Ed Boon has been churning out Mortal Kombats for over 30 years now, and with 12 mainline entries (most of those having a few notable versions) we’ve seen a lot of exceptionally poorly-designed maneuvers.
That happens to be the subject of Ketchup and Mustard’s latest video as they highlight the single worst attack in each MK entry, and some of these we can’t believe made it past the quality assurance team.
The older a game is, the more grace it gets in this category as developers have learned many lessons over the last three decades simply by making mistakes. As silly as it seems, it’s not all that surprising that Scorpion, for example, had an attack in 1993’s Mortal Kombat 2 that was so bad you could actually hit him if he successfully landed it on you.
First off, please let me state that I played easily over 100 hours of MK2 as a child, and never actually encountered this attack. I all but forgot it even existed because of how seldom-used it is, and after hearing Ketchup and Mustard’s elaborations on it, it’s understandable as to why.
The maneuver is Scorpion’s leg take down and not only does it have almost no utility in the fight, but it has so much recovery that opponents can uppercut Scorpion after the vanishingly rare instances wherein he successfully lands it.
That’s right, you risk getting hit to dole out a relatively small amount of damage and your reward is a guaranteed punish from your foe. We’d like to say Midway (RIP) learned its lesson in terms of attacks that were this level of bad, but there are still some nearly unbelievable follies in Mortal Kombat entries that came out well after MK2.
Listen and watch as Ketchup and Mustard take you through all 12 (with a few bonus mentions for notably different versions of the same games) mainline MKs and showcase the worst moves the franchise has to offer. This, by the way, includes 2023’s Mortal Kombat 1.