The original Mortal Kombat II on the arcades was a smash hit for the series. An improved roster, more fatalities, as well as other finishing moves, more secrets (which led to some ridiculous rumors among gamers), a badass final boss, female ninjas, a great soundtrack...gold was struck with this game. Unsurprisingly, MK2 ended up getting many ports to different consoles, including one on the PS1, which only came out in Japan.
In theory, this should have been a curve ball for any decent development team. Unfortunately, some weird decisions were made with this port, and it led to a disappointing outing.
First of all, let's go back a bit. I mentioned that the original arcade game had a really good soundtrack, right? This port had the chance to bring that to the home of many players, but instead, that soundtrack was replaced with MIDI tracks. For some reason, the decision was made to use the PS1's MIDI synthesizer for music.
The voices are fine, but this game literally stutters if you choose to make the game say the player names. As in, it will pause before loading the Shao Kahn voice clip needed. And the pauses for loading those clips happen a lot. It's a very strange choice! If I have to choose between that or longer load times, I'd rather have longer load times, frankly.
As the screencap above shows, yes, even during fatalities, the game will pause to load whatever is needed. This is not limited to just voice clips, apparently some sprites also need to be loaded.
The fighting itself is okay, as long as you don't bother to morph into other fighters with Shang Tsung. That's also going to require some pause to load the transformation. I'm starting to wonder if this condition of the port is the reason for why it never came out in other countries. It's ridiculous.
The AI is still mostly the same cheap garbage it is in the arcade version. It will walk towards you, and if you're in a corner, you'll get thrown. Oh, and if you get thrown into a corner, well tough break, the AI will throw you again, forcing you to take the damage from two throws. Wonderful stuff. There are full videos showing the ways in which the AI practically cheats against players. Thankfully, there are ways to trick the AI, but that shouldn't be necessary to win. It's one thing to have that gimmick on the arcades - still in bad taste, you're essentially forcing players to dump coins until they figure out the patterns, but at least I get it, from a business sense. There's no good reason to keep doing this in console ports of the game.
I'm going to keep going on about the AI because this exposes how unbalanced the roster can be. Any character that can throw a projectile in the air (Liu Kang, Mileena, Kitana) will be an absolute pain to face. If you jump forward at the wrong time, the AI will immediately jump and throw a perfectly timed projectile at you. However, if you time your jump right, you can screw the AI by forcing it to jump, and then with an air kick, you get a free hit. Rinse and repeat until you win the fight. Sometimes.
Not every character has an air projectile, and boy, the AI makes sure to let you know what an advantage that is. Generally speaking, I'll just say that Kitana is the best character in the game. With every character, I tend to jump towards the AI at the right time and kick - this works surprisingly well, I end up getting many free hits, and with Kitana, I can turn that into a little combo with her air projectile (the Fan Throw). A 2 hit combo like that does a lot of damage in this game, so it's very useful. The Fan Lift can also come in handy if you have the timing down. Otherwise, the AI will just sweep the leg and you'll just have to deal with it.
Don't even get me started on the bosses, please. Just reaching them can be annoying enough. I will say that the secret opponents are also available here. Jade is pale this time around, Smoke is there but I can never remember how to face him, and so is Noob Saibot. Funny thing with Jade, she tends to walk towards me and with the right timing, just sweeping the leg repeatedly gets me easy wins against her. Kitana wins, AI FATALITY.
Another sin that this game commits is that they ended up cutting corners on the ending. See, when you beat Shao Kahn, you hear him scream NOOOOO in an epic manner, with the screen flashing the stages of the game quickly, before he turns to stone and crumbles into pieces. The sound effects add impact to this sequence, and it gives players a cathartic feeling after beating Shao Kahn. That's in the arcade version, however. The PS1 port got a very watered down version where you don't see the other stages, and thus, no epic banging sound effects. You see, the original version would have required loading all the stages, and that would have meant pausing the game a lot for the ending. Can't have that, can we?
I know some of this sounds like nitpicking, but all of these details add up really fast. Plus, there are no modes other than the one arcade mode. You can play against another human by pressing start on the other controller during the character selection, and during fights, but that's about it. The problems with the port are hard to avoid, and while the core gameplay is accurate to the arcade, it's not like that didn't have its own problems. This leaves the PS1 port of MK2 as something only the hardcore fans of the series should even try. It's not the worst, but it's also far from the best port.