When it comes to Mortal Kombat, you most definitely want a certain amount of ridiculousness peppered into your experience. The franchise has been known for its over the top blood, gore, and violence since its earliest ESRB-inspiring days, and developers have been pushing the envelope for some three decades now.
That all said, every so often things can get a little too over the top and certain characters wind up with abilities that give them so much unintended advantage that they have to be banned from tournaments to keep the competition kosher. True Under Dawg Gaming shares with us a history lesson on four such instances latest video.
You might think these all come in the form of oppressive offense wherein certain characters can lop off copious amounts of damage or even empty their opponents’ health bars from full in a single sequence, and while such instances are definitely part of the equation here, there are other abilities that can get a character banned.
We’d like to put just one of these four under the microscope to begin with, as it stands out as a bit different than the rest. In Mortal Kombat X, Ermac had a particular variation that would allow him to fly about the screen… something that already sounds like problem potential as it’s such a rarely seen ability in Mortal Kombat.
Ermac’s flight wasn’t the problem, in and of itself, but in the early days of MKX you could actually trigger a meter building glitch with this technique. If you entered into flight and performed any of Ermac’s special moves from off the ground he’d suddenly charge up an entire bar of meter for doing so.
The implications here are fairly obvious as Ermac would almost always have resources to pull off harder hitting combos and such, but the most egregious part of all this was that he’d so often be able to pull off the franchise’s most powerful defensive mechanic: the combo breaker.
The red ninja would so often have a full three bars of meter that he rarely cared if you landed a hit on him as he’d simply combo break you away and take back to the skies to build back a quick three bars. This turned the entire flow of the fight on its head, and was something NetherRealm Studios developers quickly got after so as to retain the integrity of competitive MKX play.
Check out the full video below to hear the particulars of Ermac’s MKX glitch as well as the details on three other such instances from across the three most recent MK entries.
