Mortal Kombat/YMMV

See also:

• The High Octane Nightmare Fuel page.

The series as a whole

• Americans Hate Tingle: The series is infamously unpopular in Japan, where only the first three games were properly localized. It's believed that it might have been a bit of a Genre Killer there, hampering the localization of Western fighting games for the Japanese gaming community until Skullgirls came along. Apparently, 9 and X are straight-up banned there, or at least extremely difficult to find.
• And the Fandom Rejoiced:
  • The short film Mortal Kombat: Rebirth. Even bigger rejoice with Rebirth being Ok'd by Warner Brothers as a 10 episode webseries.
• Complete Monster:
  • Quan Chi is the most treacherous, biggest asshole in the entire series, bar none. Making a list of the characters he's hurt or the atrocities he's committed is an afternoon's diversion, to be sure.
  • Not to let Shao Kahn off the hook, of course.
  • Noob Saibot wasn't very nice when he was still Sub-Zero, but even then he showed restraint in his actions. His trip to the Netherrealm, however, stripped away all of his moral limitations and transformed him into a Made of Evil Humanoid Abomination. The other villains are evil for their own reasons, but Noob Saibot is simply evil incarnate.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Sub-Zero (the older brother who became Noob Saibot from 2 onward).
  • Shang Tsung after his rejuvenation.
• Evil Is Sexy: Pretty much every villainess (whether temporary or not). Mileena should be an exception, but she instead veers into Creepy Sexy due to an astonishing number of admirers. Shao Kahn is also considered to be this by both sides of the fandom.
• Fandom Rivalry: There are two groups of Mortal Kombat fans in their regards to Street Fighter — those who hate it because it's not Mortal Kombat, and those who want the series to cross over some day.
• Fan Dumb: Hating every character who came out since 1995 because they're "new".
• Freud Was Right: In the movie, Scorpion's Rope & Kunai is replaced with something similar but more "organic" in appearance.

The Nostalgia Critic: "... and Scorpion, whose hand looks like a vagina being penetrated."

• Game Breaker: Various characters at various points, which is why the series has never been particularly popular for Tournament Play. In some of the games, the bosses are available for use, but, keeping with a general rule for Fighting Games, playing as them is nothing more than an easy way to get people to stop playing with you.
• Memetic Mutation: Let's see: "GET OVER HERE!", "FINISH HIM!", "FLAWLESS VICTORY" (this one tends to be overlooked), "FATALITY", and a minor one for "Friendship. Friendship again?". The "Friendship" one originates from a finishing move that karried through from MK2 to MK3 and Ultimate MK3. For "Friendship", the winning player would usually "spare" the losing player's life in exchange for some wacky kut-scene playing in the background. Thus, the announcer (Shao Kahn), upset that the player did not "finish him" as expected, would say the above phrase. Also, some of us will still say "Superb," or "Excellent", or "Outstanding" the way Shao Kahn says it in the games.
  • Also, the trend of ending words with "-ality", essentially turning anything in Real Life into a gory, MK-style finisher.
  • A common fan-coined phrase in regards to characters coming Back From the Dead at the drop of a hat: "Nobody stays dead in Mortal Kombat". Then came Mortal Kombat 9, which promptly performed a Fatality on this meme then knocked it into the Pit.
  • Almost anything coming out from Shao Kahn in the second and the third game qualifies.
  • TOASTY!"
• Mondegreen: The first few games, despite being full of sampled speech, predate an era where sampled speech didn't sound like arse. Thus, a lot of things don't sound like they're meant to. Such as:

"Get in the kar!!" "Your mother is from L.AAAAAA!"

• • These kan sometimes kross the line into awesomeness.
  • It's been klarified by John Tobias a long time ago (by the time of MK2, more precisely), that Raiden does speak nonsense in his torpedo move...
• Most Annoying Sound: Liu Kang's voice.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The satisfying *TWHACK* of a well-placed uppercut, "FINISH HIM!!", Scorpion's "GET OVER HERE!", and of kourse, "FATALITY".
• Rescued From the Scrappy Heap: Kurtis Stryker, if not Armageddon, then definitely in Mortal Kombat.
• The Scrappy: The Elder Gods, especially so in Mortal Kombat 9.
• Squick: Reptile. Taken Up to Eleven in the Rebirth pilot.
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Courtesy of Proxicide
• Unpopular Popular Character: Johnny Cage. While liked by fans (especially after Mortal Kombat 9), he's disliked in-universe by fellow heroes Stryker and Cyrax. Even Raiden expresses annoyance with him in 9.

The first game

• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Scorpion. He, along with Sub-Zero, are long time fan favourites, and had practically became the "faces" of Mortal Kombat despite not being main characters. Despite being a brutal monster, his Darkhorse status often put him in a sympathetic light, such as being an Anti-Villain. Part of his appeal stems from the fact that his endings generally don't threaten Earthrealm at all. Even Ed Boon has openly admitted this, to the point that, in various interviews, he said that his favorite character has always been Scorpion, and that any Mortal Kombat game would feel incomplete without him. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 serves as the ultimate proof of this: it was Midway's apology for not including Scorpion in the original Mortal Kombat 3.
    • He and Younger Sub-Zero have become the Spotlight-Stealing Squad of the series.
  • Sub-Zero (the elder). You don't get your own Beat'Em Up Spin-Off for no reason. It's ironic, since while he, the older brother, starred in Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, his younger brother is the character that proved popular enough to justify the spinoff in the first place.
• Follow the Leader: Any fighting game with either a focus on gore or digitized graphics that came out in the wake of Mortal Kombat was generally considered a knockoff.
• Game Breaker: If an expert player's Sonya manages to land a single Leg Grab, consider yourself already dead.

The first movie

Now stored HERE.