#1156 Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks (PS2) Bosses (1/15): Shao Kahn gameplay

Gameplay of the final boss Shao Kahn in Midway/Netherrealm’s Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks.

Shao Kahn’s moves:
• Square: Punch Combo
• Triangle: Shoulder Charge
• Circle: Projectile
• R1+Square: Hammer Smash
• R1+Triangle: Launching Hammer Attack
• R1+Circle: Rising Shoulder Charge
• Square+Triangle: Taunt
• Triangle+Circle: Knock-away punch
• Circle+Square: Throw attack

Well, the vote was more one-sided than a North Korean election, so here it is. It’s time to cover the fantastic Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks, in one of the only times I’ll cover a beat-em-up on this channel.
For the record, I love beat-em-ups; I would actually go so far as to say that I like them more than fighting games. In fact, the next project I plan to work on once this project is completed, or goes on hiatus, is going to be a retrospective on arcade beat-em-ups, which will probably consist of arcade titles and then inevitably end up looking at most of the console beat-em-ups anyway. Basically, this won’t be the last time I’ll be looking at Shaolin Monks.

Shaolin Monks was released in 2005, a year after Deception, and it was just astoundingly good. I don’t think it quite has the impact nowadays that it had then, but it’s still a fantastic game. To try and contextualise it from my own, subjective perspective, it felt like the MK series was in a bit of lull by the release of Deception. Deception is in its own right a fantastic game, but despite probably playing better than the original trilogy (in its own way, anyhow) I couldn’t help but think it a little bit lesser, especially compared to a game like MK2 which still captured my imagination in a way the others’ just never really did. Indeed, if the original trilogy was the Golden Age, then the 3D sub-series was the Silver Age; still good in its own right, though not quite as powerful as it once was.

The release of something like Shaolin Monks absolutely blew me out of the water in 2005 therefore; it just felt so unexpected at the time. After so long, you had an MK game that was not only harkening back to the most beloved game in the series, but expanding upon it and fleshing it out too. The redesigns were great, the gameplay was fantastic, the graphics were (for the time) really damn good, and above all else it was just filled with a ridiculous amount of fanservice. Sure, even if you didn’t know the series you probably would have enjoyed it, but those who knew it inside and out would end up enjoying every second of it, from the boss battles, to the iconic stages recreated from MK2, to the beat-em-ups/metroidvania hybrid gameplay, to hidden characters for the 2-player mode and even the ability to unlock and play as Scorpion and Sub-Zero in the main story. And then there were the cameos from characters like Smoke, the hidden boss battles (including one against Ermac!), the occasional sections where you’d team up with other characters, and so much more where the MK team had developed things we’d only really seen in passing before.

The game not only has a ton of unlockables, but you can even unlock the original arcade version of MK2 to play! Well, in North America anyway, we didn’t get it in Europe for some reason. Even then that was inconsistent; I had a German friend years back who was a fan of the MK series, and on the topic of this game he mentioned that pretty much all the fatalities were censored in the German version! Like, Jesus, that’s just butchering the game by that point, but the less said about Germany’s ridiculous censorship laws the better. We also missed out on the Gamecube version of MKDeception in Europe too, I should add, so this was still very much the era when it felt like Europe was being shafted when it came to most things.

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#Fatal #Fury #Art #Of #Fighting #SNK #Neo #Geo #AES #MVS #King #of #Fighters #Geese #Howard #Rugal #Burnstein #Arcade #Boss #Hack #Capcom #VS #Bison

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