Mortal Kombat (video game)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Face of the Band: Scorpion. Even though Raiden and (formerly) Liu Kang are closer to what can be called the story's "main characters", Scorpion always gets the centerpiece in most promotional materials.
  • Game-Breaker: If an expert player's Sonya manages to land a single Leg Grab, consider yourself already dead.
  • Good Bad Bugs: In the Genesis port, if you achieved the conditions to fight Reptile during an endurance match, you would fight two Reptiles, and the second one would look like a buggy version of another, non-ninja fighter, most often Sonya.
    • Sub-Zero has an infinite against Goro (and only Goro), making the latter easy if you can get the timing down.
  • Porting Disaster: A subversion: under most circumstances the Genesis version would have been considered the bad port due to its looser control and noticeably inferior graphics and sound, while the SNES port was very close to the arcade version. However, players were all too happy to overlook the problems of the Genesis version for one very simple reason: it had the blood and gore intact, while the SNES version replaced it with sweat, and much duller fatalities, not to mention that the SNES version was virtually unplayable due to heavier controls.
    • The Gameboy version is a straight example, featuring horrendous slowdown and poor black and white renderings of the original sprites. The sequel, thankfully, is much better.
  • "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: The original game hasn't aged well, and when played today, few players find it very fun; the controls are clunky and cumbersome, and the actual fights are kind of boring in comparison to the newer entries in the franchise (each Kombatant had only two or three special moves, with no comboes). The Fatalities, the biggest draw, were very difficult and frustrating to pull off (and, compared to the newest games even in the series, seem fairly tame). And the digitized sprites weren't very appealing even back then, so HD play isn't much improvement.

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