makes me pulling off Sol Badguy's infinite in Guilty Gear: The Missing Link look just as jawdropping as Daigo vs Justin's set in Evo 2004. The "soundtrack" makes my nephew slamming his saliva caked hands on his Fisher Price keyboard sound just as introspective as Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence." I go could go on for hours, but there's no point.

I don't think it is right to even refer to Mortal Kombat Advance as a "video game," not even because of its design, but because it is just a sad reminder of what corporate greed looks like. It was a quick port of a pretty alright game with cult following made so kids could throw tantrums in Target until their Mom's bought them it. "Life is like Monopoly; You are not old, you are obsolete" as Justin Trosper once said.

I think that the only positive takeaway from this game is that some epitome of Reddit told me this game was better than Guilty Gear -Strive- because posting nonsensical bait on Twitter dot come makes you George Carlin, I guess. Remember kids, if you ever feel like you're a disappoint, just look up handles of gamers like LoliLover59 or some other made up username on Twitter and remember that it could always be worse

Rating: Z
Genre(s): 2D fighter, novelty game

imagine mk3 but way way worse
that's exactly what this is

there's something broken in every aspect of this game
the presentation is butt ugly across the board and this is not because of the system it's on
there are backgrounds that are so pixelated you're only gonna know the details if you've played mk3 before
the character sprites don't look much better, there are a LOT of animation frames cut out that result in movesets that look extremely jank no matter what you're doing
the music is bland as fuck and the sound effects are just completely borked
punch landing sounds aren't consistent, and when you do hear them they're the most stock effects you can think of

the gameplay is completely broken
everything is simplified as expected, this isn't really the issue
the issue is that the cooldown for specials feels nonexistent, which means that you can spam the ever loving fuck out of whatever is in your kit
which sounds funny at least, but in reality if you're just playing on your own you're gonna be dealing with the ai repeatedly throwing out whatever move of theirs is most broken to spam and just completely obliterating you with it
you can counter this by walking forward and pressing the punch button repeatedly
this is not consistent on the hardest difficulty but it is very consistent on the default medium
enemies will just walk backwards, hit the wall and you can lock them into blocking
taking chip
unblocking and just eating the punch
and then doing nothing on wakeup except eat more punches
this carried me to the centaur cunt who quite literally prevented me from doing anything on a couple tries
turns out letting bosses spam specials is extremely broken
who would have thought

the story behind this game's release is interesting enough to go look up, and some of the stupid shit you can do as a result of the game being utterly fucked is funny to see
but this is easily the most frustratingly bad fighting game i've played before
it's not the worst, but it's the one that pissed me off the most
and even if it's not THE worst, it's certainly one of them

there is better mk to be had on the gba, ignore this title