Mortal Kombat Advance

Mortal Kombat Advance for Game Boy Advance is a 2D fighting game developed by Virtucraft and published by Midway in December 2001. It is a handheld adaptation of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, drawing on the early Mortal Kombat era while reshaping its arcade-style one-on-one bouts for Nintendo's portable. The familiar objective remains direct: select a warrior, drain the opponent's life bar across successive rounds, and earn the chance to finish a defeated rival.

Matches use a side-view arena and a roster built around returning Mortal Kombat combatants, including Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, Jax, Kitana, Mileena, Reptile, Shang Tsung, Cyrax, Sektor and more. Each fighter brings their own special-move commands, and ordinary strikes can be linked into combos. Winning a match triggers the series' finishing prompt, allowing a successful input to produce a Fatality; the GBA version also retains Friendships. Blood and Fatalities can each be toggled in the options menu.

Mortal Kombat Advance offers a solo Mortal Kombat mode against the computer, where the player works through the game's tower-based progression. Difficulty settings range from Easiest to Hardest, and handicap options are available for competitive play. Completing particular towers opens additional fighters: Human Smoke is tied to the Warrior tower, while Motaro and Shao Kahn are unlocked through the Master and Grand Master towers. Those bosses and Noob Saibot sit apart from the regular selectable lineup.

The cartridge also supports linked multiplayer with Game Boy Advance systems and the Game Link Cable. Players can choose 1-on-1 Kombat or 2-on-2 Kombat, then select their combatants for local versus play. The latter is a team-based option rather than a four-person match on one screen: two players alternate between their chosen fighters. This makes the game a portable head-to-head entry as well as a single-player ladder challenge.

As a conversion, Mortal Kombat Advance is closest to the 16-bit Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 versions rather than a complete recreation of the arcade release. The Game Boy Advance has fewer face buttons than the controls assumed by its source material, so Virtucraft consolidated or altered many special-move inputs. The handheld edition also reduces some of the graphic violence, and most standard fighters have one individual Fatality and one Friendship rather than the larger selection associated with other releases.

Its release arrived early in the Game Boy Advance's life, when Midway was bringing established arcade fighting brands to the new handheld. Mortal Kombat Advance preserves recognizable character art, stages, announcer cues and the tournament format within a compact cartridge, but its adjusted inputs, trimmed finishing content and portable multiplayer identify it as a distinct version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 rather than simply the arcade game on a smaller screen.