Mortal Kombat: Deception/YMMV


 * Alternative Character Interpretation: Shujinko's status as an Unwitting Pawn makes him being seen as The Woobie, with shades of Iron Woobie. While easily manipulated, he was merely a guy who wanted to face Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat, actually got the chance to join that world, never meant for any of this to happen, and works his butt off to rectify his mistake.
 * Base Breaking Character: Bo'Rai Cho. Either you like him for being a Fun Personified Cool Old Guy or hate him for taking his already established Toilet Humor from Deadly Alliance and turning it Up to Eleven.
 * Crazy Awesome: Havik. How many fighters do you know crack their own necks to regain health, and slide across the floor like a penguin?
 * Designated Hero: Shujinko, mostly because he can't see through Onaga being a bigger dick, but you're still encouraged to rob everyone blind for the hell of it if you want to unlock everything, and a lot of problems are "solved" by just sucker-punching random people.
 * Ensemble Darkhorse:
 * Havik, due to his unorthodox playstyle and hints of him and his people being Cloud Cuckoo Landers.
 * Nightwolf as well, which is an interesting shift considering how hated he was around the time of Mortal Kombat 4.
 * Good Bad Bugs:
 * Perform a fatality and a hara-kiri at the same time to get these.
 * Possibly this or Game-Breaker, but for some odd reason, Liu Kang's bicycle kick ignores Onaga's defensive stat and takes off his health like you shattered one of the ring's Kamidogu. It's easy to defeat Onaga that way... provided that you never get sick of watching Liu Kang's ending.
 * Love to Hate: Arguably, it was the aim of the creators for Hotaru to be seen this way, but it didn't play out that way with most of the fans. See his entry under the Scrappy section for details.
 * Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Mileena.
 * Non Sequitur Scene:
 * Motaro appears out of the blue in a random Earthrealm village in the Konquest Mode to give you some koins, then vanishes. Its a rare occurrence and the player has to be quick to make it happen, so its more of an Easter Egg.
 * Meat randomly appears with a British accent in the Netherrealm in the Konquest Mode to give you some koins, then disappears.
 * Replacement Scrappy:
 * Shujinko was the target of a lot of hate for replacing Liu Kang. He's terminally naive and stole the special moves and even appearances of the other characters during Konquest mode. Doesn't help that Boon hamfisted him down the fandom's throat by labeling him "The next generation Liu Kang" in an interview, or that his name literally means "Protagonist".
 * Kira, who can basically be described as Kano and Sonya's lovechild.
 * Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Nightwolf. Prior to Deception, he had just as much of a Hatedom as Stryker did when he was introduced.
 * The Scrappy:
 * Aside of Shujinko, Kira and Kobra. Kira less so than Kobra.
 * Also Darrius and Dairou. These two pale in comparison to Hotaru.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: Progressing through Konquest Mode forces you to complete many, many Forced Tutorials where you assume different characters and learn their moves— something you can do on your own at any time in Training Mode. While it's more substantial and interesting than Deadly Alliance's version (which was nothing but tutorials), the Konquest Mode here isn't exactly optional; it's your only means of unlocking a lot of the valuable extra content like new characters, costumes and whatnot, since they require keys exclusively found in Konquest Mode instead of regular Koins.
 * Take That, Scrappy!: Mokap can be found twice in Konquest Mode. One time in Chaosrealm for a side mission and another time walking around in a flamboyant manner in Seido where he can't be interacted in any way aside from punching him out to unlock a fighting style video.
 * That One Boss: The final battle in Konquest Mode for one arbitrary reason. After spending an entire game mode juggling/rotating through every other fighter, you must take on the final battle with basic Shujinko with movesets and fighting styles you haven't used or learned since the first hour of Konquest Mode. Half of the battle will likely be you constantly pausing the game to remember what those styles even did.
 * What an Idiot!: Raiden blindly accepting Shujinko's story of being the Champion of the Elder Gods based on him "having the strength of ten fighters" without ever bothering to check with them to corroborate his story arguably also counts.