Not only a great fighting game but definitely the best in the series.
Mortal Kombat II upped the character amount, the gory fatalities and all of the game's ruthlessness. Old favorites such as Raiden, Lui Kang, Scorpion, Sub-Zero and Johnny Cage make their return here while newcomers like Mileena, Kitana, Jax and Baraka made the game much cooler than its predecessor. The graphics were crisper and made more colorful, the sounds more varied and the settings much more detailed/eerie. The game was just an all-around delight to experience.
Not everything was perfect, however. The main thing I'd like to say about this game that brings the score down a bit is the difficulty. Playing through on Normal was somewhat tolerable, but any higher and the game gets damn ruthless. You would find yourself dying over and over again even if you were just facing the second person up the totem pole. To this day, I still haven't completed this game in all of its difficulties and I have no desire to. The game just gets too cheap too soon. But that's what 2-player mode is for!
All in all, still one of the best fighting games you could ever ask for. It had nice graphics for its time, contains my two favorites characters (Sub-Zero and Kitana), introduced Babalities and just made the series that much harder to live up to itself later on. III was solid, but it wasn't II. Deadly Alliance was great but it (as well as some of the characters) didn't have the same "umph". When in doubt, II it is!
A near classic!
Overall score ------> 8.5/10
written solely by darksongbird