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Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is a 2002 fighting game developed and published by Midway for the Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Game Boy Advance. It was the first all-new Mortal Kombat fighting game produced exclusively for home consoles, with no preceding arcade release. It is the fifth main installment in the Mortal Kombat franchise and a sequel to 1997's Mortal Kombat 4.
Instead of killing the franchise after Tobias left, it actually revitalized the franchise.
Great graphics for 2002 standards, since it is filled with a lot of appealing environnements and the color palette is dark to fit the dark tone of the game, it also looked great for it's time.
The game once again uses a 3D format, allowing the player to be able to dodge attacks from their opponent easier, and while it was also present in Mortal Kombat 4, it is even better here.
It introduced Kenshi, Li Mei, Frost, Nitara, and Bo' Rai Cho as playable characters, which is a good thing for the fans of them if they want to play as them.
Like the previous games, the characters had awesome design and some of them had their best design in this game.
Bad Qualities
While some of the newcomers are decent, a few of the newcomers didn’t really stand out.
Hsu Hao, who is regarded as the worst character in the series. In fact, the developers dislike him.
While not a bad scene, the fact that they killed Liu Kang can turn off some fans, this is probably the reason why this game is a bit criticized by some fans who wanted Liu Kang to come back.
There isn't any proper story mode, which is disappointing and end up being a missed opportunity considering that there's could have been so much more for the story of this game despite that Liu Kang is dead in this game.
While still pretty decent and impressive, the GBA port is obviously inferior due to having less contents.
Reception
Trivia
Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was once expected to make its arcade debut back in 2000, but for a variety of reasons, it never showed up. Midway then decided to make Deadly Alliance a direct-to-console game.
The concept of the Krypt, an in-game currency based system of unlocking new content, was first introduced in this game. The Krypt concept would be reused and retooled for each major game release following Deadly Alliance.
Many of the game's endings assume, as per previous games, that the forces of good triumph. Kung Lao defeats Shang Tsung, Raiden returns to Earth to watch over the realm, Sonya becomes a General (her alternate outfit in the game). However, when Mortal Kombat: Deception was released, it transpires that the Deadly Alliance was in fact successful in resurrecting the Undefeatable Army, and Tarkatan warriors killed the majority of Earthrealm's heroes.
Deadly Alliance was the first game to introduce the Red Dragon clan, expanding on the history of the previously known Black Dragon clan. The rivalry between the two clans would be further developed in future releases.
MK:DA introduced the standardized "Alternate Outfit" system. Whereas previously only select characters featured additional unlockable outfits, nearly every character now features a vastly different secondary outfit which can be unlocked and used rather than a simple recolor or minorly-modified original outfits.
This is the only Mortal Kombat game officially not to feature Liu Kang as a playable character.
